The Last Long Weekend Before Thanksgiving
It’s a grey Sunday on this Labor Day weekend, and the skies call for reflection on the sunny summer days from the past few months. I’m thinking back to a little day trip I took to one part of The Everglades. With a month long stay in Florida from July - August, using the weekend for nearby day trips seemed appropriate ways to get out of our home base area and explore. Well, suffice to say we only got out once, and thanks to a tip from my ever-faithful travel explorer friend, Elizabeth, I was tipped off to Shark Observatory Tower (seen above) in The Everglades.
Approximately, an hour and a half drive from our starting point, we made our way to this slice of the massive all-encompassing Everglades. It’s a great visit if you have younger kids that aren’t too young that they can’t sit still but not too old to be bored by nature since the main attraction is the two hour tram tour through the 15-mile loop in the nature with a 30-minute stop at the tower (what used to be a drilling site back in the mid-twentieth century). While our summer season visit, didn’t lend itself to see a ton of wildlife (you’ll see more if you go in the winter season for sure), it was enough to make us feel like we saw the site with some cranes, heron, saw grass, and a couple of crocodiles. Lucky for us, the seasonal afternoon storms rolled in after our stop at the tower, and we only experienced rain for the last 15 minutes or the ride. Another popular activity is to bike the loop, but you definitely need to be more on the professional end of the biking sport to do this safely and in reasonable time.
We made our way to Miami for a later lunch at KYU (pronounced “Q”) and found ourselves so full and hot after indulging in the meal, that we turned back around and started the drive back knowing we had a two hour drive ahead. A day trip for new nature views and a delicious meal was a summer highlight for sure.
Labor Day weekend has us staying local in NYC which means we got to go back to the U.S. Open for a Friday night match, one of my favorite city events to partake in each year (if we can when we’re in town) with its walking of the grounds area, seeing memorable matches with professionals, and the general spirit of the attendees.
Staying local also means, I’ve been able to dive into some media catch-up. Read my stack of magazines (The Happy Reader, Faire, Yolo) and try to make headway in books on my nightstand (currently reading Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat). I’m also trying to watch my way through my countless bookmarked shows, movies, and miniseries across the streaming platforms, but it seems every week there’s another two or three items to add to a queue. It’s all getting to be too much, how does one truly get through it all? The answer is “they don’t,” I suppose.
The most delightful media I’ve streamed most recently was Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy. Give me a show about travel, place it in Italy, and make it about the food, and it’s pretty much going to-be a sure-fire hit in my book. It had me itching to get back to my favorite country to visit (it’s my favorite, even though I’ve only been two times) and taste the myriad of the flavors and meals Tucci gets to try around every corner. The show is set following Tucci around as he makes his way through all 20 provinces of Italy (which means given there’s only 6 episodes and provinces covered in Season 1, he’ll be on his way to making a couple more seasons, hallelujah!) to discover what makes each area particular in its food and drink through local guides, chefs and historians. Tucci is always decked out in the finest blue linen tones and wide-eyed as he meets a winemaker, a princess, the Missoni matriarch, and many others to give color the bounty of Italy’s beautiful culture. I will be waiting not-so-patiently for season two, let’s just say.
September also means it’s the start of the fall book release season—another favorite element to Fall that I look forward to in anticipation. Two that I’m looking forward to are Sally Rooney’s latest as well as Anthony Doerr’s latest, Cloud Cuckoo Land. Both are highly anticipated in the literary world due to the immense popularity of their previous books, but for me, both authors are at a base level great story tellers. Rooney crafts her dialogue so well that it flies off the page, and Doerr develops imagery that typically traverse through large scope narratives (think historical times and characters that develop over decades) that you sink into plot comfortably and you relish each turn of the page on hope and intrigue. I must hurry to finish more books in time before these find their way to my nightstand so my stack does not grow any more height!
With one more day to go on this “last long weekend before Thanksgiving,” I hope it’s one spent indulging in taking it slow and relishing in the present of a good book.