with Cara Lopez Lee, author of They Only Eat Their Husbands, a memoir of adventure in Alaska & around the world
’Tis the season of special effects glasses. This time it’s not 3-D, but HoloSpex, whatever that means. I don’t want to spend the extra dollar. A young guy leans over to me and says, “They’re totally worth it,” in the conspiratorial whisper of a pot dealer. Not that I’d know from direct experience.
While everyone else is napping, watching TV, or washing dishes this holiday weekend, let’s you and I sneak away, and continue Part 2 of our trek through China’s Tiger Leaping Gorge…
For your holiday pleasure, and my holiday break, come with me to China for a trek through one of the deepest gorges in the world. This is a 3-part journey. For parts 2 and 3, check in with me on Christmas Weekend and New Year’s Weekend, for a trip out of the house to the mountains near Tibet…
As we close in on the steaming mountain that killed some 80 people in 1968, I ask the driver, “The hotel is not this close to the volcano is it?”
“No.”
Whew.
“The hotel is closer,” he says.
Often at Thanksgiving, our family gathers in Los Angeles: my father, his wife, my grandparents, two younger stepsisters, a teenybopper half-sister, and me. (My husband is a jeweler, so he always stays home in Denver to prepare for Black Friday.) But this year, my father is getting divorced, so Dad, my 13-year-old sister Miraya, and I ate turkey at Marie Callender’s - just the three of us, in and out in 45 awkward minutes. Then, a few days later, several of us girls recaptured a bit of family togetherness and holiday joy, at high tea.
