The Best Women's Travel Writing

by Lavinia Spalding

  Yet early on, I think we each tried on the possibility of opening, just enough, in the direction of the other. But we always bumped up against the reality of where we were in life: he nearing the end of graduate school and ready to travel the world, while I was established in my career in publishing, thinking about having children.

  Even so, during those months that led to that day at Walden, we became constant companions: hours spent browsing bookstores together, drinking tea in Harvard Square cafes, nights and nights in each other’s arms. I came to know his every expression, to memorize the lines and angles of him.

  That day at the pond, however, none of that seemed to help or matter. His body in my arms became a stranger.

  I knew vaguely what to do; a boyfriend in college had been a lifeguard and once showed me how to save a person from drowning. But for a moment I forgot everything, and Fareed’s long-boned arms kept pulling him down like anchors.

  Then, impossibly, from behind me I heard Samir splashing around, yelling, “Help!” He too was going down. By then I had Fareed on his back and was churning water with my free arm, just a few feet from shore—trying for a place where he could stand—while behind me Samir shouted “Help! Help!” in a breathless staccato.

  I took one more flaccid stroke and then shoved Fareed away from me. We were in shallow water now. He could stand if he just got his feet beneath him. I swam away, looking back until I saw Fareed struggling to shore, legs buckling. I swam hard to Samir, clawing my way to where he was dogpaddling, a panicked look on his face. I tried to grab him but his arms would not stop moving. Just six feet to shore, less even, to reach a point where I could stand. I went under once, beneath a muscular arm; I swallowed water.

  I screamed to Fareed on-shore, still bent at the waist, gulping air. And like some sea creature he lumbered back into the water that had almost swallowed him. He reached out one long arm and Samir grasped hold.

  Afterward, all of us collapsed on-shore, breathing hard. No words. Then, after a while we stood, grabbed our clothes, and quickly moved away from that cove.

  Halfway around the pond, the view to the cove blocked by low-hanging limbs, we all stopped and gazed at the water. It was as if we needed to look at the pond from another angle, where we could reclaim illusion. A good pond, a fine wood. An ordinary day.

  I think that is why they began skipping stones. Something to ground them again. Samir tossed one or two rocks, and soon they both were pelting a torrent of pebbles that leapt across the glassy surface in the late afternoon light.

  Then, when we gathered our things to head for the car, Samir already ahead on the path, Fareed took my shoulders in his hands and looked at me eye to eye. “Thank you,” he said.

  There was no false bravado here, no denial of what had happened. Yet if I had to choose a moment when I knew without a doubt that our relationship would end, as it did a few months later, it was there at the pond, Fareed drawing me in too tightly, his voice resonating off-key in my ear.

  Later I would wonder: was it all too much? Had what happened somehow tipped a balance between us that could never be set right? Fareed’s voice full of relief and apprehension, thanking me as if I’d had a choice. And here’s the truth: before that day, though I’d have liked to believe I would help someone in danger, secretly I doubted that I actually could.

  So while Fareed was thanking me, what I couldn’t articulate was the wonder I was feeling inside. Truly surprised wonder, at myself. I wouldn’t have wished on anyone what Fareed had been through. But it did happen, his near-drowning, and as a result I felt something I can only describe as gratitude: that day I’d been given a chance to find out what I could do.

  Still, for a long time I dreamed of drownings. One night I pulled Fareed from the water by his hair.

  After he finished grad school, Fareed worked a few years for a Boston consulting firm. But then 9-11 hit, and the Patriot Act, and he began to find life in America so difficult that he returned to Pakistan well before his visa ran out. Today he’s consulting again, based in London and traveling, as he’d always hoped to do. And every few months I’ll get one of those international calls that sound like the person’s in the very next room.

  On a trip to Boston not long ago, Fareed met my husband and my small daughter, Hannah. He smiled down at her, and then like a gentle giant he scooped her up and swung her high in the air as she squealed. After awhile, as he almost never fails to do when I see him, Fareed mentioned Walden. Had I taken Hannah to the pond yet? he asked, and I said I had.

  We smiled silently at each other a long moment before Hannah was asking to be lifted into the air again. He reached for her, and I found myself thinking back to that day. While trying to cross the pond we also had crossed into a place apart: a threshold experience that changed the course of things forever. A life—or two, even three—might have been taken. Fate chose otherwise. Yet in the same moment that we were spared, who we’d been to each other was lost.

  I had always thought of that loss in a negative way, as something from which, I once believed, I would never quite recover. But watching Fareed lift my daughter in the air, I began to understand differently what happened. The drama of his near-drowning had simply brought to the surface an inevitable parting, the cool water of the pond slapping us awake from illusion. Until that day at Walden I had tricked myself into believing that we could traverse the barriers between us without a price.

  But there was Fareed in my living room, and I looked at where his life had taken him and where mine had taken me—each of us having found our way toward what we’d wanted most deeply. And in that moment it was as if some unclosed wound I’d nursed far beneath the surface was gently and finally coming together. My daughter was laughing, and Fareed was twirling her around and around in the air, and something inside me grew whole.

  Lucy McCauley is a writer and editor whose essays have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Los Angeles Times, The Dallas Morning News, Fast Company, Harvard Review, and Salon.com, among other places. Her first documentary film, Facing the Nazi Era: Conversations in Southern Germany, premiered at the end of 2011 in Canada and Europe. She is the editor of eight Travelers’ Tales books, including five books in the Best Women’s Travel Writing series. This essay, Beneath the Surface, was the Gold Solas Award winner in the travel and transformation category for 2012. She lives in Dallas with her husband and daughter.

  SUSAN ORLEAN

  Storming the Castles

  Was it the wine, the wheat, or the wind in her hair?

  In the Loire Valley you come for the castles but you stay for the wheat. The castles are the headline event, of course—300 spectacular jewel boxes and ornate medieval confections scattered throughout the region, overlooking the meandering river. But the wheat is the richer, subtler surprise, only revealed to the more painstaking traveler. There are miles and miles of it, spread like a gigantic shag carpet—winter wheat, bleached and crisp, and early spring wheat, so fresh it is almost lime-colored, and the summer wheat, golden and bent with the weight of berries.

  I first noticed it when we were just a few miles into our bike trip, on a quiet country road where our tires clicked along on the gravel. There were so many wide acres that the wheat looked almost like water rippling in the wind—a tan and gold and green grassy ocean. In a car, which is the way I usually travel, fields are just fields, an undifferentiated blurred space you whip past as you head to the main attractions. But I immediately noticed that on a bicycle, the scale is entirely different. The wheat is almost as high as your head, and it seems to keep you company, whistling and whispering and waving as you ride along.

  I had never been to the Loire before, but a year earlier I’d traveled throughout the nearby Meuse Valley. I’d gone there to do some research for my book on the dog actor Rin Tin Tin, who was born there. I love being on the road, but on that trip I noticed for the first time how poorly the pace of driving suits my style. Most of both valleys are farmland, and at sixty miles an hour, that kind of la
ndscape loses its features and you miss out on its secrets. It was only when I stopped my car that I would find something tucked away, tacked on a barn door, its narrative told in a quieter way.

  I love France, and that trip to the Meuse Valley planted in me a yearning to experience it at a different pace, one that would allow me to notice it more intimately, see it more closely, but still travel a good distance. Then someone mentioned to me that the Loire Valley is an idyllic place for beginner bike trips. I consulted Google: it turns out there is a 400-plus-mile network of paths and somnolent back roads called the Loire a Velo, a route that has become a magnet for small, quirky, cycling-friendly inns. The distances between these lodgings—as few as fifteen or so miles, though you can do far more—didn’t seem hugely intimidating.

  Still, it was one thing to fantasize about such a trip and another to actually pull it off. Given the demands of my work schedule, I really wanted to travel with my husband, John, and son, Austin, who’s six. But a first grader on a bike trip? In an unfamiliar place where we don’t speak the language (or rather, where I think I speak the language but no one seems to share that opinion)? How would that work? Also, could I handle it? I’d been on a bike seat just long enough to know that if I stayed on it much longer, I could get saddle sores.

  One thing seemed clear: this would either be the greatest idea ever—or we would be in over our heads from the first turn of the pedals.

  For a while, it seemed the trip might dematerialize before we could even start. In the weeks before we left, I became obsessed with chafing. I think, honestly, I was transferring all my cycling-related anxieties into one identifiable problem. The fact was, the farthest I’d ever ridden was a ten-mile loop to the post office. I wasn’t in bad shape, but I felt unprepared for a bike trip. In my defense, I live in an area where the topography resembles a huge sheet of bubble wrap; you can barely go a quarter mile in any direction without having to claw your way up an incline or fall off of one. So while ten miles wasn’t enough to train me for France, it was a hard ten miles, right? And I would be fine. Right?

  What’s more, before moving to bumpy upstate New York, I had lived in Manhattan and often rode to work—three miles through Midtown that included life-flashing-before-my-eyes encounters with truck drivers and cabbies intent on viewing cyclists as targets in a roadway shooting gallery. Surely this had toughened me for the Loire Valley, the cradle of kings.

  I tried talking myself into a mood of cavalier and confident anticipation, but still, for weeks before we left, I would lie in bed late at night, picturing myself twenty or thirty miles along with my thighs rubbed raw. I could hear the voices of concerned friends muttering an incantation that sounded an awful lot like “chafe, chafe, chafe.” I bought tubs of Bag Balm, on the advice of people on Twitter, from whom I had solicited suggestions. (Yes, I started a hashtag called #chafingadvice. I’m not sure I’m proud of that, but I got dozens of replies.) I ordered Pearl Izumi shorts, and for good measure, a pair of Canari shorts, too—and then, as just one more good measure, I bought a pair of tiny blue Aero Tech Design shorts for Austin, in case he’d inherited my fear of chafing. I kept planning to ride a few extra miles every day to train, but somehow it never happened; I guess I was too busy ordering bike shorts.

  There were other issues. My husband and I wanted to ride on our own, not as part of a group, and while there are a number of companies in France that will set up that kind of trip, we kept running into an odd sort of Continental laissez-faire: yes, we can make the trip for you, Madame, but, oh no, not that week. And not quite there. And, oui, we will call you back, Madame—or perhaps not, because what you wish for is simply not possible. At home, I had more troubles: Austin decided that he would come only if he could ride his own bike, because, he said, “trail-a-bikes are for babies.” Since he’d just graduated from training wheels, the prospect of double-digit miles with him wobbling along was enough to take my breath away. And here I had thought chafing was the big problem.

  But at last the clouds parted. Austin—bribed with the promise he could play on my iPhone during the entire flight to Paris—agreed to use the trail-a-bike, and the maddeningly pleasant but previously disobliging French travel agents suddenly, miraculously, presented us with a complete four-day itinerary.

  I packed my oversupply of balms and bike shorts, and we flew to Paris then traveled by train to Blois, where we would start our trip. There we met our travel companions: Gitane Mississippis, sturdy workhorse bikes outfitted with roomy panniers and map holders attached to the handlebars.

  We had only a little more than twenty-seven miles to ride, to the town of Amboise, and we were in France, after all, so we started slowly, which in France includes lingering over good food—in this case, perfect French espresso and a basket of croissants oozing almond paste, then stocking up on a dozen madeleines and a bottle of Sancerre for emergency road snacks.

  Fed and provisioned, we gathered around our bikes. We were suited up, helmeted, gloved, spandexed; I felt slightly bowlegged from my bike shorts. A woman walked down the sidewalk toward us. She was one of those beautiful, sleek French women who look like they play a lot of tennis but actually just eat a lot of chocolate. She smiled when she saw our pile of gear and our outfits, and suddenly I felt ridiculously over-prepared, like a tenderfoot at a dude ranch.

  As she stepped around us, she asked, in English, “Are you bicycling?”

  I said we were.

  “Well, it’s too warm for bicycling,” she said, as if she could read every bit of my apprehension. “It’s much better to sit and drink wine.”

  I couldn’t help wonder, as we set out, if maybe she was right.

  The late start meant that we had to push hard the whole time we were riding, and we took only a few breaks, stopping at a bakery on the river near the village of Rilly-sur-Loire for a late lunch of sandwiches of baguettes with sweet and salty ham then for a quick dinner at a cafe not far from Amboise, where the chef had just finished roasting spring lamb with fennel and sweet peas. This was France, after all.

  We arrived in Amboise in the dark, and our innkeeper met us at the door looking cross. She reminded us, with a wag of her finger and a reproachful click of her tongue, that she’d expected us earlier. Much earlier. In fact, much, much earlier, which was, evidently, when nicer guests would have arrived. She was impressively fierce for an innkeeper, so we didn’t even look around; we just muttered apologies in bad high-school French and scurried to bed, hoping that when we woke up we might be transformed into nicer guests the innkeeper would be happier to see.

  In the morning, we tiptoed downstairs and peeked out the front door to at last take in the view. We expected a driveway and maybe an ordinary lawn. Instead, surprise, we found ourselves practically pressing our noses up to the stone flanks of Chateau Royal d’Amboise, a massive castle built in the fifteenth century on a rock spur overlooking the Loire River. In fact, it turned out our inn was built of stone that had tumbled off the chateau over the years. (As with many of the Loire castles, a great deal of attention was paid to head chopping and dungeon banishment and boiling of miscreants in vats of oil, while castle maintenance was somewhat neglected.)

  Before getting back on our bikes, we explored the marvelous, echoey pile—a castle part Renaissance, part proto-Tinker Bell’s castle, furnished with just a few gargantuan log chairs and wine-toned tapestries. We roamed the stone rooms and trekked up and down the stairs, rubbed smooth by centuries of heavy treading, then we leaned out a Juliet balcony to view the gray-blue ribbon of the Loire, France’s longest river and its last major wild one.

  Just as we were about to leave, we discovered that the castle harbored one big surprise: the body of Leonardo da Vinci, buried in a chapel just off the entry garden. Leonardo da Vinci? Although I’d never given much thought to his final resting place, I would have pictured it being somewhere other than a chapel outside a chateau in the Loire Valley. But apparently da Vinci was a citizen of the world and spent a lot of time visiting King F
rancis I, who ruled here during the castle’s glory years. Like the best of friends, Francis provided a permanent resting place for da Vinci when he died.

  As we left Amboise, I noticed I could read every sign we passed—“S’il vous plait aidez-nous trouver notre chien perdu Zuzu” (please help us find our lost dog Zuzu) and “Maison a vendre” (house for sale)—a traveler’s pleasure if ever there was one. As we coasted along, we could peek through the gates of the occasional oddball museums and attractions, like the Musee Maurice Dufresne, which appeared to be a collection of antique tractors, and my favorite, the Mini Châteaux Val de Loire. (“All of the most famous castles of the Loire Valley in miniature,” the brochure proclaims. “The amazing attention to detail and incredible surroundings will enthrall the whole family!”)

  Pedaling onward, we stopped for a real look at the full-size castles, such as Villandry and Chambord and Azay-Le-Rideau and Chatonniere, each one insanely big and so exactly like the castles in cartoons and fairy tales that they looked almost as unreal as the models back at the museum of miniatures. The castles seemed to meet us at every turn, sitting like massive stone birthday cakes on the horizon or looming above as we went grinding up one of the valley’s green hills.

  There was an ancillary benefit to all of this roadside fascination: I forgot about chafing. Simply forgot. For one thing, being in France means eating and drinking so well, even on the road, that all other concerns seem trivial. But also the bike seats were comfortable, and except for a stiff climb at the beginning and end of each day, the ride was a lazy man’s dream. Most of our routes were on flat bike lanes on small roads, or paths that hugged the river, close enough for us to smell the muddy water and see fish popping up now and again and, on our third afternoon, rounding the corner outside Azay-Le-Rideau, to see a family of swans with new-looking chicks out for what might have been one of their very first swims.