Category
GETTING ON BOARD
It’s a blessing and a curse: if want to retain my breakfast, I can’t read, draw, or look at anything that isn’t my immediate surroundings while I’m on a train. In general, I try to fly under the radar while traveling, and while I don’t particularly fancy drawing attention to myself in any major way, the digestive-upset way would pretty much be my worst nightmare. To boot (pun intended), these incredible French breakfasts are keepers: warm little pillows of pain au chocolat with hidden chocolate tucked inside, ultra-flaky croissants with a unique kaleidoscope pattern at the center of each one, spiraled puff pastry roulades topped with bright green pistachio bits, and a tiny, perfect petit café to complement them all. Each one is special and unique, every flake of croissant dough a souvenir of a moment of joy, and I certainly have every intention of keeping them all with me.
BEHIND THE SCENES: THE AROUND THE WORLD AND BACK AGAIN COVER
Last year—and by year, I mean the decade that was 2020–my husband and I were an hour from boarding a flight to Portugal when the first Covid-19 travel ban was issued. It was early March and 11 PM at JFK, and we stood there blearily trying to parse the garbled language in the order before pulling our bags from the flight and deciding to find a silver lining in a New York vacation instead. Over the course of the next few days, we kept a wary eye on the headlines abroad from a room in a fancy hotel in Midtown—which we got at a ridiculously low rate we now refer to as the “apocalypse special”—and had just enough time to eat some incredible food and be thoroughly freaked out by the ghost streets of the city before hightailing it home as we all collectively realized that the virus was about to take over our lives.