Travel transforms me. It transforms me from a happy person to a horrible person. I start long travel days with affection and fresh eyes for Sea-Tac (“Oh, they’ve installed new bad art in Terminal A!”). My hair looks good and my clothes are clean. When I see my reflection, I see a woman who is…
Tuesday is the day I fly to Newark, then Madrid. Like every great trip, once it's this close to departure, I don’t want to go. I want to stay. I want to stay in Ballard and go to pub trivia and pick blackberries in alleys and drink Trader Joe's wine with siblings and play piano at church and eat the garlic from my garden. And I want to bike to Sunset Hill after dinner to see the blue and yellow sky over the Olympics ooze into preppy pink, and then coast…
So today is August first (or it was), and the idea is that on September first I'm going to start walking across Spain till I see the bones of an Apostle and the end of the earth. It's a journey much has already been said about, and my own words on it came when recently…
My father, our guide Prescott, and I were driving from Red Bays to Stafford Creek after fishing the West Side, and Dad and I were sweating and drinking sweaty Kaliks with the windows rolled down and the boat trailing behind us when Prescott slowed the truck in front of a dingy pink cinderblock house and…
I wanted to eat the yam in my cupboard for lunch, so for breakfast I walked down the road to a bustling coffee shop across the street from Starbucks. I selected a bagel and a twelve ounce drip and I tried to apply for a job, but the internet was down. So I seized the…
I don’t crave food very often but last year I started craving colors. I craved blue most of all. I don’t know why I got to craving blue. I saw at Whole Foods that blue is the color of the throat chakra, and that energy center is in your throat and it's related to speech and…
I tore out of Seattle and drove six hours, half of them before dawn, and stopped when I saw the ocean, sickeningly white and churning with the sky. Sitka spruces braced themselves on the bluff, gnarled and forever flung back by the wind and rain that screamed over the swells smacking the edge of my…
Chelsea the Writer 