booked | costa rica

To celebrate our two years and my next chapter and take a breather before my internship this summer and grad school starting in the fall (phew), Zan and I are headed to Costa Rica for a little over a week in early May. Can I tell you how excited I am? I've barely touched this trip. Barely researched (for me). Barely laid my hands on a spreadsheet with an itinerary. Barely booked a thing. In fact, we've booked nothing except the tickets to get us there and home. (And the home part seems optional to me.)

This trip isn't how I normally travel. It's not a chance to squeeze every bit of culture, new experiences, and sites into the eight or nine days. This trip is, can I even say it? A vacation. A true, honest to god, vacation. We won't be jumping from city to city (very much) or staying in a handful of airbnbs and hotels. On this trip, we're going to see a thing or two within a day trip from San Jose, and then we're parking ourselves in an airbnb in Cahuita on the Caribbean coast, just north of the backpacker-friendly Puerto Viejo, for 5-6 days of beaches, national parks, drinks with locals and ex-pats, sloth-spotting, and excessive R&R.

That is, if I can stay strong and fight the temptation to research every nook and cranny of that beautiful country and book our time until it's filled to the brim.

Stay strong, self, there's a Caribbean paradise just around the bend of this month.

ps - I nabbed our tickets off of Spirit Airlines for less than $350/each roundtrip! (Including fees for a carry-on bag.) 

a matt interpretation of a cyndi day

For Christmas, Matt and Ryan gave me a fun-filled, jam-packed day in Virginia. In the card, they wrote clues to what we'd be doing: in the air, underground, and of the earth. Actually, Matt and Ryan didn't intend them to be clues but a fun way of introducing what they had planned for the day. But because I'm an eternal 8 year-old, I tried to solve the riddle.

"Underground" was Luray Caverns, an enormous cave discovered in the late 1800s. Today, visiting the cave is a commercial experience, but it's still astounding. The stalagmites and stagtites have grown together in some places (and we spouted those words off like we remembered which was which!). The highlight of the cave is a reflecting pool. The surface acts as a mirror for the formations around it. It's mesmerizing.

In the cave, the second we saw the paved path, Matt and I cracked up.

"This is a Matt interpretation of a Cyndi day," he joked.

"In the air" turned out to be climbing a rock wall and going ziplining. Matt had diligently researched the best spot somewhat near the Caverns in Virginia. He talked it up all morning. He and Ryan were stoked for the ziplining, especially. The website boasted numerous activities and groups of friends and families having the best time ever.

When we pulled up, there were no cars in the parking lot. The office is a ramshackle shed. The climbing wall is a three-story slab of wood. And the ziplines were literally just through some trees.

"This is definitely a Matt interpretation of a Cyndi day."

It. Was. Perfection.

I don't know what it is, but of all the things that Matt and I have in common, ironically fun things are our favorite. We love it when something doesn't look or pan out like it sounds like it will. We once stopped during a road trip at the world's dinkiest water park. We rode every ride in 30 minutes. If you ask me to this day what my favorite water park is (though I'm not sure why you would?!), I'd tell you the one in Amarillo, Texas. We're really talented at making very silly things feel like the grandest in the world.

This place was our heaven. Zan, Matt, Ryan, and I had it to ourselves all afternoon. Not a single other person showed up. Just when we thought it couldn't get better, the guy running the whole shindig offered to let us go zipining for a fraction of the normal price. We were already planning on doing it, but we were really sold then.

We had to learn to put on the "brakes" and how to turn and pull ourselves across the line if we had to. Of course, I was the only one who got stuck... repeatedly. My arms got a serious workout, and the guys all got a serious laugh. The small bases we landed on were rickety and small, and Zan practically hugged the trees for dear life.

After all that, we had lunch in a tiny town on a real life Main Street that felt like the Georgia that Matt and I know. They had homemade ice cream - just about literal icing on the cake, if you ask me.

Exhausted, we almost went straight home. But we still had "in the ground" to experience. Cleverly, that was a visit to a winery. The views were better than the wine, but wine-tasting with Matt is the real fun of things anyway.  ("I get... hamburger patties in this one. And a hint of shoe sole.")

I'd usually describe my perfect day as one on a barely-marked trail with a map I can't really read (because turn it in circles 10 times and just start walking is my map-reading strategy).

But this day, seeing the kind of Saturdays I seek out through the lens of friends giving me the greatest gift - knowing me and my interests and finding ways to enjoy them with me? It was incredible. I'll go on a Matt interpretation of a Cyndi day any day.

capitol cutups

A Mormon missionary from Ohio attending the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in DC noticed Zan's Wittenberg University jacket and struck up a conversation.

I can't figure out where to take this blog post from that little snippet of memory, but I felt like it had to be documented somewhere. I would have ignored the guy, if I'm honest. I have little patience for being proselytized with religion or conservative rhetoric - call it a casualty of growing up in in the deep south. Zan didn't. In fact, they talked for so long the lanky college kid who swam in his suit jacket had to sprint to catch up with his group.

While they talked, Zan reminiscing about his old college stomping grounds, I leaned over backwards with my camera in my hands, my back arching just as far as it could and shot pictures of the National Mall upside down.

A family asked us to snap their picture in front of the Capitol Building.

Zan and I took turns planking in front of the Capitol steps, taking pictures of each other - "Just one more!" - to see how long the other could last.

We took pictures of ourselves, trying to get the Washington Monument right in between us, and failing every time. 

It was that one rare sunshiney day in the midst of a never-ending winter.

I'd wanted to go hiking, but after a book club brunch, and a walk through Eastern Market, we said why not just walk some more right here? And we took off to the Capitol, my camera in tow, and it was just as good - if not better - than our original plans. 

I could use 100 more of these days, and then 100 more. With the sun shining, and laughter in our eyes, and a willingness to goof off on the steps of the Capitol Building, proud to live in this city and call it home.

That kid from Wittenberg. I think he stuck in my mind from that day because this whole career of mine that's right in front of me - just two short years away - it's rooted in being open-minded and willing to listen, even when everything in me wants to walk away. Zan wasn't just diplomatic, and he didn't just patiently deal with the kid. He really engaged and listened and enjoyed talking to him, differences and all. That's what true diplomacy is all about. Hell, that kind of dialogue is just the thing we need in that beautiful, tall dome we call the Capitol.

a hike in rock creek park + transitions

All of the greatest experiences in my life have required me to adapt. To be uncomfortable until I know nothing else. To find joy and contentment in my initial discomfort. Living abroad was certainly that way. I didn't know how to eat with chopsticks when I arrived in Japan, let alone how to speak to my neighbors in Japanese or even how to work the washing machine. Every day there was a new challenge to tackle. Until suddenly, it all felt commonplace, comfortable, my new normal.

The same with going to school out of state. And taking my first solo trip. It was to Mozambique after a girlfriend bailed on me. I was scared out of my wits when I got to the airport and had to figure out how to get to my hostel. In the end, that trip lit an eternal flame in me for adventuring by myself, and for finding my way into - and out of - crazy situations.

Right now I'm going through it with living with Zander. We've planned and worked for this moment for a year, and now that it's here? It's uncomfortable and strange. How much food do we buy for two people? Do I have to watch another car/fishing show? Do we do our laundry together or separate? I'm so fiercely independent that the walls of that small one-bedroom apartment feel like they just don't have enough air sometimes. But I know with a little patience, and a whole lot of trial and error, this will become my new normal, too.

The same was true with adopting Theo. In fact, maybe more so than any other decision in my life. Adapting to his schedule, planning walks, skipping happy hours, hiring a dog walker, playing endless rounds of fetch, training him -- it didn't come 100% naturally to either of us. But now our routines are so intertwined that I don't need to set alarms anymore because he wakes me up at the exact same time every morning. And without thinking, when I get up from the couch to use the restroom or get a glass of water, I open the back door for him to go outside. As I brush my teeth in the morning, it's second-nature to pour him a cup of food.

If you follow me on Instagram, you might have seen a few of these pictures from a recent hike Zan and I took with Theo. Mr. Man (one of Theo's many, many nicknames*) is spending the summer (or at least a month or two) with my mom in Georgia until Zan and I can rent his place and find one of our own that allows dogs. It's a weird transition. My space feels awkward without Theo there to share it with, to insert himself right at my legs, or put his head on my lap, or to walk by my side in the woods.

It's strange, and it's awkward, but it's the right choice for right now. I thanked my mom for the billionth time the other day for taking care of him when she already has a dog and several cats and a bird (a zoo!) to take care of already, and she said, "This is what family is all about."

Before Theo made the long car ride down to Georgia, we took him on an early spring hike in Rock Creek Park. It looked like a gray day with clouds that threatened rain, but on the trail everything was golden, more like early fall than a persistent winter. It was a fairly easy hike, but Theo laid down in every puddle of mud he found, every pond he could stand in, and chased every stick Zander and I threw. That dog is seriously the joy of my life, you can't tell, right? He and Zander and some golden woods, and I am the luckiest.

A lot of things in my life are in transition right now. I'm leaving my job in less than a month to start an internship on Capitol Hill. I'll be in graduate school full time for two years after that. Zan and I have to move again in a month or two. Zan and I are making big decisions and asking big questions about what our future will look like now that my career is decided (and decidedly nomadic).

Many things right now are up in the air, but I know for a fact that I'll always look back at this time as one of the best of my life, uncomfortable transitions and all.

We hiked the 3 mile Northern Loop in Rock Creek Park. Check out Active Life DC for hike details! 

*Theo's other nicknames: Baby Bear, Pumpkin, Mama's Boy, Little Man, Munchkin Man, and Theodore (generally reserved for VIP guests and/or when he's ignoring me). Never, ever Teddy.

my next chapter

"Here's one final question. Why do you want to be a Rangel Fellow?"

Matt was playing the part of my interviewer to help me prepare for pretty much the single biggest opportunity of my life, and he was doing a great job of it. He had already peppered me with questions on foreign relations - asking me on the spot to outline essays on topics such as the role of multilateral organizations in global conflicts.

I paused to think about my answer - why do I want to be a Rangel Fellow? It was a great question - and an obvious one, and somehow I hadn't thought of it yet. I knew in my gut, in my heart, deep in me from the moment that I heard about the program that I wanted it, that it was my calling - if I can be so bold to say that. But how could I put that in words?

Last fall, I spent some time visiting the graduate schools in which I was interested. At the information session for one of them, a fellow attendee and I clicked immediately. She mentioned that she was applying for the Rangel Program - a fellowship designed to increase the number of minorities and low-income people in the Foreign Service. Excited, I spent my bus ride home reading the Rangel website and learning more about the application process.

Congressman Charlie Rangel founded the Rangel Program - a House member from New York. Today, the program is funded by the Department of State and run out of Howard University. A grand total of 20 fellows are chosen each year - a tiny number that intimidated me! These Fellow spend the summer before they matriculate into graduate school doing an internship on Capitol Hill - either for a Senate or House committee or with a Congress member. The Fellowship provides generous funding for graduate school that is matched by most international relations programs. The second summer, the Fellows take on an internship in an overseas embassy. After finishing the second year of graduate school, the Fellows go directly into the Foreign Service (FS). The Fellowship includes a 5 year contract in the FS.

I put everything I am into that Rangel Fellowship application, let me tell you. I daydreamed about it every waking hour. And dreamed about it in my slumbering hours. I shed tears of hopefulness, even.

When I found out I had been chosen as a finalist, I don't know if I've ever been more excited - or more nervous - for anything in my life. The selection process for choosing the Fellows was a full day - a panel interview and a writing test. I was terrified to my core because the stakes were so high. Rangel, in my mind, is too good to be true. So, you know, just the single most important interview of my life. No pressure, right?

I felt myself starting to well up as I finally responded to Matt's question.

I want to be a Rangel Fellow because the Fellowship is more to me than a free-ride to graduate school. I don't want just five years in the Foreign Service; I want an entire career.

I want to be a Rangel Fellow because I believe in the power of diplomacy for making positive change in the world, promoting peace, spreading democracy, and strengthening global ties, and I want to contribute to that important work. 

And I want to be a Rangel Fellow because even if I'm not chosen, I believe in this program. I believe in its mission of diversifying the Foreign Service, of giving a chance to people like me from single parent and low-income homes, to give voice to their experience and use that breadth of diversity to make American diplomacy even stronger.

Just three days after I answered Matt's question, I was sitting in a movie theater waiting for the 10:30pm opening night showing of Veronica Mars (amazing) to start. I opened my email, and my life changed, and all my dreams came true.

I'm a Rangel Fellow. 

2 years

I fell into love like a lanky teenager grows into their limbs. That's a weird analogy, right? But it fits me just right.

I always expected real love to be like the movies - that's how I learned about it all, after all. And books, of course! I expected that if you found the right person, everything would just neatly and cleanly fall into place, and happiness really would be ever after. Love has never been like that for me, though. I've loved twice, maybe three times, and with both - or all three - of those men, it has been turbulent, rocky, kind of psychotic feeling in its intensity. I'm stubborn and independent, but I also want to be comforted, validated, and doted on. But as soon as the men I have loved do those things - and oh, those first two loves! They comforted, validated, doted to the max! As soon as they did those things I thought I needed, so desperately wanted, I kicked and punched and fought and pulled away. Then when I pushed them away, I ran back. I was emotionally all over the place.

I'll never forget the first time I had one of those moments with Zan. We'd been dating a short time - we were in that uncomfortable transition between dating and becoming a real thing - you remember that spot? It was somewhere around noon, and I hadn't eaten. He notoriously doesn't keep breakfast food in his house, and I am a person who needs every. single. meal. I have low blood sugar, and I am a beast if I don't eat. I was upset at him for not thinking of me and stocking his kitchen, but I was passive aggressive about it. Instead of telling him, I gave him the cold shoulder, mean looks, and eventually picked a full-on fight. We were driving somewhere, and I demanded he turn the car right back around because I was going home, dammit! He turned the car around without another word, parked on the street in front of his building, and I stormed out. Without a purpose or a mission because where was I going? And of course I wanted to go back.

He yelled after me, "I'm not coming after you. I won't do this."

And you know what? For the first time ever in a relationship, I walked back, swallowed my pride, apologized, and told him what was up with me.

Let me tell you, it took about a billion of those types of incidents for me to get it through my thick skull that walking away is not the answer. (And, okay, sometimes it is still my knee-jerk reaction. But hey, working on it!)

That was the moment, I think, when I knew this was for real, and I had found the kind of man that can handle me. Yep, not the "dream" man or the perfect man or the one, as so many people say. But a man that I respect to my very core, a man who knows not to indulge when I'm overreacting but absolutely indulges me when I need to cry something out, talk something out, sleep something off, or simply hug it out. A man who has my back. A man who is so right for me.

Relationships are so hard. My mom always said that as I grew up. That they're "hard work." Do you know... that sounded so dumb to me. Love is bliss! Love is fun and exciting and new feelings, and love is perfection, I thought. Surely, she didn't know what she was talking about. But like most things in life, mom is alright right.

Maybe we were both right. Love is bliss, and love is exhilarating and often sucks the very breath from my lungs, but relationships? Now they are hard work.

I have to work at becoming as emotionally independent as I am physically.

We have to work at communicating. No, seriously, we are the two most stubborn people on the face of the planet, and so we fight. We really do. Straight up yelling at each other kind of fights. It happens! Over the dumbest things, too, you don't even know. We're both so fiercely stubborn that we both have to really work on learning when to back down and let the small things go. That, I tell you, is some of the hardest work I've ever done.

I have to work at letting go of my preconceived notions about relationships. This relationship thing isn't what it looks like in romantic novels or '90s Julia Roberts and Sandra Bullock movies. Real life relationships are sometimes boring. Sometimes we find ourselves sitting on the couch on a Saturday afternoon, together, absolutely bored out of our minds. Okay, that's mostly me. He's pretty content doing nothing. Real life relationships don't end with Zan climbing a fire escape to bring me a dozen roses and profess his undying love for me, all the while facing his fear of heights, after a big fight. It's pretty okay with me if we both just say "I'm sorry" and talk about how to communicate better next time. But sometimes he also brings flowers, and that's pretty great, too. And he has faced his fear of heights for me more than a few times - remember the ledge hike in Ecuador? So maybe he really is my Prince Charming, after all.

I have to work at loving him. Oh! The just being enamored of him and fighting the smile that wants to play on my lips when he looks particularly cute in the middle of an argument -that is easy. But the part where I am intentional about making room in our shared lives for the things he wants to do (instead of just hike, hike, hike like I want to!), that is work. And being intentional about making him feel loved in the ways that make him feel the most loved, that takes thought and effort. That's the kind of work that is most special to me. It's my favorite.

So anyway. To get back to my original point - about love being like fitting into awkwardly lanky limbs - that's what this relationship has been like for me. It has been slow and steady. I started out unsure and always always always questioning. Always doubting. I never knew I had such a Doubting Thomas in me, but it's true. I do. Every time he got too close in the beginning and saw me a little more raw, a little more open and honest and imperfect, I pulled away. I was uncomfortable with real love and even more uncomfortable with a real relationship.

But two years in, today, I remember back to the night he left a March madness basketball game to come all the way to H Street NE to meet me for just a single drink in a bar that now no longer exists.

And as I think back to that night, when he said goodbye to me on the sidewalk with a simple hug, nervousness and questions and uncertainty written all over both of our faces, I think that I've grown into this thing. I fit perfectly into our relationship. We fit perfectly.

Happy two years, Zander.

swimming with sea lions in the galapagos

 From my journal... 

I carried our clean clothes from the laundromat up the last hill to our guesthouse, and I sighed. With the weight of the clothes and the complaints from my feet. And in that moment I felt like a natural, a local - like I lived here, almost. That's the sweet spot of traveling - the moment when assimilating feels closer than being a tourist.

Our last day in the Galapagos was more perfect than I could have imagined it would be. Zan and I took a Viator tour to La Loberia Island off of Santa Cruz. I'm writing about it for viator.com, and that's what it feels like to be a travel writer. It feels pretty great.

We were wary of a tour - aren't I always? So the joys were unexpected. Standing a foot from a blue-footed booby while a marine iguana sunned at its wide-webbed feet - it was wild experiencing nature like that. My wide feet, clad in blue Toms, fit right in with the peculiar and beautiful bird's. Later in the day we swam with sea lions. We ungracefully flapped our limbs, those dangly arms and legs unsuited for aquatic life. We took enormous breaths and plunged as deep into the ocean's surface as our ears could handle to see the sea lions glide and dive with grace and ease. They were dancers down there. I came eye-to-eye with one and could have stayed there for an eternity if I didn't have those pesky human lungs.

Later we hiked to a natural swimming hole - Las Grietas. We walked in our swimsuits, ocean water still dripping, in sandals and flip-flops, over lava rocks and an expansive pink salt mine. I scaled boulders taller than me, piled one on top of the other, next to each other, supporting each other, until I reached one 10 meters high. I had to sit on my butt and scoot forward inch by inch, stretching my legs and pointing my toes as hard as I could to balance while trying to reach the narrow ledge of the rock right below it. And then I stood on that bulging boulder, the ledge thinner than the length of my feet, holding on to the one behind me for life - and a twig of a branch reaching out from a crevice in the rock beside me. The water was so clear I could see the rocky bottom from the sky, it seemed. And in that moment, it felt like I was standing on the sky. I counted to three- 1...2...3... fifteen times, but finally, on one of those "3s," I jumped.

The adrenaline rush and pounding of my heart could only be matched by the thrill of the ice cold water rushing over me. I'm a junkie.

We watched the sunset back on the boat with eyes wide open, eager to hold on to the moment for as long as it could last. Our boat captain cut the engine right as the sun started to fade, and he shhh'd us all and pointed. And there, a foot from the boat, two larger-than-life sea turtles were rolling over each other, first one's hard shell popped to the surface and a second second later, the next. They were mating. We watched with rapt attention and awe. So that's how they do it, you know we were all thinking. 

We ate ice cream twice - once after lunch and again after dinner. We shopped for final Christmas gifts and souvenirs. We walked slowly down Santa Cruz's streets, and savored life as we were experiencing it.

Zan almost didn't stay on Santa Cruz today. He considered taking the 2pm ferry back to San Cristobal and meeting me there tomorrow for our flight. Exhaustion almost got the best him. But at the very very last second - right as the tour guide arrived at our hotel - he changed his mind. I'm so glad he stayed and we powered through our fatigue. We were rewarded a thousand times over.

Ciao ciao the local people say in the native language Quichua to say goodbye. Ciao ciao, Galapagos Islands.