February Travel Diary
Marrakech, Salzburg, Mayrlife, Rome, Doha, Hong Kong, Tokyo
In the shortest month of the year, I packed in more travel than ever. Buckle up—it’s a long one! One of my biggest takeaways from this multi-legged journey was that it wasn’t stressful because we deliberately didn’t pack in too many things to do in all of these places. We gave ourselves a hall pass on doing all the things you’re supposed to do, and instead did a lot of wandering without an agenda. (Hard to do especially in Tokyo, where everyone has big opinions.) Last night I was relaying this to a friend who said there is a word for this—la dérive—which literally means drift, but also an unplanned journey. Apparently this concept was popularized by the radical anti-consumerist artist/intellectual group Situationist International in the ‘60s, who used it to convey their way of experiencing a place without a work or leisure reason. I’m so pleased to have a word for this kind of unscheduled day, especially in a city where you feel pressured to squeeze in so much.
Early in December, Matt and I decided we would spend a week at Mayrlife, a medical health resort about an hour outside of Salzburg. In the last few years we’ve loved going to Buchinger Wilhelmi, but we wanted to try someplace new, and have many friends who recommended it. Once I started looking at how to get there (the closest airport is Salzburg, or you can fly into Vienna or Munich, each a three hour drive), I realized I was going to have to get creative, or commit to spending a day traveling. I decided to research what cities have nonstop flights into Salzburg, and discovered a 2x weekly flight on Eurowings (a subsidiary of Lufthansa) between Marrakech and Salzburg. Since we were going to be at our place in Bordeaux and there were multiple daily flights between Bordeaux and Marrakech, I figured, let’s go to Marrakech! My husband hadn’t been there since the ‘90s when he came as a photo assistant to Eric Boman on a British Vogue shoot, so I figured it was time for him to visit. I’d been there just two years earlier on a mother-daughter trip and fell in love, and I had a feeling Matt would feel the same way. Serendipitously, the editor from that Vogue shoot had posted some images from that very story the week before we were leaving—I think it made us both more excited about the trip. So that is how this became a part of our journey.
Marrakech
