Notes from the Red Bird House

I'm a runner and I travel. It's a great combination. Most of the time. There is no better way to see a city than on foot. Plus a morning run keeps me from languishing in bed half the day and I seldom binge out on the hotel's free breakfast buffet (Admittedly, the bacon yesterday was a poor pre-run choice but it smelled too good to pass up). The best part for me? I don't gain weight on my vacations or lose fitness. The even better than the best part? It's free.  Ok, it's mostly free (I'll come back to this...). Or it can be. Strap on your running shoes, zip your room key into an inobtrusive pocket (that hopefully opens easier than mine does, especially with frozen fingers), and hit the road. Look, if you're female or merely safety conscious, you've gotta have a knot in your stomach by now. "Let me get this straight, Stacee... I'm supposed to run in a strange city, on strange roads, where I probably don't know where I'm going, in pl...

The majority of travel bloggers will tell you about the glamour of travel. Multi-star restaurants, spas, wine tours, nightlife. Others will highlight the free stuff. Churches you can tour without a guide, opera houses with midweek freebies, petting zoos for the kiddos. None of them ever mention the ugly, fatty underbelly of travel. For some, this means a city without Uber. For others, it might be an airport without a luxury lounge. For the solo-budget-conscious-multi-week-hump-it-in-hump-it-out-catch-a-daily-workout traveler, it's laundry. Yes, laundry. Let me tell you how quickly one person can run through underwear. Ok, let me not. It's not pretty. Even in Scandinavia in the late winter. I can only imagine traveling in a sweaty climate at a sweaty time of year. It's production would be terrifyingly exponential. I can hear the objections now - Pack more? If it doesn't fit on my back it doesn't travel. Given that there's only so much room in my bag (my on...

I might have been the only person in Copenhagen who was excited to see snow last night. It was just my fourth day of winter. The natives were easily going on their sixth month. I live in Texas so I'm allowed to love the cold. My sister who lives in Las Vegas thinks I'm insane as does my sister in Minnesota. And let's face it, they're probably right. Who could possibly love running through slushy snow and over the occasional random icy patch if not an insane person? Likewise, who could honestly like a bracing 18mph headwind that plummets the already chilly ambient temperature into the upper teens? An insane person. Or a woman from Texas who hates the heat and relishes a nice (apparently) late winter (rather than early spring) Scandinavian vacation. I was here a year ago and the temperature was a good fifteen degrees warmer. I'm not sure what's considered normal for this time of year. All I know is that when I looked at the extended forecast for this year's ...

I’m pretty sure when I turned forty, I talked about “redefining” a decade. Or maybe it was once I was in my forties and realized that they weren’t as bad as people said they were. I don’t recall fearing forty. My fortieth birthday sucked, I remember that much. My friends all had good intentions, but I ended up pulled in two directions as often happened in Texarkana – one went toward the gay side of town, the other toward the straight. About the time I decided I couldn’t make everyone happy (and would only make myself miserable trying), I accidentally dropped my phone in a mud puddle. After fishing it out (yep, the puddle was that deep), I used my water-logged cell phone as an excuse to make my exit. Strangely, that mud puddle was the best thing about the start of my forties. Fortunately, the decade, though not without its challenges, has turned out better than it started. Fast forward nine insanely quick years. Today I am forty-nine and beginning the last year of the decade. I co...

Before my last half marathon, I sat on a towel behind my car and stretched. The morning wasn't exceptionally cold, the garage was covered (the second level of a downtown Austin bank affair), and it was early enough not to be too busy (i.e. I wasn't in danger of being run over). I'd rarely, if ever, stretched before a run or a race, but I'd also rarely, if ever, been a month away from my forty-ninth birthday. And I'd learned in the course of my training that my legs responded better on longer runs if they'd been stretched. Easy math. I was nervous that morning, perhaps somewhat irrationally so. It wasn't about racing. Or the distance. In my twenties, when they said I should win, should set a PR, my nerves were exclusively attached to the race and my ability to perform at a high enough level. I knew I wasn't racing for anything other than myself that morning. I set a goal of sub-1:50, entirely too conservative and pedestrian for me , but such a goal ...

McCarran International Airport, Las Vegas, NV Terminal 3 Gate D-17 Saturday, February 24, 2018 I go many places but in reality there is only one place want to go. I look at pictures constantly - they fill my Instagram feed - and, though I am not prone to envy, I am envious. Of the photographer because he or she was there (behind the camera but there nonetheless). Of every pedestrian, every person, photographed because (whether they like it or not) they were there. In the place I long to be. Next month, a month from today in fact, I'll hop a plane for London then another to Copenhagen. Two weeks of running, walking, and writing my way around Scandinavia. It'll be my second visit to Copenhagen and Gothenburg, but my first in both Oslo and Bergen. My travel bucket list grows longer daily - Croatia, the Netherlands, Malta, Faroe Islands, Iceland, Finland, Estonia, Romania, Poland... I can go on and on. I picked up a Conde Nast Traveler magazine at the airport in Austin, the...