The Happiest Place on Earth

Longtime readers of this blog, which means me, will remember my fascination with Iceland. It's the number one place in the world that I would like to visit, and as it turns out, it's also the happiest place on earth,* according to former NPR foreign correspondent and self-described grump Eric Weiner. After spending years traveling from one miserable place to another to report on mostly miserable events, he figured it was time to search for something radically different—happiness—and now has a book to show for it.

Weiner managed to score a spot on tonight's Colbert Report, which means his book, The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World, will benefit from the Colbert Bump and hit a high spot on the major bestseller lists. I haven't read the book (hey, give me a break—I just heard about it an hour ago), but it did garner a solid four stars on Amazon. Since I tend to trust customer reviews, taking the most negative and the most positive reviews with a grain of salt, and since Weiner was booked on Colbert, I'm pretty sure it's worth checking out.

But back to Iceland. Call me crazy, but I love traveling to cold places. Give me Canada or Alaska any day over the heat and humidity of the tropics. Weiner's research tells me I'm no so crazy after all:

All things considered, colder is happier. Maybe we should all be vacationing in Iceland, not the Caribbean. And global warming takes on added significance…it's also likely to seriously bum us out. This might be the most inconvenient truth of all.

So there. Cold makes people happy. So does this, I suppose:

I want to stay in that house, somewhere on the frozen tundra outside of Reykjavik. Even though I'm living my bliss in Colorado, I wouldn't mind a week or two in another geographically blissful, glacially beautiful area.

 

* Okay, so it's one of the happiest places on earth, but I have no emotional tie with the others. Iceland it is.

"Let's Go Shopping"

Those are the three little words I never expected to hear my husband say. I am absolutely certain that he has not put those words together, in that order or any other, at any time in his 50-some years on earth. Frankly, I'm not sure I've said those words very often. But one day last week, he was driven to utter them, and I was driven to comply.

"Driven" is most appropriate in the context of that day. We had driven 28.62 miles, according to Mapquest, from our cozy home in the mountains to the strip mall in the city that is home to the closest DMV facility that so beneficently grants Colorado licenses to recent transplants.

The situation didn't look very good from the parking lot, but maybe all those people standing outside in the frigid weather were just smoking.

Not so. They were in line. We peeked around them, saw countless people sitting and waiting, countless people standing and waiting, and then counted 10 people in line outside. And that's when my husband said it: "Let's go shopping."

So we did. All was not lost. I managed to score a three-piece Columbia Sportswear ski outfit in perfect condition for $15 at the thrift store several doors from the DMV.

A Colorado driver's license won't be so easy to score, I fear. What is it about the DMV? Why is that one agency such a joke in just about every state? Why in the heck can't they get it together?

Answers, anyone?

You Know You're in Colorado...

...when you wake up in a postcard and can't get out.



The bottom photo shows what the back of our house looked like earlier today. You've got to love a place where the high is 65 one day and 25 the next, with who knows how much snow having fallen during the night in between. (Our very cool wireless weather station measures 10 weather elements, but snowfall isn't one of them; we do know the wind chill was around 5 degrees at times throughout the day.) For a couple of Florida transplants, one of whom has not seen snow in more than a decade, this was a wonderful day indeed.

Oh, and that car you see near the back door? It's now stuck on our steep, red granite driveway. We can't go out until the snow starts to melt, and we couldn't be happier. There's something so comforting about knowing you're semi-stranded (we could walk, if we really had to go somewhere; "town" is only three blocks away). I'm able to kick back, knit a pair of warm woollen socks, watch the Red Sox wallop the Indians, sip a cup of hot chocolate by the fireplace, and never feel like I should be doing something more productive. This is productive. It's producing peace.

And to think it's only October.

Off to the Abbey

I'll be living my bliss this weekend, attending a knitting retreat at an abbey in northern Colorado. How cool is that, I ask you? One Mary Gildersleeve, a certified hand-knitting expert and knitwear designer, will be leading the retreat and causing the rest of us to do penance for being so envious of her skills and creativity. Keeping us in line* will be Sister Hildegard, guest house director of the Abbey of St. Walburga** in Virginia Dale, Colorado.

The last time I experienced anything that sounded this medieval, I was in a real live medieval castle in England. Really now---Gildersleeve! Hildegard! Walburga! How can you not have great expectations for a weekend filled with such a wondrous array of appellations?

Alas and alack, there will be no cell service, no Internet connection, no technology more advanced than electricity, so there will be no real-time blogging from the big event. Rest assured, my lads and lassies, I shall report on this extraordinary journey back in time when I return to the 21st century. If I return.

* Not really.

** St. Walburga lived in 8th-century England, and to this day her bones produce a healing "oil" throughout the winter.

Un-Freakin'-Believable

Atop the 14,000-plus-foot summit of Pikes Peak stands the appropriately named Summit House, part gift shop, part snack bar, part warmup area for tourists who have ventured to its heady, oxygen-derived, and often, very, very cold environs. It's a friendly little place and, one would think, a place safe from big-city crime.

Not so, it seems. Sometime during the night on Saturday, burglars broke into the Summit House and made off with a safe.

Here's the thing: the only way to get to the summit is via a cog railway or a toll road. The burglars not only traveled that treacherous toll road after dark, they did so in a stolen pickup belonging to the Pikes Peak Highway toll road agency, according to a story in the Colorado Springs Gazette.

Hey, I'm not one to admire criminals, but you've got to give these guys credit. They managed to pull off a heist that promised an incredibly difficult getaway. I mean, really, you can't exactly speed off down the mountain on a road whose hairpin turns have claimed numerous victims over the years. Maybe they were able to clock their getaway at 30 miles per hour---maybe. In a stolen truck, no less. On a toll road that showed no telltale signs of foul play---no broken toll gates, nothing.

As admirable as all that is, I hope they get the buggers, and soon. The Summit House holds so many fond memories for so many people, and its employees ought to feel that they're still working in one of the safest places on earth. Well, safe from criminals, anyway.

The Life I've Always Wanted

Last month my husband and I moved from Florida to Colorado.

Just eleven words, but those eleven words represent a thirty-five year journey that took me from New Jersey to Delaware to Florida and finally to Colorado. Back in New Jersey in 1972, a couple I knew from college decided they'd had it with the East Coast; they were heading for Colorado, and in true hippie fashion, they were selling all their earthly goods, which amounted to one stereo, to fund the trip. I was the buyer. I'd never owned a stereo, and I was happy to help them out. But more than anything, I wanted to go with them. I promised myself I'd follow up on that and connect with them as soon as...well, I don't know what I was thinking. As soon as I graduated? As soon as I graduated and got a car that might make it that far? As soon as I graduated and got a car that might make it that far and Jupiter aligned with Mars and peace would rule the planet and all that? It was the Age of Aquarius, after all, and maybe there was something to all that cosmic stuff.

Well, whatever the forces were that converged to make this happen (before you get all upset, yes, of course, I know it was God, all right?), I am grateful beyond measure. Here I am, finally living in the Rockies, on an amazingly private piece of property at the top of a rise three blocks from the center of a wonderful small town, surrounded on three sides by evergreens with an awesome view of Pikes Peak on the fourth side, working from home, and loving every single thing about my new life.

The "getting here" wasn't much fun, though. As my regular readers know, I haven't blogged in a while. At first, that was due to a very tight book deadline involving dozens of interviews and tons of research, a temporary living situation with spotty Internet service, and time-consuming real estate problems in both Florida and Colorado. I figured everything would settle down once we closed and I turned the book in to the publisher---did I mention that the closing date and the book deadline fell on the exact same day?---but that was not to be.

First, the buyer's mortgage company went bankrupt the day before the closing on our house in Florida. I can't begin to describe what that nightmare was like. The guy performed nothing less than a miracle in acquiring a new mortgage in record time, but the stress was unbelievable. I had already moved to Colorado, my husband had quit his job, and the movers were scheduled to start loading up.

So we closed, but we had no place to live in Colorado. We planned to rent for the first year, and one rental after another didn't pan out. So even as our stuff was barreling down I-70 in Kansas, we didn't know where to tell the driver to deliver it. We ended up putting everything in storage and paying for a second move from the storage unit to the house we rented.

And then my friend Margaret Rex passed away. Margaret, who was in her 70s, had the spunk and energy of a woman half her age until the cancer that had been in remission for years reared its ugly head again. She was a lifechanger, and I told her as much the last time I saw her. You could not know this woman and not be touched by her in a deep and profound way; she was one of those people who brought joy and laughter and meaning to life in every situation and in every encounter you had with her.

Margaret patiently taught me to knit socks.

Margaret lived in Colorado Springs, where I had spent much of the last few years, and I was looking forward to spending time with her when I moved to Colorado permanently. We hadn't even unpacked when we got the call that she was failing; four days later, she was gone. I miss her, and yet I am comforted knowing that her struggle is finally over.

So it's been an eventful summer. There's lots more, of course: a close relative ended up in a mental health facility, called me as much as five times a day after his discharge, and is now living in a homeless shelter; I spent most of three weeks in bed with a phantom illness; at times, chaos seemed to be the new norm for our lives. But here I am today---and I can't say this often enough---living the life I've always wanted.

How many people can say that? Can you? In 1972, I didn't expect to live past my 20s. I lived recklessly, and I knew it. Something was bound to get me sooner rather than later. But here I am, 35 years later, living a reality that was just a dream back than. I am blessed. Truly, unbelievably blessed---blessed beyond measure.