"Peculiar Travel Suggestions" or "Finding Niagara"

So I read Cat's Cradle in one night, and came upon a superb quote the night before I embarked on a completely spontaneous, totally unplanned, fantastically unpredictable adventure with one Lindsey Mullen:

"Peculiar travel suggestions are dance lessons from God."

So we had a mantra. Then we had plane tickets, then we had two seats on a plane to the Buffalo/Niagara airport, and then we had a destination. And then we had the adventure.

If you want a play-by-play, there's twitter. If you want the highlights, there were friends we met on the bus that were always helpful, there were tiny birds that ate out of our hands about 10 yards from one of the most marvelous natural occurrences on planet earth, and there was a seriously beautiful stroke of divine intervention that led us to a positively fantastic hotel. Dearest thanks to Hotwire.com, your friendly neighborhood Buffalo airport security guard who also might be a drug dealer, and public libraries.

Buffalo and subsequently Niagara were, respectively, ghost-towns, but as Lindsey and I traveled the streets and public transit, we learned to appreciate it. It was quiet, chilly, and plenty of room to breathe. The houses in Buffalo have some of the most delightful-looking architecture I've ever seen, and we stumbled into a used book store full of hippies and a whole section of home-made zines. Sometimes whole streets would smell like garlic, and we danced to music playing from an outdoors store, and survived on nothing but crackers and clif bars. Then a doe-eyed little cheerleader from the church of Scientology gave us a free DVD.

The whole trip cost less than $300, including plane fare, hotel, food, and transportation. We only ate one real meal while we were there, and I think that the best way to appreciate food is to live on vending machine fare for a few days, then eat anything warm and soft. It'll be so good you'll insist it's manna from God himself, given only to you out of love.

It was a fantastic trip, and I didn't panic when we didn't have a place to stay, or when our friend Germaine tried to get us to stay in a hotel/front for human trafficking operation/crack house, or when Niagara was a town of abandoned buildings and closed Mediterranean food trailers.

My head was completely clear. It wasn't that I was making an effort not to think of my ex-boyfriend new happy-and-drug-free relationship, the work I have to get done for Apwonjo and graduation, papers and midterms, college sophomores who have still stolen my heart, my messy room, or my still foggy job prospects, but the thoughts weren't even there. I thought of nothing but Niagara falls, warm coats, Lindsey's smile, meeting new people, seeing new things, and appreciating how lucky I really am.

We only took video, no photos, so we'll take still shots from that later, and make a little travelogue. But for now, verbal description will have to suffice.