The book is a look at the social movement I call ‘New Domesticity’ – the fascination with reviving “lost” domestic arts like canning, bread-baking, knitting, chicken-raising, etc. Why are women of my generation, the daughters of post-Betty . . . → Read More: Exciting news!]]> I’m writing a nonfiction book! Title TBD, it will be published by Free Press at Simon & Schuster in 2013 (2013!).

The book is a look at the social movement I call ‘New Domesticity’ – the fascination with reviving “lost” domestic arts like canning, bread-baking, knitting, chicken-raising, etc. Why are women of my generation, the daughters of post-Betty Friedan feminists, embracing the domestic tasks that our mothers and grandmothers so eagerly shrugged off? Why has the image of the blissfully domestic supermom overtaken the Sex & the City-style single urban careerist as the media’s feminine ideal? Where does this movement come from? What does it mean for women? For families? For society?

Any and all opinions are most welcome. If you’re a knitter, a mom blogger, a banker-turned-baker, a neo-homesteader – or if you simply have an opinion about women and domesticity – I’d love to hear from you!

Marching band boys in front of Pirates of Nassau Museum

The last time I was in Nassau was in 2003. Spring Break. An ill-advised trip with my college roommates, with whom I had little in common besides a shared bathroom. We stayed in a . . . → Read More: Fear and Loathing in Nassau]]>

Marching band boys in front of Pirates of Nassau Museum

The last time I was in Nassau was in 2003. Spring Break. An ill-advised trip with my college roommates, with whom I had little in common besides a shared bathroom. We stayed in a $75-a-night dim box of a motel room, with a scabby door and liver-colored carpet spongy with mildew. By day, my roommates exercised their ambitious and thoroughly pre-planned tanning regimens, laying like corpses on rental loungers at Cable Beach, stirring only to flip themselves at appointed intervals. When the sun gave me a migraine, I walked through the artificial midnight of the black-ceilinged casino, listening to the narcotizing tinkle of slot machines and watching bouffant-ed ladies drip cigarette ash onto the carpet. By night, we plied the neon-lit environs of Senor Frogs and the Waterloo, eating soggy nachos and dancing desultorily with frat boys in upside-down white visor hats.

Midway through the trip, the US invaded Iraq. I spent the rest of the week in the hotel room watching CNN, growing more depressed by the hour. When it got too hot, I climbed in a cold bathtub with a bottle of duty-free rum and a library book. One afternoon, I ventured across the street to the seaweed-strewn public beach to find a crowd of people staring at something floating in the water. It took everyone a minute to realize that it was a human baby. Someone plucked the limp body from the water and laid it on the sand, unbreathing, unmoving. An American tourist rushed over, began CPR. After a nauseating interval, the baby began to cry.

Needless to say, I was not keen to get back to Nassau.

But, like most things, Nassau was not at all like I imagined/half-remembered. Yes, there are daily cruise ships disgorging thousands of passengers into the daiquiri bars and duty-free diamond stores of Bay Street. Yes, there’s enough pollution to leave a scrim of gray around your ankles by the end of a long, sweaty day. Yes, lunch costs $30.

And yet. Nassau has its charms. Downtown has all your dreamy, decaying Colonial glamor – crumbling pink-and-gray mansions, sun-bleached graveyards wreathed with tangles of casuarina, ornate wrought iron fences surrounding hibiscus- and azalea-choked churchyards. The far west side of the island has a number of cool little hotels and restaurants, even an organic farm. There’s a Dunkin Donuts!

I stayed in a little downtown guesthouse run by a sweet, somewhat deaf elderly Greek couple, Mary and Steve. Sample dialog between me and Mary:

Emily (returning to guesthouse in the evening): Hi. How are you today?

Mary: Ehh, not so good. My medicines are giving me the constipation.

I visited a yoga ashram hidden beneath the palms in the shadow of Atlantis, where I was introduced to the orange robed swami in charge. What does being a swami entail? I asked my tour guide, a poker-faced Canadian with an improbable Hindu name.

It means he’s renounced certain things? she said.

Like what?

A lot of things.

Well, if the ashram was about renunciation, the rest of Nassau and Paradise Island is about gleeful consumption – and that’s not a criticism. The gleaming pinnacle of all this consumption is the madness that is the Atlantis resort on Paradise Island. Imagine Sea World meets Disney meets Fifth Avenue meets St Peter’s Basilica, every bit of its vast acreage designed down to the doorknobs to resemble an Indiana Jonesish version of the Lost World of Atlantis – a vast domed lobby shellacked with with gilded mermaids, hallways carved with fake hieroglyphs, a water park with slides made to look like ruined pyramids. There’s a dolphin lagoon, an aquarium, a massive casino, a private movie theater, restaurants from Nobu and Bobby Flay, a swim-through shark tank. You need a GPS – and a half-day – to navigate the place.

After a guided tour, I returned to my guesthouse feeling somewhat disappointed that it lacked a water slide.

Other Nassau highlights included checking out the semi-secret dungeon beneath the public library, which was the jail back in Nassau’s pirate days. I asked the librarian if it was true that there was a dungeon beneath the building. She rolled her eyes and got out her keys. The “dungeon” – now a dump for broken chairs and torn books – still bears the hatch marks from centuries-ago prisoners counting the days until…until what? Release? Hanging?

Graycliff torcedores

In the spooky-cool 18th-century Graycliff Hotel, I visited a cigar-rolling shop staffed by a dozen imported Cubans. The scene could have been straight out of 1905 or 1925 or 1955 – cigar rollers sitting at battered wooden desks in a narrow tiled room, cigars hanging from their mouths as they rolled translucent dried tobacco leaves so fast their hands blurred. The air was yellow with smoke, a tinny radio playing in the corner.

Until last year, the rollers – called ‘torcedores’ in Spanish – used to work under the direction of the late Avelino Lara, the former personal torcedor to Fidel Castro. But since the tobacco is not Cuban, the cigars are perfectly legal for export to the US. Sadly, neither I nor anyone else in my life these days has much interest in cigar-smoking, however wonderful said cigars may be.

The other great draw of Nassau is duty-free shopping. Almost every afternoon as I strolled down Bay Street on my way to the guesthouse, I would duck into the blissfully air conditioned Colombian Emeralds store to try on gaudy, grass-green cocktail rings and speculate with the shopgirls about which $30,000 bauble my husband might like to purchase for me when he arrived on Friday.

When Jamin did arrive, our plans did not, sadly, involve shopping for emerald jewelry. But that’s a story for next time….

Yes, several conch were harmed in the making of this trip. This little guy is coming to terms with the realization that he’s about to lose his head. Who even knew they had heads? Well, after . . . → Read More: Laurie and Emily’s Abaco Adventure]]>

Yes, several conch were harmed in the making of this trip. This little guy is coming to terms with the realization that he’s about to lose his head. Who even knew they had heads? Well, after dinner at Conchy Joe’s floating conch stand in Marsh Harbour, Abaco, Laurie and I knew more about the anatomy of these gastropod mollusks than the average marine biologist. Just ask Laurie what a conch “pistol” tastes like

After flying in from adjacent Grand Bahama on a teensy Cessna, Laurie and I spent an excellent week exploring the island of Abaco and its surrounding cays by ferry, car and – always my favorite form of transport – golf cart. Abaco is an interesting place, historically speaking. Many of the island inhabitants are descendants of Loyalists who fled the United States after the Revolutionary War. They settled the various islands just off the east coast of the Abaco “mainland,” which became known as the Loyalist Cays. Each cay has its own distinct culture, architecture and – most notably –  accent.

The accents are damn odd, and I say this as someone who has traveled a goodly chunk of the Anglosphere, from Outback Australia to Belize to Singapore to India to rural New Brunswick to the Mississippi Delta. While in the rest of the Bahamas, the Afro-Bahamians speak with a light Caribbean lilt and the Euro-Bahamians have what sound like watered-down British accents, the Loyalist accent is an entirely different creature. It might best be described as Olde English-meets-Southern-meets-Dutch, all spoken with a mouth full of marbles and a belly full of rum. Just saying “would you like mac n’ cheese with that?” in Abaco English makes you sound like a Dangerous Pirate.

Laurie on Man-O-War Cay

Since the (white) Abaconians are descended from such a limited stock  there’s a very, very small number of last names. If you’re not a Sands, you’re a Sawyer, but your married name was no doubt Albury or Malone. I was dying to broach the issue of, uh, consanguinity, with the locals, but somehow it never seemed like the appropriate time to ask “so, just how inbred are you?”

So I busied myself with other questions and pursuits. Some of the highlights of the week:

Lola’s husband shows off his conch collection

On Man-O-War Cay, where everyone is named Albury, we met an elderly woman named Lola who invited us to hop aboard her golf cart and come home with her to buy fresh cinnamon rolls and guava jelly. How does one refuse an offer like that?  One doesn’t. Lola was born on Man-O-War 77 years ago; her husband was born in Cherokee Sound, an isolated Abaco village where everyone is said to have identical red hair and freckles. They were both lovely, though nearly impossible to understand.

Old Gaol, Green Turtle Cay. Can’t you imagine pirates swinging from the roof gallows?

On Green Turtle Cay, where everyone is named Sands, we rented a golf cart outfitted with monster truck tires and off-roaded along the sandy paths winding through the casuarina and cabbage palms. The island’s main settlement, New Providence, is a spooky 18th century ghost town of a place, with a crumbling old jail house, a vast decaying cemetery, and a downtown lined with vacant clapboard cottages, which locals refuse to rent to off-islanders. We ate banana-coconut bread in a tiny, silent restaurant that felt like the cafe at the end of the universe, then rode a saggy, overloaded ferry back to the mainland.

Beach yoga, Tahiti Beach, Elbow Cay

On Elbow Cay, where everyone is named Malone (they’re nearly all descended from a single South Carolina Loyalist widow named Wyannie Malone), we explored the hibiscus-lined alleyways of Hopetown, which is like a tiny, tropi-colored Martha’s Vineyard. After much getting-lostness, we finally found our way to Tahiti Beach, which was disappointingly small in real life but looks utterly amazing in this photo, no?

On the “mainland,” we rented a car and drove to the north and south tips of the island, stopping to take a very tippy tugboat ride to the private island of Spanish Cay, once the super-secret party pad of the Dallas Cowboys, and to eat enormous, drippy cheeseburgers at Pete’s Pub, a sand-floor bar on a remote hidden cove that looks like a pirate hideaway straight out of Central Casting.

Now I’m in Nassau, pounding the pavement and feeling cranky about being in the big city after such a lovely interlude. Though the Dunkin Donuts coffee goes a long way to make up for it…

Gold Rock Beach, Lucayan National Park

The night of our wedding rehearsal dinner, with 50 guests eating Mediterranean food outside, I ducked into my room to catch my breath and check my email. There, I found a rather unexpected message . . . → Read More: Let the island-hopping begin! First up: Grand Bahama.]]>

Gold Rock Beach, Lucayan National Park

The night of our wedding rehearsal dinner, with 50 guests eating Mediterranean food outside, I ducked into my room to catch my breath and check my email. There, I found a rather unexpected message from Lonely Planet: did I want to research their next Bahamas book?

Well, for the past two years, I’ve managed to evade the soggy gray bone-chill of fall/winter in North Carolina, packing off to Southeast Asia in 2008 and Australia in 2009. Why break a winning streak?

Little more than a month later, I was on a BahamasAir prop plane, touching down on the island of Grand Bahama. So here we are. Story of my life.

Grand Bahama is like your sweet, hard-working friend who keeps getting one shitty break after another. A hurricane. Another hurricane. A recession. The collapse of a major hotel, which sucked down all surrounding business with it.  In the past six years, the population has reportedly declined from 70,000 to 40,000. Almost everyone lives in the central settlement, the conjoined towns of Freeport and Lucaya. Freeport itself is a low-rise cluster of government buildings, banks and strip-malls, while Lucaya is a tidy row of hotels and pastel-pretty shops and restaurants designed to appeal to a largely cruise ship-based tourist contingent. I’m staying in Lucaya, in a lovely B&B called Seagrape run by a Canadian-American couple of ex-divers.

Jellyfish CAN be cute!

Everyone here is nice. Really nice. Nice in a no-strings-attached kind of way, not in that obsequious, I’m-trained-to-act-nice-but-I-really-wish-you’d-drop-dead way you sometimes encounter in tourist towns. Everyone says “hello” or “good afternoon” when passing on the street, which is sweet when it comes from an old lady. But when it comes from a young dude, and I’m alone, I do what I’ve been doing almost without thought ever since I hit puberty: ignore them.  But, over coffee at a local cafe, Canadian ex-pat and editor of the Bahamas Weekly Robbin Whachell explained to me that big city conventions of ignoring greetings from opposite-sex strangers don’t fly here; you must say hello to everyone or be considered terminally rude. So I’m trying.

Pelican Point Beach

Yesterday I rented a car and drove to the far west end of the island, chanting “stay on the left side! Stay on the left side!” the whole time (they drive British-style here, though mostly in American cars; despite my Australia-New Zealand interlude, I’ve never really gotten used to left-side driving and tend to overcorrect and wind up veering into the left shoulder).

Overcome by hunger in the settlement of West End, I ducked into a tiny bakery and bought a Cheeto-orange meat pattie, which is the Caribbean’s turmeric-spiked answer to the empanada, and two enormous swirls of guava duff. Guava duff, more or less the official Bahamian dessert, is a rolled-up log of dough and sweetened guava paste, which is boiled, sliced into rounds, and served with…butter. Big, fluffy piles of sweetened, guava-flecked butter. It is delicious, obviously.

Lyndah, Lanelle and Harry at Zelma’s Conch Shack

Today a local photographer, the charming Lyndah Wells, brought me along on an excursion to the easternmost tip of the island with two of her friends. We drove the island’s sole highway through sandy scrub lands, past the abandoned studio where they filmed Pirates of the Caribbean 2 and 3, past several exquisite and empty beaches, past the old US Air Force missile tracking station, where they brought the first few Mercury astronauts for debriefing after their capsules splashed down just offshore. At McLean’s Town we ordered cracked (fried) conch and lobster from Zelma Davis, who’s been frying up seafood from a freestanding kitchen next to her house for 15 years. Though the conch, liberally lashed with Davis’s own hot sauce, is superb, Davis suggests you come on Saturday to taste her true specialty, crab rice.

Miss Zelma and her fantastic cracked conch

Alas, I will not be here next Saturday! Tomorrow my friend Laurie from Chapel Hill is meeting me here to accompany me to the Abacos, where we shall frolic, dive, and perhaps have some adventures with personal watercraft. Just because someone hasn’t driven a boat since they were eleven years old and their father let them steer the pontoon at Smith Mountain Lake in West Virginia is no reason why they shouldn’t rent a full-size speedboat for cay-hopping, is it?

. . . → Read More: New food writing anthology featuring yours truly]]> I have finally met my longstanding life goal of being featured in an anthology alongside Anthony Bourdain! Sadly, my essay does not include the phrase “bull testicles” even once.

Morelia, the Pink City. If this were in Italy, it would be CRAWLING with travelers.

Just got my author copies of Lonely Planet Mexico. I wrote the Western Central Highlands section, whose highlights include Guadalajara, Lake Chapala, Patzcuaro,  Morelia . . . → Read More: My new Lonely Planet Mexico is out]]>

Morelia, the Pink City. If this were in Italy, it would be CRAWLING with travelers.

Just got my author copies of Lonely Planet Mexico. I wrote the Western Central Highlands section, whose highlights include Guadalajara, Lake Chapala, Patzcuaro,  Morelia and the massive monarch butterfly wintering grounds in eastern Michoacan. I know a lot of people are scared of going to Mexico these days, but don’t be! Just don’t, you know, try to smuggle in cocaine or sleep with a Zeta’s wife, OK?

Memphis. Truth.

Just got my advance author copies of Lonely Planet USA, out in stores April 1. For this edition, I covered the awesomest part of the country, the Dirty South! Buy the book, then go to Nashville and . . . → Read More: My latest Lonely Planet USA book, out April 1]]>

Memphis. Truth.

Just got my advance author copies of Lonely Planet USA, out in stores April 1. For this edition, I covered the awesomest part of the country, the Dirty South! Buy the book, then go to Nashville and get some Prince’s Hot Chicken.

. . . → Read More: Lonely Planet Best in Travel 2010]]> Lonely Planet Best in Travel 2010 is out – check out my Charleston and Oaxaca chapters!