Shelly Breyer

I want to be the person who travels to Paris and spends all of her time in bookstores and unknown cafes, and gets lost on the rue de la Montagne Geneviève like Owen Wilson in Midnight in Paris. The truth is– if I go to Paris I will visit the Eiffel Tower and a café listed in my Lonely Planet guide. I’m a tourist not a traveler.

I am always ready to head out of town but am a regular person with a day job, a medium-size paycheck and a family: two freakishly busy teen-age sons and a school teacher husband who only gets vacation time when everyone else is on vacation. No low season rates for us.

A three day trip to Toronto last spring was typical. We took the elevator ride up the CNN Tower. We saw two and a half baseball games at the Rogers Centre, where we stayed. The closest we got to ethnic fare in that grand culturally diverse city was poutine at a fast food joint, shoveled down on our way to the Royal Ontario Museum. One afternoon, my family went to the Hockey Hall of Fame while I wandered
the streets and the waterfront, where I found the Toronto Music Garden. Later on I brought my balking family to see the garden. The morning we left, I ditched the family again to return to the waterfront on a rented Bixi bike. I dig out travel bits in the time between the tourist spots.

Paris isn’t in my immediate plans, so even the Eiffel Tower will have to wait.

My husband creates cool ambitious itineraries, a mix of urban and nature. We are tourists in part because there is a lot we haven’t seen and we have to cover a lot of ground.

My home turf is the Adirondacks, Catskills, NYC and all of New York State. I also spend a lot of time in Massachusetts, particularly the Berkshires and Cape Cod. We have camped on Cape Cod National Seashore since 1991.

Recent travels:
Who said that national parks are boring? Not us. We visited Glacier, Yosemite, Death Valley, Olympic, Yellowstone, Mount Rushmore, Grand Canyon, Shenandoah.

We drove the Pacific Coast Highway from Santa Monica through Big Sur to Santa Clara, staying in a yurt and visiting an amusement park along the way.

We loved Seattle, Portland, Denver, Las Vegas and the forlorn oceanfront community of Ocean Shores Washington.

We found Elvis and Robert Johnson and ate ribs at the Rendevous when we drove south to Nashville, Memphis and Clarksdale, Mississippi.

I can write about all of it. And plan to.