Friends

Posted December 4th, 2004 by Michelle

I have this friend- we’ll call her “Stacey”, who I’ve known my whole life. I got the rare opportunity to spend a week with her last month, and although I’m a little concerned that she brought home a tapeworm from Vanuatu, at least she gets to eat all the cookies she wants and she gets to stay super fit. We lived in the same town for a year during college, but I was going through a particularly joy-less phase and my boyfriend kept hitting on her friends so I didn’t see her nearly enough. A couple of years later, she moved to Chicago, and had her own unfortunate year, but I didn’t even stick around to see her through it- I left on tour about three or four months after she moved there. So our visits have been short but totally and completely awesome, and I’ve found that if she’s around, I do stuff I should do but that I probably wouldn’t have done. I walked the Brooklyn Bridge, only once, saw a grotto in Wisconsin, only once, dove fully clothed into Lake Michigan at sunset in the middle of a bike ride, only once, and had the fates been better to us, I would have gone to Vanuatu to visit her. Alas, instead, I went to Iowa, but I am certainly not complaining.

Next year, in late fall, Stacey and I are going to Peru. We’ve decided that I’m going to learn Spanish for the trip, and I’ve found the perfect class at my local college. On separate sides of the continent, we are drooling through our guide books, trying to decide how best to use those two weeks. Last night, I saw “The Motorcycle Diaries” and watched Che and his chubby companion climb the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. Stace and I will do the same, and maybe by then neither of us will be chubby.

We are going to climb that trail, wander Machu Picchu, take the train back and drink tequila with the locals, just like we did in Iowa: