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Journal Entry 2 by KathleenMolloy on Thursday, July 17, 2008
This is the sixth west Quebec author I have read for the 2nd Canadian Book Challenge.
Kiss the Sunset Pig, Lauire Gough
Since moving to Quebec I have discovered that everyone in Guelph Ontario adores Laurie Gough. I know this because whenever I meet someone from Guelph they assume "Oh, you must know my dear friend Laurie." And when my dear friends from Guelph hop over the bridge for a visit they always pre-arrange a tea date with Laurie and her family. Laurie collects good people.
Having finished reading Kiss the Sunset Pig I now know that Lauire has managed to collect good people from around the world. In her first book of travel adventures, Laurie squeezes us into her beat up old Bronco named Marcia. We accompany her on a road trip across the United States, pass the non-descript strip malls, pass the Plains, pass the robust Americans... all the way to California. She's looking for a cave in which she spent some time during her youth, a time when she felt safe and certain of who she was and what she wanted.
Laurie's first trip to the cave was in her twenties, she wrote this travel log in her thirties, and she now bounces happily into her forties. Yet although we know she is a mature adult woman it is still impressive to read how she described her journey from who she thought she was en route to becoming who she wants to be.
And isn't travelling as much about what we learn from the world as much as it is what we learn about ourselves? On this adventure Laurie learned that she could be happily independent, happily in love with Mr. Right if she ran him over, and profoundly lonely and isolated.
As she described her misgivings about her Korea trip I remembered the complete isolation I also felt when holed up in a Seoul hotel for three days.
My return flight from Singapore was delayed for two days because of jam. Not an air traffic jam but raspberry jam. Crates of raspberry jam had crashed in the cargo, spilling a gooey mess and forcing the passengers to sleep in the airport for 2 days while the airline searched a jam-free flight for us. It was impossible to get information from the airlines. Impossible to escape old Korean ladies body slamming their way to the front of the line. After being knocked around a line-up for almost 12 hours I finally reached the ticket counter where I pressed my elbows down flat, stretched my arms the width of the counter and spied the ticket agent dead on. He couldn't have possibly ignored me. Yet he did. And this was because an old lady wedged herself in between the counter and my breasts. She had ducked under the stinky gap of my armpit and settled comfortably between me and the counter. My stunned response to the invasion didn't last long and I barely got out an "Uhh excuse me," before a second old lady joined her. Now, I must confess, I never was a girl blessed by the Hooter Fairy, so it is hard to imagine how two grown women could nestle in between my boobs. But they did and the ticket agent didn't flinch.
My travel mates and I were shuttled to a suburban hotel where we spent 3 nights eating noodles and watching American GI TV. Just as Laurie described it, for me Seoul was bleak, crowded, overcast, polluted and did I mention crowded? In that suburban hotel I was isolated. I woke with panic attacks fearing that the airline would loose all records of my existence and forget me there. On night two I had a nightmare that the American soldiers had taken over the city and in response the Koreans slaughtered foreigners in the street. Screaming myself awake I had only my purse and the airline-issued tooth brush to fend off the nightmares. Fortunately the hotel laundered my clothes every night but during those hours when the hotel had my clothes, I can honestly say that I felt naked, my soul, my hope, my common sense - all gone.
Like Laurie, I've had the opportunity to explore much of this world and I've made some curious and oft times unhealthy travel choices. Part of the adventure right? But I have never felt as lonely and vulnerable as I did in the Korean suburb, naked, with only a tooth brush and David Letterman.
Kiss the Sunset Pig is not so much about hitchhiking through Sumatra, canoeing in the Yukon, sleeping in a redwood tree…as it is about yearning to be yourself somewhere else. Let's see where Laurie's next adventure takes her.
http://www.lauriegough.com/books.html
And who want to Kiss the Sunset Pig of the title? Singer Joni Mitchell does.
http://top5.weblog.ro/2008-04-28/355177/California---Joni-Mitchell.html
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Journal Entry 3 by KathleenMolloy at Ottawa, Ontario Canada on Thursday, July 17, 2008
Released 3 yrs ago (7/17/2008 UTC) at Ottawa, Ontario Canada CONTROLLED RELEASE NOTES:
CONTROLLED RELEASE NOTES:
This one is going to my dear friend DeeDee who recently explored India.
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Journal Entry 4 by KathleenMolloy on Saturday, July 19, 2008
I just received a lovely note from the author Lauire Gough and edited it below for clarification :
"A friend of mine just emailed me your blog. I'm glad you liked my book! I just wanted to say it's actually my second book about my travels. My first book is called Kite Strings of the Southern Cross: A Woman's Travel Odyssey and in Canada it's called Island of the Human Heart. (Only in Canada does it have that title. In the rest of the world it's called Kite Strings of the Southern Cross.)
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Journal Entry 5 by DeeHetherinton from Carp, Ontario Canada on Thursday, August 07, 2008
I caught the book from a friend from the Wakefield area. As another traveller, she thought I would enjoy it.
I always wondered if I/we (my husband and I) were a bit different from most of our friends. They were content to spend holidays at home, at the cottage, visiting the nearby city or camping at the same spot year after year. They proudly accumulated weeks of un-used vacation leave, while I was lucky to have 2 hours of leave left at the end of a year.
Every year we had to go somewhere. These somewheres changed as our circumstances changed - jobs, a child, age - not old, just older. Initially our travel was international. Then we explored our fine country coast-to-coast camping, several times venturing into the US. The all-inclusive beach holiday was never a choice and our poor son must be the only 16-year-old not to have visited Disney World. Not that I have a problem with Disney World, it's just that there are so many place in between here and there.
We ventured 'international' again this year with a trip to India last December. With the Internet, it was fun to live the trip in the 2 years of planning leading up to the departure. Everything was pretty well planned out -as I'd hoped. Still, there are always surprises - it wouldn't be travel without surprises.
As an older traveller, I have to disagree with Laurie's sentiments on page 340 "That's what's missing as we get older. We lose that thrilling sense of not knowing, the gift of a possible turn in the road, of anything might happen. We had no idea what life had in store for us, but we longed for things." For a traveller, I don't think age really matters so much as circumstances, be they financial or health. I long for things and hope that with the turn in the road, I'll be open to what might happen.
Laurie's book legitimizes the sense of wonder in the unknown that travellers have and it has helped me accept that I cannot stay at home and that I need to find out what's beyond the turn in the road.
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Kiss The Sunset Pig
