The Getty Center + coincidences
Whenever people find out that Mark and I have never been away together without the kids, they immediately urge us to take a trip together on our own. I see their point, but the girls are such good travelers that I can’t really see ourselves doing that anytime soon. I mean, they’re totally FUN to travel with (also, since Mark and I have known each other for 20 years, there was plenty of traveling pre-kids already). We don’t have heaps of money to go on vacations all the time so I can’t think of leaving them behind. Someone once told me – and maybe it was right here as a comment on the blog – that of all things remembered and treasured from childhood, family vacations are right up there with the best memories. I think this is totally true. The few family vacations I took growing up were never long, fancy or far from home, but I remember them well. I’m glad that I’m able to create these memories for them.
When I booked our flights for LA, I knew that if we only had time for 1 museum, I wanted to take them to the Getty Center. Not so much for the art – though Claudine recognized a van Gogh painting that she learned about in preschool and the girls kept asking if these were the “real” actual paintings – but to walk around the grounds of the museum. Too bad the landscaped garden was closed. A blog reader who works at the Getty left a comment on the blog a few hours later saying that she spotted us from afar getting back on the tram. How funny and random.
This reminds me of the time the girls and I were playing at a community garden in our neighborhood when a stranger walked by and did a double take because she was AT THAT MOMENT reading the story about me and the girls in Time Out NY Kids when she spotted us as she was walking by with the magazine open to our page. Weird, huh? Or like the time a few weeks ago when a woman stopped me on the street in our neighborhood to say hi because she recognized me, but coincidentally had JUST bought a package of our cookies at the local store and they were in her hand bag right there. Crazy coincidence. Or like the time I tweeted something about my grad school on Twitter and someone, who happens to work at Etsy and also happens to be an alumni at that very same NYU grad program (and as I later found out, went to the same college in WA as Mark and I), caught my tweet while at that moment eating ONE OF OUR COOKIES. I mean, c’mon. That is super nuts.
Sometimes chance meetings are meant to happen.
