Similar to most people, COVID-19 impacted the plans I had for the summer. I found myself at home, bored, and baking way too much banana bread for my own good. So when my dad, a high school teacher, suggested we go on a camping road trip, I was already halfway out of the door. On July 1, we hit the road in our trusty old Dodge Caravan with a stack of U.S. maps and an open schedule. There is no better place to socially distance than the great outdoors; we were armed with masks, sanitizer, and even a pop-up shower to stay safe during the pandemic.
All photos courtesy of Annie Lalonde
All photos courtesy of Sammy Harris
The entrance to the indigenous Bribri Village. Photo courtesy of Ryan Yanchar.
My parents and I had flown into Costa Rica for a family vacation the night before and spent the night in a hotel close to the airport. Today was the first of three stops of our trip: a bed and breakfast called Casa Rural — Aroma de Campo (Country House — Smell of the Land).
“Tiene hambre?” Are you hungry? I snapped back to reality after spacing out as I watched a group of four and five-year-olds jump rope. “Sí, claro,” I said offhandedly. Of course I was hungry, all I’d had for breakfast was pancito — bread, made cuter with a -cito tacked on the end — with strawberry jam. And it was nearly 1 p.m. Juan opened his camouflage lunch box and rummaged around for a moment before he found what he was looking for. He handed me a mango, first inspecting it to make sure the small dent in its skin hadn’t damaged the inside of the fruit. Suddenly, I felt the need to hold back tears.
Sitting in the tiny airport’s café, we waited for check-in time. When the time came, we got in line at the front desk, and I rummaged in my pockets for my backup phone. I came up empty—and it wasn’t in my purse, or my backpack, or my carry-on. “Don’t tell anyone else this,” I said to my friend Brooke, “But I’m going to go look for my phone.” “Julia, no,” she said, exasperated, but I was already gone.
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve found it challenging to answer why I decided to go to Montréal in early January. The most truthful version is that I wanted to go somewhere over break, and my friend Charlotte suggested Montréal.
Eat your heart out, Eden Park. Sawyer Point is indubitably the most beautiful place to connect with nature while in Cincinnati. Just an hour out from Oxford, the park is the perfect place for a weekend day-trip. It was created in 1988 to celebrate the city’s bicentennial and conserve the riverfront. Since then, it’s been the site for the traveling Tall Stacks steamboat celebration, the Labor Day fireworks show and the Bunbury music festival.
This fall break I got to live out everyone’s wildest dream: I piled into a large, white van with nine other college comedians and drove through some of America’s flattest, most corn-infested farmlands. That’s right, Sketched Out Improv was headed to Chicago.
