When I visited Palm Springs, California, I had no trouble remembering where I was. I had trouble placing when I was.

The city is well known for its impressive array of  Mid-Century Modern buildings — many of which have been preserved, some of which have been tragically lost.

The sleek aesthetic of the middle 20th century has always struck me as incredibly futuristic, which is what creates that “wobbling in time” feeling — don’t ask me to tell you what year it is when I’m looking at fifty year old building that seems like it belongs to an era that won’t happen for another fifty years.

Adding to this time travel effect were my Palm Springs accommodations. I stayed at the Riviera, which takes its design mission very seriously — there were lots of “oh my” moments, from the lobby’s curved orange wall, lit up, with a floral metal lattice work dwarfing small check-in desks in the lobby, to the swank Rat Pack pool, to the never-ending collision of patterns in the hotel’s labyrinthine hallways –  but not so many clues about what year tops the current calendar.

I will now confess that my estimate of fifty years of temporal flux in either direction was no rough estimate.  I’m not too proud to say that my earliest impression of Mid Century Modern came from watching The Jetsons, and they “lived” in 2062. Exactly fifty years from 2012.

Anyway, the best way to get to know Palm Spring’s Mid-Century Modern architecture, also known as “desert modernism”, is to head there for Modernism Week, February 16th to the 26th, 2012.  There are tours by foot and tours by bus, parties, lectures, films. Check out the full event schedule here.  And if you’re heading to Palm Springs another time, be sure to get your mid-century bearings at the Palm Springs Visitors Center, pictured above left, which started its life as a fabulous gas station, constructed in 1965.

My decision to move out of New York City this past August came as a surprise to many of my friends and acquaintances and colleagues. Perhaps most of all to me. But even the most die hard New Yorkers I knew were wiling to grant that a plan to quit the city’s cooked pee summer streets for clean country air had a certain logic to it.

But seasons do change, I was reminded, and then what would I do in the dark and dreary winter, when the world would be leached of all color? Then I would pay the price for those mid-day dips in the swimming hole, and afternoon snacks of blueberries picked in my garden, and evening jogs without the risk of bronchitis or heat stroke, and sweater nights on the porch watching the stars.

The price for all of that pleasure would be bleak winter misery.

So it has been a surprise to me that the winter has not been bleak in the least. There have been gray days, of course,  but the winter landscape here in New York’s Taconics has more than compensated.  I am enjoying the bare musculature of the trees, the roll of the corn fields plowed, and the sight of houses that are in the warmer months hidden by leaves.

These are the pleasures of a black and white photograph, a sort of stark pleasure which I suppose I could have guessed I’d have enjoyed, even in summer.  The actual startle has been at how much color I’m finding when I wander, and how much I can appreciate these single instances of color when there aren’t as many gaudy distractions.

In the spirit of Kerry’s quiet winter moment, here are a few of my moments from the Harlem Valley Rail Trail last weekend. Each would be possible in another season, but would I have noticed the green, red and blue, or even the beauty of the shades of gray?

There is something sort of wonderful about hearing a woe-is-me travel story from a big whoop wealthy lady. Schadenfreude is not the nicer part of my personality, but why bother to hide it?

I was standing in a corner of Oblong Books in Rhinebeck, New York, between the community bulletin board, and a shelf that held sci-fi books and graphic novels.  It was crowded, because Annie Leibovitz was soon to give a reading from her new book, Pilgrimage.

Oblong, if you don’t know, is an amazing bookstore with locations in both Rhinebeck and Millerton, NY, and although they are an indie bookstore not currently on the verge of death, most of their events are far less crowded.  When I’d RSVP’d, I was cautioned that seating would be first-come-first-served. I arrived a half hour ahead and learned that the seats had filled up two hours earlier.  But I didn’t mind standing.

So there comes Annie Liebovitz, in baggy blue jeans and a black button shirt, and she seems really, really really nice. She said she was excited about doing this talk, because after all this is our community bookstore. (One of her homes is nearby.) She said she was excited to support this store, because “we have to take care of ourselves.” I think she meant it in a warm, we’re all in this together way, although it came out a little wrong, more like, fuck everyone else.

She reads from the new book, which starts during her well-publicized financial woes, when she decides to take her kids to Niagara Falls.  She had this idea that she and her kids would arrive in the night, check into a Falls-facing hotel, and she’d open the curtains in the morning and they’d have an amazing view. But when they arrive her credit card has been declined, rooms given away, and it’s August and there are no other good rooms, so they end up in a crappy motel. And in the morning, the view is of a cinder block wall. That’s the schadenfreude moment.

But her kids don’t care, she goes and sees the water and gets inspired and then she decides to go see all these other things, like Virginia Woolf’s writing studio, and multiple trips to Yosemite to try to get the same sort of Ansel Adams sky, etc. etc. the photos are spectacular, and, she seemed to be saying, it helped her to get her creative mojo back. And then she said that she hoped that this book would inspire everyone to make a list of places they would like to see, and plan their own pilgrimage.

That’s a great idea, I thought. But then I realized that while there are many places I’d like to go see in this world, the idea of knocking them out in the way she did, one after the other, in a kind of race to publication, really didn’t appeal to me that much. Nor did the exercise of list making especially appeal either — I like the idea of compelling destinations floating up in my mind in a less regimented manner, to be visited, rather than pursued.

And most of all, I want the list to be never ending.

Brian wrote a defense of traveling in company last week, and I would like to add to that:

In my travels, I’ve found that I’ve had an entirely different experience of the exact place if I’m traveling alone, traveling in enjoyable company, or traveling in miserable company. I’ve experienced this shift on the very same trip in fact — there have been times when I’ve been a part of an unpleasant group, and I feel very oppressed, and I start to calculate the hours until I can flee for the airport. But suddenly I negotiate an escape, and I’m on my own, blessedly on my own, and then I am quite happy and start to think about staying longer.

It is true that traveling with other people, even quite wonderful people, can be distracting.  You’re dealing with the dynamic of that relationship, and not “purely” interacting with the place itself.

But this whole idea of “purity” strikes me as utterly absurd and impossible — as absurd and impossible  as the notion of journalistic objectivity, in which real human beings pretend they have no opinion and go to great lengths to conceal any opinion that they’ve naturally formed.

Allow me to point out that if  you’re not in the company of other people when you’re traveling, you have not simply erased all the relationships you’ve accumulated in your life and in your past. Those people are affecting you and your experience of that place, even if they’re only in your thoughts. Pretend it’s not happening as much you want — it won’t be the first or last fiction introduced into a travel story.

I’ll grant that it’s much easier not to totally avoid speaking to strangers when you’ve got a travel companion.  And there are real advantages to speaking to strangers.  But deciding that you’re definitely going to get something much more important and  by having a conversation with someone you don’t know, versus someone you know? Again, absurd. Over the years, my travel companions have made many interesting observations that have enhanced my experience of a place.  I might have noticed something different if I was alone, but so what? I might have noticed something different if I turned my head to the left instead of to the right.

I am really quite content traveling on my own, so it’s sort of funny that I’m defending traveling with others.  But this whole idea that one must travel in any particular way for authenticity is so goddamned grade school snob annoying. As annoying as people who make this profoundly idiotic and incredibly common comment : “you should have gone to XYZ 20 years ago, that was the real XYZ.”

Please.  Places change over time, no one ever has the same experience of a place twice, every traveler gets to a destination exactly when she gets there and that’s just fine.

And whether you’re alone or with others, there’s no one “real” or “correct” way to experience a place.

At about this time last year, a very large and extremely friendly house cat found himself alone on the streets of Brooklyn.

He could have been abandoned, or he could have slipped out when someone wasn’t looking, I don’t know. Either way, last winter was a brutal one in New York City,  so it is fortunate that this cat found his way to a marina, where he came across a TNR team — an acronym that stands for trap, neuter, release, actions meant to reduce a feral cat population.

He walked up to group,  meowed an introduction, and made it clear he was by no means a feral cat. In this way, he ended up in the care of the excellent people at the Picasso Veterinary Fund, one of the coolest animal charities anywhere.

They introduced me to this goofy but wily survivor of a feline.

We named him Henry, and he is spending this winter in considerably more comfort than he did last year.

I’m bringing all this up because, hello, my name is Alison and I am a cat person. (I greatly prefer this title to “crazy cat lady”. ) This is not an affection that I leave at home when I travel. In reviewing my travel photos from last year, I have noticed that nary a trip passes without me snapping the photo of some cat or another.

I’ve also noticed that I’m not the only person setting up the impromptu feline photography sessions. For instance, many, many people photographed this cat sleeping outside Tedeschi Winery in Maui.  Almost everyone made the joke about him having had a little too much at the tasting room.

I haven’t read many stories about this phenomenon of travelers photographing strange cats. I realize it’s deeply uncool. I don’t care.

So although there are many reasons to visit the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum in Tucson, I submit that cat people everywhere should not miss Cat Canyon, where you can observe bobcat and ocelot, pictured below. Obviously, these make great additions to any cat photography collection. Even your non-cat-loving friends will admire them.