Misquamicut Beach, RI: We’d ride a wonderful old carousal. Up and down, up and down, the painted horses lulled us around and around to the honky-tonk music of a calliope. Half of that time, we viewed the Atlantic gently lapping the shoreline.
Matunuck Beach, RI: We awoke being swallowed whole by a massive turbulent, hurricane-whipped tidal wave tearing us loose from our reality. Clinging to our cottage, now ark, we were viciously tossed, saturated, half-submerged, spinning around and around, no refuge in sight. Frantic and exhausted, we cheated death for interminable hours. No shoreline. Mayhem. And then…
Moving in to my hotel in Saint Malo (FR), I’d barely crammed my suitcase, backpack and swaddled self into the antiquated, one-person elevator, and was selecting my floor when a shorter woman, swathed in a huge cape that swallowed her whole, stealthily insinuated herself in, too, her oozing cape filling any gaps. Compressed. Intimate. Awkward. Jerking, we haltingly ascended. Gears loudly cranking its load upwards, she looked up apologetically, “C’est petit.”
I brightly replied, “Oui, mais automatic!”
Then we both smiled at our clever rhyme as we jolted to a stop, ultimately untangled and went our separate ways.