We're off to Italy! Ischia, actually. With camera. So setting this in advance, hopefully when you see it, we'll already be there. Really into the concept of travelling light, not checking any baggage.. oh and we're leaving at 3:00, so just hope the alarm works.
This isn't Italy, btw. It's Venetian Pool. As before.
When I was a young girl, in awe of something (I was awe struck a lot - still am, actually) and I'd say to my dad, wow, it's Magic. And he - an early childhood science education professor, who wrote books called Teaching Science Through Discovery, would smile and say 'It's Science.'
Perception is everything.
When we were at Venetian Pools, in Coral Gables, this winter, I was watching a young man showering. I'm older than him, and - he had appeared out of nowhere, it seemed - I realised he was probably the age my father was, when we first came to this seemingly magical place. I hadn't yet been to Italy, but it was like a Hollywood version of Italy, in the middle of a suburban neighbourhood south of Miami, created by architects in 1923, out of a coral quarry. And as I looked at the shower itself, the wabi sabi way it has aged so beautifully - beautiful decay - I realised that this is the same shower that my mother probably helped my younger sister, my younger self, rinse off when it was time to go.
This was the same shower my dad would have used.
It felt sacred, this water: swimming in it, bathing in it. After all, we're mostly made up of water. We're all connected by water. Which is, if you think about it is quite magical.
It was the year the Beatles first came to America, and they had just been to Miami for the first time. For those lads from Liverpool, I've seen the shots of them in the warm sea, and I know they'd not known anything like this.
I know, because it was the first trip I remember to Miami: I was just old enough to have memories, that stay with me, like songs, all my life.
We spent day at the Deauville Pool, guests of a man (a friend of my dad's?) who was staying in the same suite the Beatles had just vacated. Telling stories of girls knocking on the door, crying, kissing the walls.
But of all those memories, staying with our friends who are like family still, and trips to Monkey Jungle, Parrot Jungle - kids stuff - there are none that compare with Venetian Pool, in Coral Gables. And going back with my husband, after all these years, seeing a little girl who looked like me, who was exactly my age when I was there, playing with her brother being watched over by her father.. swimming in the same natural spring waters (it's the largest man made natural pool in America). Knowing it hadn't changed - that these were the same coral shapes that my father, living, had touched, and the joy that it was every bit as beautiful as I remembered it - a Hollywood vision of Italy, created from a coral quarry, dug to create the homes in this incredible place, just south of South Beach, Miami. It opened in 1923, the Gatsby era, and the ghosts of that time - and of my family, as children - haunt it today.
I have mixed within my photos, two shots by my father, Art Carin, the top shot, and the one of my sister in her blue swimsuit. His legacy - his eye - watches over me, informs everything I do.
And this is a song that has played ever since, which I offer to you, as the sound track to my life.
RoadTrip23 is the natural evolution from StreetStyle London, which is still here, and has been since 2009. Because there's more to the world than fashion, and there's more to the world than London. Lovely as London is.
I'll still be posting street style, if something really grabs me, but have expanded into other areas of interest, primarily travel, the arts, culture. Whatever I feel is beautiful or interesting: either man made, or a natural wonder.
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