Notes from the Road

I have to admit it: I suffer from the lure of the open road. In the right mood, there’s a sense of freedom in soaring through the skies or eating up the miles in a car. Cities flash by, vistas change by the minute, and acceleration beyond anything our horse-powered ancestors dreamed of gets the pulse going.

Even without lockdowns, though, endless-seeming stretches of highway are hard to come by in pint-sized Israel. A few miles to the right and you’re deep in the West Bank. A few miles to the left and you’re in the Mediterranean.

So, two years after a global travel ban forced airlines to mothball jets and car rentals to sell off their fleets, recent trolley-dashes around the Tristate area and Paris were a taste of the pre-pandemic world of carefree travel.

And wanderlust apart, they gave a sense of something that in my experience, is just as bracing as the open road.