I don’t see my family as often as I’d like. One brother lives in Berlin with me, but the other is in Orlando; one set of parents is in Baltimore, the other in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. There’s always Christmas, that whirlwind holiday in which we flit up and down the highway between homes, squeezing in visits with old friends and last-minute trips to the store for stocking stuffers. But in part because we all live so spread out, and because there’s so much else happening around the holidays, we make an effort to see each other throughout the year, to vacation together – a cruise through the balmy, blue Caribbean, a week sampling all the baklava in Greece, or renting a house on a sound in Maine.

Growing up, my nuclear family lived far from our extended families. Back then, my mom’s family was concentrated in Florida, my dad’s in southern Germany. We were in rural Pennsylvania. But we were always traveling to see family, spending Christmases in Orlando or summers on the Swabian Jura – or taking everyone, aunts and uncles and cousins to Tuscany to spend a week in one of those big, rambling terra cotta villas (German family) or to the smoky, barbecue-filled backwoods of North Carolina (American family). For me, family has always been something you travel for and with.

Just recently, I spent a long weekend in Prague with my mom, stepdad, brothers, and grandpa. My favorite part of our trip – besides long evenings spent playing cards with the lights turned low and the electric fans whirring to combat the heat – was the meal we ate at Field, a Michelin-starred restaurant close to the old Jewish quarter. We ordered the wine pairing and sat beneath the ominous mounted farm-equipment for three hours, just talking and eating and toasting. » Continue reading this post...