furry coats with rainbow hearts & the glamorous lives of strangers you see on vacation

i got back about a week ago from a much-needed warm(er) weather, west coast getaway to LA and san diego; you can get the whole rundown of food, drink, a billion photos, etc. over on my blog.

but on the last night of my trip, i had a very brief, seemingly insignificant experience that actually crystallized one of the things i love most about traveling. a woman who seemed to be around my age — who was walking her dog — strolled past me in an eye-catching, thigh-length, furry black coat that was covered in multicolored hearts. it immediately struck me as such a STATEMENT coat to be wearing to take your dog for a casual wednesday night pee break that i immediately and unconsciously started spinning up all sorts of theories and assumptions about this fellow pedestrian’s life in san diego’s ocean beach neighborhood.

she worked in something creative, for sure; perhaps art or advertising? or maybe she owned a vintage store (i found the coat online when i got home: of course, it was a donnybrook style from the ‘80s that resells for hundreds). she lived in a colorful, spanish-style bungalow, decorated to the brim with treasures and knickknacks carefully curated from yard sales and antique stores. she wasn’t married, but had a long-term, serious boyfriend who works in the service industry as a chef or cocktail bar manager. i don’t even think we made eye contact, and my glimpse of her was all of 10 seconds, but she unknowingly inspired me with both her coat and her effortlessly casual yet chic *~vibes~*. i was picking up what she was putting down.

all, some, or none of the above conjecture may be true, but that doesn’t matter. even if you love where you live (and i do!), your environment inevitably becomes a bit of a humdrum habitat after a little while. so when you venture to somewhere that feels *so* different than your day-to-day surroundings, just about everyone and everything seems ever-so-slightly more exotic. in reality, it’s all more or less the same — i’m forever amused when i happen to be walking through some gorgeous historic neighborhood on trash day and getting whiffs of garbage juice as i’m snapping photos of beautiful homes. i live for that juxtaposition of the glamour and the grossness that brings me back to reality. but the unknown is so alluring every time.

anyway, my point is this: much of the beauty of visiting somewhere i’ve never been — for me anyway — is that it can make even the most mundane things magical, the most typically unremarkable things unforgettable. the change of scenery, even if slight, is enough to give everything a little bit of a rose-colored tint and make me endlessly curious about every single human, place, and thing i see.

when i got home from my trip, i immediately pulled my furry polka-dotted coat out of the closet and wore it out to the coffee shop. thanks, stranger.