Escape Fantasies

My husband and I like to joke that if one of us ever kills someone, say, and needs to disappear, we’ll rendezvous in Jujuy, Argentina, the kind of place Interpol would be least likely to look. For pure escape — what would my life be like if I lived there? — I always think about Salta, Argentina. And I find myself fantasizing about it every year at about this time.

The holidays might have something to do with it: my yoga instructor says that spending the holidays with family is like being asked to hold a really difficult pose for a long time. And didn’t Peter Mayle—who turned his escape fantasy into a career—hatch his getaway from London in December at an office Christmas party? I can hear the bad karaoke soundtrack now, a foil to sunny Provence.

My Salta idea involves exploring the terrain of northwest Argentina — from the bright white salt flats to the sedona-like pink, turquoise, lavendar and red rock hills — on horseback. (In this vision, I am also an exquisite horsewoman, natch.) We would rent a place in Salta, a colonial city with a half-million residents and a cooking school, and eat all our meals outdoors in a garden courtyard, surrounded by arching branches and aristocratic-looking dogs.

Most people have an escape fantasy of some kind, and I always love hearing about them. One friend, a doctor, told me how much she’d like treating “bumps and bruises” in a ski town, where she’d spend her off hours on the slopes and making out with tanned and sexy ski bums. Another — a mother of two kids under ten — rhapsodized about moving to one of those non-speaking convents, where fellowship is experienced through shared activities, like jam-making, and the rest of the time is spent in solitude reading non-Biblical bestsellers. But neither of these visions is particularly decadent, unless you’re counting the luxury of free time. Isn’t it weird, though, how free time doesn’t seem decadent unless you’re in the right place — the woods, the slopes, on a horse, or under a goosedown comforter?

Many of my dreamiest trip ideas have come out of someone else’s vivid micro descriptions of a place — an over-the-top Bavarian coffee made from a porcelain espresso machine in Vienna, the idyllic pace of traveling on a Norwegian mail boat, the rush of ripping pages out of Vogue on a plane and bringing them to a wizard of a tailor, who can whip up custom copies in twenty-four hours flat. That’s what gets my blood pumping. Well, that and a really sick hotel. So help me out with some leads here, or a confidence or two: what’s your escape fantasy, and does in involve surfing, learning, or the art of doing nothing?