Diving for the First Time in Twenty Years

The one thing I completely forgot about was seasickness. The boat was rocking, and my stomach was rolling… it was not a good combination and it was time to get in the water. The kids first open water dive and I was so ill there was no way I was going to be any help to either of them. Thank God for Gigi, their instructor and our dive master. After spending the day with her yesterday, I knew they were in good hands.

Malone buddy checked me and I made my way to the edge of the boat. Thinking I would be scared, I hesitated at the edge, but nothing is a better motivator than nausea. I walked right into the water and swam to the rope to wait. Unfortunately, my stomach liked bobbing around the surface about as much as on the boat so I was feeling pretty bad by the time we all started our descent.

As we went down, I started to panic. My ears weren’t clearing, my air felt sluggish, my stomach was still rolling, my mask was fogging – you get the idea. Everything was going wrong and I was starting to freak out. I figured if I was having this much trouble the kids must be having a hard time too. After a long three minutes of sheer terror where I decided that I was just not a diver, that my air tank wasn’t working, that this whole idea (which was mine in the first place) was a huge mistake – just to name a few, I looked around and there was Colin happily swimming in circles waiting for me to come down and join him.

Suddenly I was calmer. I scanned for Bryce and found him communicating with Gigi, also a dozen feet below me. Everyone was happy and safe and fine. Breathe! Soon my mask was not an issue, my breathing was calm and my stomach settled. Malone was already filming the boys and I started to enjoy the dive. The first moments of terror dissipated.

Watching the boys underwater was one of the greatest moments of my life. They are naturals and flew through their dive skills with aplomb. While Malone and I took in the ocean life around us, they flooded their masks and cleared them, buddy breathed, threw their regulators aside and found them again. Skills I remember doing so very long ago.

It was really our fourth dive where the magic happened for me. Everyone was confident in their skills and we had all been diving together for three days now. Colin and I smiled so big we both flooded our masks and Bryce was playing around swimming upside down.

As the boys ran through their skills with Gigi, Malone and I explored a beautiful natural wreck with some of the most amazing corals I have seen yet. After the “lesson” was over we all explored it. Flying slowly just a foot or two above the deck was a dream come true. I’ve never seen anything like it outside of the movies. And to top it off, a beautiful reef shark cruised slowly by us. I fist pumped in the water I was so excited.

Today we do a shark dive. Where we go purposely close to sharks and then feed them! Yup- we’ve come along way this week.

 

The Kids Getting PADI Dive Certified in the Bahamas

 

I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise that the thought of watching my kids jump off the side of boat into 60 feet of water along an underwater cliff that drops to nearly 7,000 feet is keeping me up tonight.

The boys have wanted to dive for years, ever since they experienced a few hours of snorkeling in Hawaii. That first experience was reinforced a couple of years later when they spent an hour in an introductory class for kids at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Since we live just over the hill in Carmel, we are at the aquarium every time a relative or friend comes to visit. During the class the boys put on dry suits and floated in an enclosed tide pool. I have video of Colin at eight years old desperately trying to kick to the bottom. He just couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t let him go to the bottom as that was the whole point, right?

We spent today in the pool with GiGi, the boy’s instructor, an amazing young woman from Romania who has been teaching dive class for four years, both here in the Bahamas and in Thailand. It was a long but satisfying day. The boys spent the last few weeks taking an “e-learning” class from PADI so they would be ready to go straight to the pool. We, and more importantly GiGi, were impressed with the recall of what they had learned.

At dinner tonight we reviewed the fun of the day and talked about the excitement, and fear, associated with tomorrow’s first open water dive. As a father one spends a lot of time saying, “listen to me. Do as I say.” But, tonight, I made the point that tomorrow, if told to do one thing by me and something different by GiGi they were to do what GiGi says. Colin smiled and responded, “yeah dad, we know to do what the instructor says but it still makes me feel safer to know you will be there to make sure nothing bad happens.”

I guess that is one responsibility that you can’t put onto someone else.

A Family Christmas in Costa Rica

As we sit here in the Bahamas learning to dive (more on that in the next post) we were reminiscing about our trip to Costa Rica over Christmas last year. As a traveling family, Costa Rica had long been on our list of possible destinations and having finally made the decision to spend Christmas and New Year’s there we were not dissapointed.

The people are wonderfully warm and aside from a slightly increased likelihood of petty theft, Costa Rica is a safe and ecologically diverse country.

Traveling to the Bahamas During a Hurricane

As our family travels around the world, we expect to run into flight and travel problems but flying towards a hurricane would not have been one I would have guessed in advance.

As is almost always the case with an around the world ticket, any change we make involves a fee and having the remaining legs of the ticket “repriced.” Even though we could see the Hurricane and Jet blue acknowledged that yes, the flight would probably be cancelled into Nassau, there was nothing to be done but get on the red eye flight from San Francisco and head to New York.

Once we were “in the system” in New York we would become Jet Blue’s problem, even though, as they acknowledged, it made sense for us to go south to Florida and swing in behind the Hurricane.

We arrived in JFK at 5:25am NY time and our flight to the Bahamas was still scheduled to fly. After a quick airport breakfast we boarded the flight….and then…they cancelled it. No one was terribly surprised.

Instead of dealing with us all at the gate JetBlue sent us off to their service desks…so we all scattered in hopes of figuring out the next step. Bryce, Colin and I were at one end of the concourse in line at a help desk while Aleix was at another. As the first group of us was discussing options with the desk agent, a panting jet blue employee appeared waving her hands while exclaiming, “quick if you are on the Bahamas flight get back to the plane! If we can close the door in 10 minutes you can go!”

Nearly 100 of us moved in mass at a quick march down the concourse. I have never seen a plane load so fast. Folks were cheering each other on, “let’s go!, “let’s go!” I was slinging other traveler’s bags into overhead compartments and folks were diving for their seats.

With a round of applause, the doors closed and we pushed back to get in a 25 aircraft line on the taxi way waiting for departure. We had made the push back deadline and as long as they didn’t cancel us in route we were headed south…

The flight was uneventful with about 5 minutes of turbulence. (Ok, so Aleix and the boys are telling me my skills at judging turbulence are way off. It was longer and much more dramatic than I perceived, and that I slept through most of it. Which might be true. Oh, and they reminded me the landing was fairly exciting.)

We landed at the nearly empty airport with 80 degree weather and a reasonable 10 knot breeze. As you can see from the photo, we were the last flight in….

From there we headed to the local grocery store to stock up as the government had ordered a shut down of schools, agencies, and non essential private businesses. While the store was full, folks were happy and everyone was confident the storm was headed north. The damage done to the central and eastern islands was looking substantial but reports were still coming.

We arrived at our beach front condo and settled in for the evening. Winds are still blowing this morning but the sky has cleared and it is looking like a beautiful day!

Home School Or Should I Say Travel School.

So a lot of you have asked about home schooling. How will that work? Who is the teacher? When do the boys work?

Here are the basics:

The boys work when they can. Unless we have something special going on – i.e. diving all day or traveling all night, the boys hit the big three subjects everyday. Reading. Writing. Math.

Reading

I have chosen a variety of books for them to read from classics to Pulitzer Prize winners. Bryce can read a book in a few hours (When he wants to) and Colin takes about a day to get through a book of his own choice. I’m stretching them on this subject because they can handle it….

Writing

The are both working on essays and blog posts as well as writings for the blog set up. So far we don’t have anything published, but we are getting there.

Math

We bought Colin the standard Saxon PreAlgebra book – or as it is called in the homeschooling network Algebra 1/2. We are plowing through that as well as working online.

Bryce is keeping his skills sharp working through Algebra books and a Geometry review book.

 

Traveling to Burning Man with Kids

We are in the midst of a “Round World Trip” with our two teenage boys. A primary goal of the trip is to introduce our boys to difference cultures and show them the diversity of human experience in the world. As anyone who has been to Burning Man will tell you, Burning Man is a cultural and sensory experience unlike any other.

Each year a city of 60,000 plus inhabitants comes into existence and then a few weeks later disappears. The Burning Man organization has developed 10 principals which I have listed below , along with our thoughts on how they relate to taking our kids to Black Rock City (The name of the burning man city in the desert) and around the world.

Radical Inclusion
Anyone may be a part of Burning Man. We welcome and respect the stranger. No prerequisites exist for participation in our community.

We hope to raise young men who welcome and respect others, even those that might have different political views, cultural baggage, or religious beliefs. At Burning Man there were ample opportunities to point out that someone’s beliefs might be different from ours. This will no doubt be a recurring theme over the coming year.

Gifting
Burning Man is devoted to acts of gift giving. The value of a gift is unconditional. Gifting does not contemplate a return or an exchange for something of equal value.

The amount of research that supports the hypothesis that giving is a far better source of happiness than the collection of material goods is staggering, and yet our society/culture pushes kids in the opposite direction. In our past adventures we have often been the recipient of gifts (whether a ride, the offer of a meal, or a seat on a train) and the boys fully embrace this principal at Burning Man and beyond.

Decommodification
In order to preserve the spirit of gifting, our community seeks to create social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising.

International travel opens one’s eyes to the advertising that is all around us, because it is different in other countries. Our boys get a kick out of how products are pitched in different places.

Radical Self-reliance
Burning Man encourages the individual to discover, exercise and rely on his or her inner resources.

This was a theme at Burning Man, and will remain with us throughout the year. Living out of four backpacks with long train rides, flights, jet lag, big cities, cramped quarters, language barriers, and a tight budget will reinforce the important of individual and family sized self-reliance every day.

Radical Self-expression
Radical self-expression arises from the unique gifts of the individual.

As any parent of a teenager will tell you, self-expression is typically not a problem. We are hoping to channel some of their self-expression into drawing, writing, and photography.

Communal Effort
Our community values creative cooperation and collaboration.

We arrived at Burning Man two days before the “gate opened” to help build Kidsville, the neighborhood within the city where you must have kids with you to camp. It was a communal center of families and our boys loved their role in helping build it (even during the blinding sandstorms.)

Civic Responsibility
We value civil society.

A few years ago we found ourselves in the middle of a civil protest through downtown Madrid. We were amongst thousands of Spaniards who were marching to protest the financial hardships of the middle class from what they considered a corrupt political system. While we paid close attention to our safety, and in what direction to head if the protesters or the police became violent, we were afforded an amazing hour of experiencing civil disobedience as a form of protest. That led into a conversation with the boys about the concepts of civil society that ran well into the night hours after we had left the protesters to sit in a late night restaurant and review the experience.

Leaving No Trace
Our community respects the environment. We are committed to leaving no physical trace of our activities wherever we gather. We clean up after ourselves and endeavor, whenever possible, to leave such places in a better state than when we found them.

This principal speaks for itself and is one that our boys (and their peers) seem to be taught in school from an early age.

Participation
Our community is committed to a radically participatory ethic. We believe that transformative change, whether in the individual or in society, can occur only through the medium of deeply personal participation. We achieve being through doing. Everyone is invited to work. Everyone is invited to play.

As I recently said to a friend, our boys over the last two months have moved from being passengers on our “ship” to members of the crew. On some days there is a measurable lack of enthusiasm about participating (doing laundry being an example) but for the most part they understand that this is a team effort and it takes all four of us to get it done, whether the task is fun (a hike) or a pain (packing and getting through an airport.)

Immediacy
Immediate experience is, in many ways, the most important touchstone of value in our culture.

Traveling for 12 months through 9 states in the United States and 25 countries around the world is certainly a set up for immediacy—every day.

A Youth Burn (Burning Man) ~Bryce

Burning man

We arrived in the dust. It blew. The wind howled, and the trucks kicked up more dust than I could with an army of men. I was excited, nervous, and ready to experience whatever the hell was about to happen. I had no information, and little did I know that this would be the best week of the year.

Gate took at least six hours. We moved from station to station, becoming two lines out of six. Mom and Colin played cards, whilst Dad and I looked outside and played Briscola, an Italian card game. Sometimes Dad had to pause the card games and get up to drive forward. And when the dust blew by we all had to jump up and close the open windows. (We usually kept one side of our bus open in order to let air in, but the dust out.)

After gate, Dad drove the bus down to Kidsville, which was on the corner of 5:30 and E. We parked our bus a little bit off the street but not perfectly. We talked to our friends and asked them where we should camp. Soon another group arrived and asked us to move our bus over so they could fit in their camping spot. We agreed, and dad got back inside to shift our position. This new group consisted of a family from Colorado and their friends. I helped set up their camp as well as ours. That night I got out my mixer and mixed some sweet tunes.

During my week at Black Rock City I had a wonderful time. I danced, walked, and biked my way around the streets and blocks of the city. I made friends and we walked together, which was nice. Unfortunately, as all good things must, the week came to a close.

On the last night that everyone was in the city the man burned. We spent the whole day freezing as the wind blew, kicking up dust. It really was cold. The wind bit, and the dust floated from one end of the city to the other. We, my group of friends, walked down to the center of the city where we sat on blankets. Waiting with baited breath the entire population of Black Rock City sat and watched as the man, standing motionless, watched over the city. The wood was golden brown and he shot 50 meters out of the desert. With a sudden movement the arms of the man swung up and touched the sky. There was a collective gasp.

SHHHHHHH, BOOOM! Fireworks! Cheering and clapping, the playa burst into sound, voices cried over the thumping music of the art-cars, no one voice could be pulled out of the din.

With a flash, the fire was lit. And, boy, did it burn. It started small, but as the fire got bigger it started to melt the wire supports holding the arms suspended above the man. With no warning they snapped and the arms fell, one at a time, more screaming and cheering ensued. It burned for quite a spell before the all the outer wood had fallen and just the frame remained. It stood tall and proud before it fell. The man creaked and shuddered. Then, it fell. There was a large smash as it impacted the ground, ash flew up into the air, the giant columns of smoke and spark grew in size as the trapped air and fire was suddenly released.

“Heads up!” This was the occasional cry from the audience as large pieces of flaming wood fell from the sky, into the crowd. Cheering and dancing the crowd started to disperse past the perimeter of art-cars and fire throwers, the pile of wood and fire that once stood proud over The City smoldered in the background.

A kid in Burning Man (it is awesome)

One of the main reasons that I enjoyed Burning Man was the friends that shared the experience with me.  This year was the dustiest Burning man in a long time.  The best bit was the actual burns, the ginormous man and the temple that they build every year for the experience.  Burning Man was one of the best experiences on this trip so far.

My friends from school, Gus and Joe, camped with us and we went to the burns, played poker, and set up the camp together.  They had been going for four years so they knew a lot and showed us around the city. The big reason why it was so fun was because of the friends we made.  We hung out with Landon, Carson, Mickey, and Marty on the trampolines.

My brother hung out with kids more his age, Hope, Arri, Forrest, Will, and Meghan were some of his best friends. He actually met his girlfriend Hope at burning man.  Having friends that were more experienced was really helpful.  They took him dancing a lot.

The dust was bad. The first day was a 15 hour dust storm. It was crazy, you couldn’t see five feet in front of you. The whiteout lasted for 12 hours and it was moderate for the rest of the storm. To go outside we had to  wear goggles and masks to protect our eyes and our throats.   The next storm lasted four hours, it wasn’t that bad. My dad and I watched sky divers get blown off course because of one.

The burns were amazing. The energy before the burns was great, every one was excited for them but sad because it marked the end of the week. The Man had a whole show and burned for 45 minutes before it fell. He was 60 feet tall. The temple had no show but was more spectacular than the man, it fell after 7 minutes but everyone stayed for the perimeter break. We have a temple for other burners to make shrines for lost loved ones. They were the whole point of the place and marked the end, it was a bittersweet occasion.

Burning Man would have been dull without the friends that I made there and those that I already had.  This year was very, incredibly dusty.  I had the most fun at  the actual burns both the man and the temple, they were amazing but a little bit sad.   Burning Man was one of the best experiences on this trip so far.

Getting Ready to Head to Burning Man

Welcome to our blog, it isn’t actually live yet (hopefully in the next few weeks.) But in the meantime, a quick update of where we are and where we are headed.

We have traveled from Northern California, down to Arizona, up through Utah and over to Nevada.

We are in Sparks at the moment preparing the bus for our trip out onto the “Playa” for Burning man.

 

Biking with Bats –Zion National Park

Stepping off the shuttle with my two boys in total darkness, my stomach clinches. Our plan was to take the shuttle to the top of Zion canyon and bike the nine miles down in the evening light. Evening light – light being the operative word. It is now dark. As in no light, no twilight, nothing but darkness.

“Watch out for deer on the road,” our driver says to us as we unload our bikes from the shuttle’s rack. We are the only passengers. “Last year a woman came up here and thought it would be fun to bike down in the dark, without a headlight, and hit a deer. Both ended up hurt pretty bad.”

“Yeah, ohh-kay,” my husband says as I adjust the boys’ headlamps.

What the heck have we done? I ask myself as I send my children off ahead of me. Leading the way is Bryce, our fearless 15 year old, with the brightest head lamp clamped to his helmet. Colin, our 12 year old, puts himself in the middle and my husband, Malone, and I share our tandem bringing up the rear as we ride through the darkness. With only three headlamps, I am given the third as it is the only one with a “red tail light.”

The views, they said, would be amazing in the falling light. I can’t really say. Can’t see anything but the reflective seats of the two bikes ahead of me. And that is what I do the entire way – shine my light hoping to illuminate their way as we make our way down the canyon.

We have the ride of our lives. The bats come out and fly with us. The deer stay on the side of the road, thankfully, but we see their glowing eyes as we whizz by. There is no one else around and we get to experience this part of the canyon alone – quite a feat for a park that gets over 30,000 visitors a day this time of year.

And it dawns on Malone and I – the metaphor of this ride. The kids are fearless, the path clear, the sky dark but we have an experience of a life time. We both know that not all of our trip will be this successful or amazing – nerve racking and sanity checking yes – but it’s nice to know that every once in awhile we get it right.