Twelve Feet, Six Continents, One Year

By all measures, today was easy. We ate breakfast in the hotel. Henry got to buy the book he tantrummed about in Coupeville at an adorable local bookstore, where I was also able to add to our sticker collection. We paid less than $50 for lunch and ate it in a beautiful park near an amazing playground adjacent to the lake in downtown Coeur d'Alene. That's right, we classed it up at a public park in our underwear. Look out world! Our driving was less than four hours and the kids watched movies the entire time. We crossed the Clark Fork dozens of times because that's what I-90 does on its way into Missoula. We got to our hotel, ate an acceptable dinner at a local Mexican restaurant (under $100), and got back in time to spend an hour in the water park. This was just long enough for Ali to build up the courage to go down a waterslide by herself. It's 10:30 and the kids are probably asleep. I wouldn't know, though, because we've put them in an adjacent (not ad...

Today was our first big day of driving. Mostly, it went very well. We were on the road around 10am, on a ferry at 11 but not at lunch until after 1. (As usual, lunch cost $150 and about half of what we ordered went uneaten.) Another accomplishment: there was zero screen time. The credit for this goes to the miracle of audiobooks. We previously stumbled across a title called, "Mystery of the Third Lucretia," which features a 14 year old heroine. So on this trip we started the sequel, "Rescuing Seneca [something]." It's obviously captivating for the kids! I had been looking forward to this drive because it significantly retraced the route that Elise and I biked in 2001. We had independently signed up for a tour run by a group called Cycle America. The first week was from Everett, WA to Missoula, MT, which are the origin and destination of these first two days of driving. We got to see a lot of familiar scenery, including some specific sites (and sights) that w...

Somebody's mother, possibly everybody's mother, said that if you don't have anything nice to say then you should say nothing at all. So this will be a short blog tonight. On the up side, Elise built her first cairn (which I'm teaching her is a one-syllable word and not two) and it is MAGNIFICENT! In other news, Elise is getting really good at using portrait mode on her new phone/camera. On the up side for me, I had a haircut today. This isn't a likely highlight but I'm excited to get my head shaved in barber shops all over the world. Today was exceptional. Hot towels, great conversation and a very quiet, very calm hour. My barber was C'Bo, or Charles III, and his father, Charles Jr., was hanging out in the shop for most of the time I was there. Here's the after shot: We had a great lunch in historic downtown Coupeville at a place called Front Street Grille. Their specialty is mussels and the preparation Elise had with a saffron broth was incr...

Let's roll some sweet footage: That was made possible by re-tresspassing, by a different route, to the destination of yesterday's illicit run. We enjoyed the wide open tarmac, an adjacent playground, and zero traffic. Both girls did great, even biking up the very moderate slope of what must have been a parking lot some time ago. The rest of the day was sort of on-again, off-again. We went into town (Oak Harbor) to treat the kids to the local candy store and to fix a broken key on our brand-new laptop (shame on you, Asus). There's an extraordinary almost-open waterfront park that deserves the highest recommendation available by some kids standing at a construction fence looking in. It's definitely going to be fantastic. Later in the afternoon, I took Ali, Cate and Henry on a hike around Joseph Whidbey State Park. Including the beachfront traipse back to our house, it was about two and a half miles. It had the desirable effect: they might actually be asleep bef...

I'll tell you the story of jumping over barbed wire to leave a military installation but first let's talk about Deception Pass. Whidbey Island is separated from the mainland by a pair of bridges over Deception Pass, a waterway that separates Skagit Bay, at the north end of Puget Sound, from the eastern end of the Salish Sea, which generally separates the Olympic Peninsula (USA) from Vancouver Island (Canada). Our first approach to our vacation on Whidbey was from the north, using Deception Pass. It's a grand gateway, which made more sense when I learned today that it was a WPA project from the 30's. On the way in on Sunday, we spotted a sign for Deception Pass Tours ; on Monday we booked a reservation for Tuesday. The timing was fortunate because the waters today were perfectly flat instead of choppy, as they had apparently been recently. The boat is the same kind they use for Jet Boat Tours in Portland, and we were expecting a lot of full-throttle touring around the ...

Dear Reader, As long as I've known Elise, she has craved Big Water. Not the kind of big water I've heard surfers covet. You see, Elise grew up on Lake Superior, which has this massive effect on you simply because of its, well, mass. It evokes calm. No, it commands calm. For most of our 20 years together, we made frequent trips to where her late grandfather lived on Bainbridge Island, looking out on Agate Passage, which separates the island from the mainland Kitsap Peninsula. Elise always took a specific kind of deep breath whenever we arrived there. So now, here we are on the western side of Whidbey Island, near the town of Oak Harbor, facing another large body of water. If you've ever encountered Big Sky Country in Montana, presumably as a visitor, you probably know this feeling of awe. Whatever it is, Big Water means something special to Elise. Today was a good day. There was quiet reading on the sofa (quiet for us, the kids were wrecking havoc on the beach at low t...

First, a quick recap: We pulled away from the curb in front of our house at 10:18am, having set 10 as an ideal and 11 as a realistic target. Pretty good! We got stuck in our first traffic jam of the day because the Interstate Bridge (which carries I-5 over the Columbia River between Oregon and Washington) was lifted for boat traffic. Elise found us lunch at Tugboat Annie's on the waterfront in Olympia. After we ate, we explored the marina and saw schools of fish and a few jellyfish. Apparently we had missed a seal having its lunch just an hour earlier. We had about 3 hours of driving after lunch, including our second major traffic jam (construction-related), which took us through Seattle and Everett and finally over Deception Pass and onto Whidbey Island. We arrived at our beautiful rental home near Sunset Beach, outside Oak Harbor (Washington). Henry and Lily immediately began hunting from crabs under rocks on the beach while Ali and Cate discovered the hot tub. Dinner was...

It's 10:42 at this moment and there's a roughly 97% likelihood that we'll be on the road in 12 hours. In between there may be some sleep. I can't remember a "night before" as exciting as this. Before college? before grad school? before my first day of my first job? before our wedding? before our children were born? We're asked all the time, "are you ready?" and each time we deflect. Of course we're not ready. You're never ready. Nothing in the world can prepare you except departing. We met on a bike tour across the United States. Nine weeks, four thousand miles and no amount of riding beforehand could prepare you for riding so many hours on consecutive days and sleeping on the ground, night after night. Maybe there's a difference between "ready" and "prepared." One thing we are for sure is packed. Each of the four kids has a suitcase and a backpack. Each of us has a duffel with wheels and backpack straps. Th...

I am writing this post to myself to read in about 15 months but maybe some folks reading it will relate to the issues I'm trying to address. Some folks - the ones I work with are foremost on my mind - may or may not want to plumb the depths of my psyche like this! Dear Jon, At the start of this trip, you were struggling with stress and the impacts it has on your health as well as the people around you. Remember the dry mouth and swollen tongue that doctors (both western and eastern) told you was the result of high stress? Remember getting a bunch of blood tests with borderline results? Remember the night when Lily sat you down and told you that yelling isn't normal and shouldn't be normal and could ruin the trip? Yeah, that was you in June 2019. You've struggled with anxiety your whole life. When you were a kid, you used the term "perfectionist" to explain why you had tantrums if your tennis serve didn't go in. In your early (and unsuccessful) relati...

People are saying "Now it's getting real" to me on an increasing basis. My last day of work was last Friday (today is Wednesday) so I'm on day three of my new life in which everyday is a mad sprint to accomplish pre-departure things. There's a not-so-small part of me that wishes we were leaving tomorrow. Just rip the band-aid off and get it over with! For this first phase of the trip, in which we drive our own vehicle from Oregon to Minnesota and then base ourselves there for about two months, we have basically everything we need. A big accomplishment this week was obtaining and installing a bike rack. Ultimately, this required a hacksaw, duct tape and some moleskin (to protect our bumper from a security bolt) but now it's on there! We ordered packing cubes yesterday. A few weeks ago we ordered  a set of color coded matching rolling bags for the four kids. (This winter we had settled on a set of Osprey duffels for ourselves.) I'm kind of bummed that th...