Twelve Feet, Six Continents, One Year

For weeks, maybe months, we've been looking forward to this day. For the last week or two, Henry has been suffering serious emotional difficulty in a state of anticipation. Now, at about 7:30am, after flying for 17 hours, our friends from Portland landed in Singapore. Ali and Cate impatiently waiting to cross the street to see their friend, Anya. Reunited and it feels so good! We spent the afternoon together at their extraordinary rooftop pool, enduring the scowls of childfree couples of various ages and sometimes incurring the lifeguard's whistle. By we, by the way, I mean the kids. Elise and I were busy having grown up conversations with fellow adults! The ten of us barely fit in an elevator. Our noise definitely didn't. Looking good after transpacific travel. Later in the afternoon we took a river cruise to see some of Singapore's highlights, especially notable buildings, from water-level. Melanie, Owen and the Marina Sands Smiling ...

The first time we visited Sydney, it was for one night (and a total of about 12 hours). The third time will be three nights. The second time? You guessed it: two nights. In terms of play by play, we arrived by plane after a 90 minute flight from Gold Coast airport. The only notable thing about this has to do with time zones. Sydney is in New South Wales and Gold Coast (specifically Coolangatta) is in Queensland, which sits on top of NSW the way Washington sits on top of Oregon. Nevertheless, Queensland has its own time zone, one hour earlier than/behind NSW. Thus, we left Byron Bay at noon and arrived in Coolangatta an hour later at - drumroll, please - noon. After a bit of lunch by the beach we flew for 1.5 hours and landed 2.5 hours later in Sydney. It's hard to say whether or not we had jet lag but we were definitely confused. (I hadn't realized we jumped a time zone when we drove 2 hours from Brisbane to Byron a few days earlier.) NB: Screen shot taken at 12:44 with ...

Good things, even really, really good things, generally come to an end and so it is that the six of us piled into a van on the morning of Saturday, November 9th for our departure from Witch’s Rock Surf Camp, from Tamarindo and from Costa Rica. From a purely logistical perspective, we had a pretty miserable 4-hour drive to San Jose, followed by a mediocre 4-hour interval at the airport, followed by an uneventful 1-hour flight to Panama City, followed by a easy 20 minute drive to a lovely and shockingly inexpensive Westin Hotel on the Pacific coast. But who wants to think about logistics when there are such better things to contemplate. For example, I’d like to tell you about a typical day at WRSC: Lessons are offered in three, two-hour time blocks. Each instructor takes a maximum of three students who are comprable in ability and also height (having to do with wave depth) so Elise/Jon/Lily were assigned to Jose (can’t figure out the accent on this keyboard, sorry) in the first ...

We were all absolutely exhausted by noon. Lily's surf lesson ended in tears despite the fact that she had caught some great waves and even succeeded in making her first turn. Lunch conversation was a comparison of bruises, board burns and worse. We were all absolutely exhausted again by 6 when we sat down for dinner but in between is a completely different story. The morning surfing was hard because of changes in the tide that I don't understand. I do understand that the high tide has been getting later and that our "ideal" 6am lesson time was no longer ideal. But I don't understand why waves behave the way they do. I do know that I love jumping in them and getting demolished, just as I did when I was a kid. But surf lessons, like ski lessons, require going back and forth. The key difference is that the ski lift is basically effortless whereas paddling out against a pounding surf (by beginner beach standards) is exhausting and sometimes futile. In both cases, ...