Twelve Feet, Six Continents, One Year

The purpose of writing this post is personal and selfish. I just want to record the details of a day that felt like a big deal before, during and after. The Prime Minister of Malaysia held a press conference last night at 10pm and announced a series of measures to reduce the spread of the coronavirus. We already knew Singapore was closing its borders in a significant way. Now Malaysia announced that nonessential activities (not just travel) would be restricted starting 26 hours later. Among other things this means Legoland is closing for at least 14 days, which is a major change in our expectations for our time here! As far as we could understand immediately, the only things open were going to be grocery stores and maybe banks. My first action was to rent a car. I had a fear that the taxi services (we use Grab) would be suspended and we'd be really stuck. Then we started a shopping list. It felt like preparing for a hurricane, which is exactly how some of our Floridian tribe-ma...

Now is as good a time as ever to get back to the basics. By now, as you may have heard, there's a global pandemic endangering the lives of people with compromised respiratory systems (like my 99.5 year old grandfather and our nearly-six year old nephew) and the economies of, well, basically everywhere. To date, our experience has been very different than most of our peers in America. When we arrived in Singapore in mid-February the country was already mobilized to contain the risks, mainly through personal hygiene but also social distancing. In Cambodia and Vietnam, where many people wear masks on a daily basis because of pollution, our guides told us that the biggest change was that tourism was way down, mostly because the Chinese were barred from traveling. So over the last two months, this has been an everyday concern for us as we have traveled between and within countries in Asia. Our kids have gotten used to washing their hands many, many times a day and occasionally ...

People: our visit in Melbourne was filled with great people.  Our host, who shares the duplex with the apartment she rents, was a generous and warm person who made us feel so welcome and comfortable. Her family, especially her 12-year old son and their 4-month old English Staffordshire named Lucy, brought us many smiles. The abundant toys in our rental used to be his and we are very grateful, especially for the LEGO. Our first friend in Melbourne was “Motormouth” Bridget at Oliver’s Barber Shop. We passed the shop several times a day and the kids always looked forward to saying hi. Bridget renamed Henry “Jabberjaws” and they were good mates. Bridget had lollipops for the kids but they’d love her without them.  The kids went to summer camp at the local primary school with a program called TeamKids. They enjoyed being in the company of peers for several days, doing kid-focused activities, and being as wild as they felt like. Ali and Cate made friends with two girl...

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 ...

I've written dozens of posts in the last five months and never has the feeling struck me, or struck me as hard as it does here, to instruct  you to visit this place where we've been. I think I implored you to go to Alabama, especially Montgomery, to understand civil rights history firsthand. But here, for reasons more adventurous than ethical, I am compelled to instruct you to visit Igauzu Falls. Igauzu Falls from the short boat trip we enjoyed! EE-gwa-zoo. Appearing variously as Iguazu, Iguassu and Iguacu. The falls reside just upstream from the convergence of the Iguazu river, which divides southern Brazil on the north/east from northern Argentina on the south/west, and the Parana River, which divides both from Paraguay to the west (of both). In other words, it's a little like Pittsburgh;) The singular characteristic of these falls, relative to peers such as Niagara and Victoria, is the breadth. There are roughly 250 distinct falls spread across roughly 2 miles w...