Twelve Feet, Six Continents, One Year

Sunday started like any other day under a Restricted Movement Order in a barely-familiar foreign country. There was breakfast and screen time and generally low expectations. Then we heard about Peru. The news reported that Americans (and others) in Peru were effectively stranded. There were no commercial flights available for them to depart and due to “optics,” according to the stories, the US government did not want to send in a military plane to evacuate them. Then we heard about Singapore. Several sources informed us that Singapore had revised its COVID measures and would prohibit even transiting (connecting) between flights for foreigners. Our main exit strategy had been eliminated. We had decided on Friday (March 20) that we would give ourselves a break for deliberating on our plans until Monday (March 23) but here we were on Sunday back at it. It's eerie to read the posts from Friday and Saturday in light of what's transpired since. What if Malaysia extends the RMO...

Can you tell that we're smiling? We went on a date to a store (Tesco) that resembled Target in its scope. I'm not very good at adapting. I think I've written before about the fact that when I have a plan in mind, it's very hard for me to let go. Professionally, it's taken me a long time and a lot of effort to learn to understand that my own ideas aren't the only and certainly not necessarily best way to go about something. I wasn't a very good or valuable colleague until I figured that out. The same is basically true for me as a spouse/partner. I have concrete memories of fights from previous relationships that centered on the fact that I believed I had the right to say "no" definitively and end the conversation there. I had a lot of growth ahead of me in those moments. Approaching this trip, I knew I was going to struggle with this issue. I knew things were going to go wrong or at least awry. I knew that it was my number one goal to demonstr...

00.36 - Elise has found me sitting at the kitchen table eating ice cream from the tub. I haven't slept yet, mostly because yesterday ended with an epic fight with my son and I'm confronting my shortcomings as a parent. Also, living in pseudo-lockdown is hard. A friend has sent us a link to a news story reporting that the State Department is about to set a worldwide Level 4 warning, recommending all US Citizens return to the States or prepare to "shelter in place indefinitely." Awesome. 03.30 - After hours of talking at the kitchen table, we're finally laying on a bed in a dark room. The pace of conversation is slowing. Soon we'll give up and fall asleep. 05.30 - Cate appears bedside, having had a nightmare. After a attempting to sleep with three in the bed, Elise gives up and moves to the living room. For those of you keeping score, that was about 3 hours of sleep in the early evening and about two in the early morning. Yay! 09.00 - I get out of bed and ...

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 ...

Okay. Take a deep breath. (Unless you assume the face mask on the person next to you is to protect you from them instead of them from you.) It's February 28th and the news of a flulike disease has been spreading faster than the disease itself for more than a month now. I want to write about this at length, in part to document my feelings at this particular moment in time but also to communicate those feelings to spectators who express their concern and curiosity to us on a regular basis. First, please understand that my viewpoint is cynical. Since the beginning of time, news media in any form has had a singular motive: sell. Journalist friends and friends of journalism: I do not speak ill of thee. But if you go to the New York Times website, there has been a flashing red box for weeks announcing breaking news on the subject. Sometimes there is something new to report but mostly there is just a new derivative of the same limited information. But sell, sell, sell means headlines ...

After our epic day on Monday , we were good and exhausted. On Tuesday, we merely returned to the Maxwell Road Hawker Centre for lunch, walked around Chinatown and returned to our apartment for some pool time. That summary omits a few details: Our Grab (taxi) driver to lunch was shockingly candid about how the evaporation of Chinese tourists has decimated business. Beyond that, many locals are working from home and thus not taking rides around town. He put a very human face on the economic cost of this epidemic, especially in Asia. We walked through Chinatown, stopping to visit a temple and to buy some souvenirs. On some advice from an info centre, we entered a mall to look for an acupuncturist. My idea was that there might be a treatment that would reduce Lily's misery from the itchiness of her numerous bug bites. The first problem is that we struggled to navigate another mazelike mall. The second problem is that even though there was a library in this mall and this one had evi...

Here's our hotel room on a recent night-before-departure. This is hard for me to say but I made a mistake. I don’t even remember how or, specifically, why I made it. Fortunately, it hasn’t been hard to remedy. All I had to do was write two emails that included the word “cancel.” Here’s the rest of the story. When we left the US on November 1, we had plans for everything up to March 14th, when a plane would carry us from Mauritius to Johannesberg, South Africa. We had booked a tour of Cambodia and Vietnam for three weeks in late February and early March. We had booked a resort for four nights in Mauritius because it turns out that it’s one of the ways you can fly from SE Asia to South Africa. We had booked a crazy “transit hotel” in the Singapore airport for an overnight layover between a flight from Hanoi and a flight to Mauritius. It was all nailed down. I felt pretty good that this was a fair balance. We had done four months of domestic travel and we had planned fo...

Greetings from Los Angeles International Airport, where we are enjoying an overnight layover on our way to Costa Rica. It has been ten days since we pulled into Portland in the RV. Several times during that span, Elise remarked that she suddenly understands that it's possible to be hospitalized for exhaustion. This pivot, from phase one (RV) to phase two (foreign lands), was BIG. What you could see in our pictures, and in the memories of the children, is ten days of fun and excitement. Playdates, parties, sleepovers and reunions. Because of their ages - between 6 and 11 - their experiences were very different. The twins (6) had pure and unadulterated fun. They blitzed from one exciting visit to another, upset only when they were too tired to cope. For Lily, almost every moment of joy was tinged with longing. She was thrilled to be with friends but felt on the outside looking in. Theres tween drama that is absent from our family unit but there is also the sense of connection with...

We don't know much but here's the itinerary as it's coming together... Part 0: USA Acadia National Park Blueridge Parkway/Skyline Drive Civil Rights Tour of the South Southwest Yosemite Part 1: South America 1 Week at Surf Camp in Tamarindo, Costa Rica 2 Weeks in Buenos Aires 2 Weeks elsewhere in Argentina (and surrounds) PART 2: Oceania Hamilton Island (5 days, 4 nights) Melbourne Perth Elsewhere Sydney 2 Weeks of RVing NZ South Island 2 weeks on North Island PART 3: SE Asia Guided tour of Vietnam/Cambodia