Twelve Feet, Six Continents, One Year

First of all, is my math right? I know that we started on June 23rd but that was in the United States. Today is January 8th but that's in Australia. It's only January 7th in the US. Does that mean the trip is longer or shorter? Can anybody explain daylight savings time to me? Second, we've been having a really good week. Elise took the day off on Monday and regained some energy. We found a daycamp here that is effectively drop-in during their school holidays. For friends in Portland: this is like Campfire mixed with Trackers. In other words, it's awesome. We showed the kids the "menu" if activities on each day and the result was that Henry and Lily went on Tuesday, Ali and Cate on Wednesday and all four on Thursday. Arriving at St Kilda Park Primary School for TeamKids Camp We feel really satisfied and proud that our kids show up at a new venue with unfamiliar kids and adults and plunge right in. Henry made a friend, which led to a playdate and possibl...

The pictures of our days in Byron Bay, on the Gold Coast of Australia, are golden. If I was a proper social media propagandist, that's probably all you'd see. But the truth is that these have been hard days and there have been a lot of tears. We left Hamilton in the afternoon on Monday and had an easy, 90-minute flight into Brisbane. There, we rented a mini-van and had our first experience driving on the wrong ("other") side of the road. Fortunately, the airport dumps you directly onto an interstate and that's about the best place to start. I found it about as disorienting as driving the RV because I simply had no idea where the far edge of the vehicle was. Two hours later, with no incident and only one episode of car sickness (poor Cate), we parked at the famous Beach Hotel on, you guessed it, the beach. It is an extremely laid back place. For an arrival night, the good side of this is that the hotel immediately provided an extra cot but the bad side was that...

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, ...