Twelve Feet, Six Continents, One Year

We made it. The RV trip - this odyssey within an odyssey - is not complete but this feels like a virtual finish line. We left Portland on June 23rd to spend a week on the Pacific Ocean and since then we have been working our way, clockwise, around the country. On October 18th, we returned to the Pacific and it was glorious. After a short but somewhat harrowing drive over two mountain ranges, we chose Seacliff Beach State Park in Aptos (California) as our destination. It couldn't have been more perfect. We ate a quick lunch in the RV and then armed ourselves for an afternoon at the beach. For three hours, it was kite flying and castle building, wave splashing and even a few polar dips. There was the bizare wreck of SS Palo Alto beyond a fence at the end of a tall pier. There was pizza eaten at the top of the bluff and ice cream from a local shop. Then we drove for about an hour to reach my parents' house in Los Altos for a weekend of family fun. We might not be done with t...

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...