Our Curry Village tent cabin

I was carrying my bag into Yosemite’s Curry Village, about to check into a canvas-sided, one-room shack that’s a hybrid of a tent and a cabin, when suddenly I came within an inch of stepping in one of the biggest piles of poop I’ve ever seen.

I know dog doo, cat scat, cow pies, horse manure, deer droppings, feral pig dung and, of course, human feces, and I knew this cake-sized coiled turd was none of the above. Barely disguised with dust, and resting a mere 10 feet or so from our door, it looked frightfully fresh, thick, dark, and flecked with something nutty and grainy — a hapless hiker’s granola bar, perhaps?

“A bear did that!” I said out loud to no one in particular. Then I found Morgan to show him, and we in turn showed it to a man we had just met in the neighboring tent cabin.

“I’m not surprised,” the man said. “You should see the patch job on my cabin,” and he held up his hand and mimed a menacing scratching motion while describing a large ursine claw mark still visible underneath a patch on his unit’s flimsy excuse for a wall.

“Well,” I said to Morgan, “We’re not in The Ahwahnee anymore.”

Once upon a time, when we were newlyweds and my in-laws occasionally traveled with us and very generously picked up the tab, I discovered Yosemite while staying with them at the national park’s historic and top-rated Ahwahnee Hotel. We would gather for drinks in the Great Lounge (every public room at The Ahwahnee is so special that each has its Own Name), and we’d marvel at the stone fireplaces that are tall enough to stand in, at the Native American designs stenciled on the beams, and at the floor-to-ceiling windows that showcase the valley’s 3000-foot-high granite cliffs, which are streaked black with lichens and white with waterfalls.

Morgan took this shot of The Ahwahnee in 2004, the last time we stayed there.

I fell in love with Yosemite Valley then, and also with The Ahwahnee. Built in 1927, it remains one of my favorite hotels in the world — a magnificent example of understated luxury that fits in beautifully with the natural environment.

There’s only one problem with The Ahwahnee: a standard room, which is quite cramped for a family of four, goes for $443 a night. The nicer rooms range from $500 – $1000+.

When Morgan and I decided to spend almost a full week in Yosemite without our kids (who were at a wonderful sleep-away camp), there was no question that The Ahwahnee was beyond our budget, and we didn’t really want to stay there anyway. We planned to spend entire days running and hiking, so a fancy room would feel like a waste and the dinnertime dress code a burden. We wanted to stay somewhere cheap and rustic, but not do full-fledged camping, since we also wanted a hot shower and a safe place to secure our things during the day while out on the trail.

Thankfully, less than a mile away on the east end of the valley, lies Curry Village, a sprawling, dusty collection of some 500 barracks-style canvas cabins. We had never spent time in Curry Village in spite of visiting Yosemite Valley numerous times over the past two decades. I wrongly assumed it didn’t have much to offer beyond low-cost lodging that looked, during the crowded peak season, like a happier version of a refugee camp.

A typical row of Curry Village tent cabins.

Did I end up liking it? As my dad always used to say rhetorically to indicate the obvious affirmative, “Does a bear shit in the woods?”

We rented an unheated, 8′x10′ cabin for four nights. Our cabin could sleep three, but others accommodate up to five (extra guests are $10 each). And what did we get for the summertime rate of $109 per night?

Inside our tent cabin.

Two cots — one double, one single — with sheets and Army Surplus-style wool blankets, a couple of well-worn towels, a metal shelf equipped with a safe, a single bare compact florescent bulb hanging from the ceiling, one chair, a padlock on the squeaky door, and a bear-proof storage locker outside. That’s it — no plumbing except in the communal bathrooms and dining area, and no outlets except in the public lounge. But it was comfortable, cozy, and we found the communal areas to be a great place to hang out each day after we finished long runs and hikes to three of Yosemite’s summits. (For a guide to recommended runs/hikes in the area, see my running blog.)

A cafeteria, taqueria, pizza and burger place, store, lounge and amphitheater are clustered in the village core, housed in buildings little changed since they were built in the early 1900s. In August, the village is packed with a diverse mix of people dominated by college-age backpackers from around the world and families with kids who zoom around on bikes or splash in the public pool. The mix makes Curry Village feel like a cross between a youth hostel and a family camp. It somehow manages to maintain a laid-back vibe in spite of peak-season crowding that makes finding a free table on the dining patio as challenging as climbing the cables to the summit of Half Dome.

Hanging around the Curry Village lounge.

No matter, you can eat in your lap while sitting in a rocker on the veranda of the shingled lounge, which is decorated with black-and-white photos depicting the village’s early days when the founders, David and Jenny Curry, managed it.

The Currys were part of the first wave of tourists to explore Yosemite in the 1890s, drawn to the extreme beauty of the wilderness that was depicted in articles by John Muir. But the couple balked at the $100 stage fare and couldn’t afford $4 per night for a hotel, so they established Camp Curry in 1899 to provide affordable lodging for Yosemite visitors. It was no-frills but high in spirits, with a dance hall, lounge and pool. It remains that way today. Park guides stage energetic shows for wide-eyed kids on the amphitheater stage, re-enacting Teddy Roosevelt or, more bizarrely, a slow-moving glacier, while across the way at the dining area, beer flows into pitchers and ice cream is scooped into cups all afternoon long. Squirrels run underfoot while placid deer munch on bushes along the walkways, almost as tame as lazy dogs.

Comparing The Ahwahnee to Curry Village is like comparing apples to oranges, or a giant sequoia to a lowly oak, but if I had the choice to stay at one or the other regardless of cost, I might actually pick Curry Village. Unlike a resort that encourages visitors to lie around and be pampered, the tent cabins — noisy and chilly enough to feel like a real campground — prompted us to wake up early, get outside and hit the trail. The communal areas bring strangers together for conversation. And the deer, squirrels and bear poop (which was never removed during our time there) remind us that we’re really in the woods, barely insulated from nature, and isn’t that the reason to go to Yosemite?

If you go: Make reservations at least six months in advance, and pack these not-so-obvious things:

• a padlock to secure belongings in the bear-proof storage locker
• earplugs to block the sound of other residents talking, laughing and snoring at night
• rubber flip-flops to wear in the public showers
• towels to supplement the small ones provided
• sleeping bags for extra warmth at night
• groceries and a cooler, to be kept in the bear-proof locker. Groceries from the village store are quite expensive, so it’s better to stock up on snacks and drinks ahead of time, and buy ice from the store to cool drinks. No cooking is allowed — not even camp stoves to heat water — but you can get free hot water from the village coffee bar, which is useful for making instant oatmeal for breakfast. Dining options are relatively affordable in Curry Village and pricier at around Yosemite Village.

Hit the trail for views like this of Sentinel Rock (on the left) and El Capitan (on the right) cleaved by Yosemite Valley.

Related posts:

1. Welcome to Patagonia, Where Paradise Packs a Punch
2. 36 Hours in Telluride, CO
3. 83 Places, 5 Continents, 10 Months

Morgan, Colly, Kyle and I each sat down and wrote letters reflecting on the experience, showed them to no one else at the time, sealed them up, and then opened and read them out loud over dinner in June on our last night before driving home. Now, the letters sit on my desk as reminders of what the round-the-world trip was all about. Today, for a couple of different reasons, I re-read them to reflect on how the 10-month trip affected us individually and as a family.

One reason is the snarky backlash, prompted by the film release of Eat, Pray, Love, to long-term travel for the sake of change, education and self-reflection. (I haven’t seen the film and don’t really want to since I liked the book and hear the film adaptation doesn’t do Elizabeth Gilbert’s writing justice.) As a Salon.com critic dismissively puts it in an article about “The New Colonialism of ‘Eat, Pray, Love,’” the new breed of travelers “want to spend a year in a faraway place on a ‘journey.’ But the journey is all about what they can get. … I don’t want to deny [Elizabeth Gilbert] her Italian carbs, her Indian oms or her Bali Hai beach romance. We all need that sabbatical from the rut of our lives. But as her character complained that she had ‘no passion, no spark, no faith’ and needed to go away for one year, I couldn’t help wondering, where do those people in Indonesia and India go away to when they lose their passion, spark and faith?”

Okay, that’s a fair enough question to ask, but I object to the idea that families taking long-term trips similar to ours, and living a significantly different lifestyle in the process, are doing it because it’s “all about what they can get.” Our motivation was much more, “What can we give up?,” “What can we learn and teach our kids?” and “How can we better connect with each other and with others?” It was, to a great extent, about thinking and acting more openly, more mindfully and less materialistically so that we have a better chance of functioning well as a family, and of raising kids with a socially responsible world view and a heightened appreciation for our privileged lives back home.

The other reason I reviewed our time-capsule letters is because tomorrow, August 15, marks the anniversary of our departure. Having just returned from a shorter trip, we are taking a deep breath to get back to school and back to productivity, all the while trying not to lose the lessons gained from the journey.

So the year away is really over. Was it worth it? (Yes.) Where do we go from here? (Still figuring that out.) Those letters provide additional clues and details. I decided to excerpt some short passages here to highlight some aspects of long-term family travel.

Colly in Malcesine, Italy

From Colly, age 11 at the time, on what the trip is all about and how it has affected our family:

“Some of the words people might think of when they think of this trip are ‘fun,’ or ‘cool,’ or ‘relaxing.’ To me, those words suck. As Mom and Dad would say, those are dull words that don’t describe a tenth of what’s going on. I don’t think there’s a single word that can even start to describe our trip! But, if I had to sum up our trip all in one word, I think that word would be ‘trying.’ We are trying new foods, we are trying new places, every day we are trying new things, and those things don’t always work out but at least we’re trying. Our trip has changed all of us so much. I am reading way more than I would in Piedmont, we all need less stuff, and, well, Kyle is still in love with ice cream. I think that this trip has without a doubt made us more of a family. We are definitely closer than we’ve ever been before. All in all, I am tremendously grateful that this trip is happening and I do not regret it at all.”

Morgan near Karamea, New Zealand

From Morgan, age 43, on whether this trip represented a “midlife crisis”:

“I bristle at the term ‘midlife crisis’ for the connotations of a somewhat selfish and sad desire to recapture a moment of youth. The term ‘midlife opportunity’ is a much better term. There are many opportunities in life that people never take, and can spend the rest of their life agonizing over whether they should have. They key to the midlife opportunity is recognizing that such opportunities actually do exist, and having the guts to make the wrenching changes necessary to seize them. Taking this trip was seizing hold of an opportunity to do something different with the remainder of my life. Now, with half the trip behind me, the question becomes: was it worth it? The answer is an unequivocal yes. It has taken me five months to slowly unwind the feelings that I have about what I left, and to get excited about a different future. The process of travel itself has allowed me to slowly change my focus from the past to the future. Travel forces ‘the new’ upon you on a daily and moment-to-moment basis. Trying to figure out how to order in Spanish, or work a foreign ATM or get a phone card in another country, or figure out what’s on the menu, all combine to make change a constant in your life — and a pleasure. Rather than fearing change, I’ve come to live with it on a daily basis involving all the small things in life. This trip for me has been much less about any particular place or thing, but more about the process. I hope the remainder of this trip continues the process of future-thinking that has started to take hold.”

The kids and me about to board a bus for a 17-hour ride to Mendoza, Argentina

From me, age 40 at the time, looking ahead to our return:

“When I reflect on our five-and-a-half months of travel, one thing that hits me is how much I love spending time together as a foursome. I thought I might yearn for more time alone, but the opposite happened: I’m happiest when we’re together, in a small space, such as the car or hotel room. My main hope pertains to this summer and beyond: that we don’t lose the closeness — the bond — we’ve strengthened during this journey; that we don’t lose the ability to be flexible and free-thinking; that we don’t get stuck in a rut and become more materialistic.”

Kyle on the Colorado River

And from Kyle, age 8 at the time, on the joy of discovery through travel:

“I have been to many places and a lot to come. It feels a long time from rafting [in Colorado at the start of the trip], but I still remember it because it was so fun. I also loved the dulche de leche from Argentina, and I really liked Patagonia with all the dogs. And luging [in New Zealand] was so fun and fast. I hope we get to Australia safe. I really hope I discover new ice cream flavors. This trip was fantastic so far and I’m excited for new things to come.”

A week ago, an article in the Sunday New York Times called “But Will It Make You Happy? Consumers Find Ways to Spend Less and Find Happiness” did a much better job, in my view, of portraying the meaning of long-term travel than the critical response to the film Eat, Pray, Love. The Times story detailed new research supporting the not-too-common common-sense wisdom that happiness comes less from acquiring material possessions and more from meaningful experiences, such as travel, and from cultivating positive relationships. Amen to that. I’d much rather spend disposable income on family day trips and saving for travel than on replacing our faded sofas and buying new clothes.

According to the Eat, Pray, Love critics, we’re guilty of taking a journey to discover happiness. We got rich from experiences, knowledge and relationships. I’m not sure that makes us selfish and self-centered, but it certainly makes us feel lucky and grateful.

Related posts:

1. Eat, Run, Love
2. How To Plan A Year-Long Family Travel Itinerary
3. A Typical Atypical Travel Day

I wanted to hear their breathing and feel their closeness one more night before everything changed back to our non-traveling life — before the movers came and filled our house with so much of the furniture and boxes of stuff that I now feel ambivalent about owning, and before my kids moved back into their own rooms and we all established our separate domains in this house that feels too big and fancy. I wanted to curl up in my sleeping bag and fantasize we were camping the way we did on the banks of the Colorado River or on the beach of New Zealand’s Abel Tasman Park.

Everyone has been asking how it feels to return home. The short answer is: weird, and tiring! I haven’t felt this conflicted and unsettled since … well, since we pulled out of our driveway to start the trip on August 15, 2009.

The penultimate stop: We drove through Yosemite on our last day and arrived home about four hours later.

At first, we were giddy with anticipation while driving back from the Eastern Sierra and seeing familiar landmarks that meant we were getting closer to home. Kyle even pointed to a freeway barrier and exclaimed, “I remember that wall!” We collectively felt the poignancy and optimism of starting a new chapter in life as Morgan heads down a different career path, I start some new projects, and the kids fix up their rooms and gear up for school.

Finally we reached our freeway exit and drove the final mile. The kids literally were shrieking with excitement and I held my breath as we braked to turn left onto our street, knowing our house would come into view and signal that we really had made it back, the round-the-world odyssey really was over. How would it look? How would I feel?

And then we made the turn, and what I saw caught me by surprise and deflated the moment in the most fitting and funny way. There at the edge of our driveway, like a monument or middle finger, stood a big ol’ porta-potty for use by workers at our neighbor’s house. How perfect: a harbinger of all the crap — of all the moving boxes, bags of mail, health insurance headaches and wood rot in the windowsills — waiting for us once we started to unload and settle in. I had to laugh.

This all happened three weeks ago. It has taken me this long to start to get my head around the transition and to return to this abandoned child of a blog.

We arrived on the Summer Solstice, when everyone was taking off for summer vacation. By contrast, we’d experienced summer all year long, having been in the Southern Hemisphere October through February, and it felt to me as though summer should be ending and we should get back to productivity. My daughter, let down by the realization that many of her friends had left town just as she was returning, unknowingly expressed my mood by what she wore her first full day back: she dressed all in black and donned an absurd Santa hat she found in a moving box, and she glumly hobbled around on crutches, having dislocated her knee the prior week, like a bird with newly clipped wings.

It felt so odd and slightly stressful to move our furniture back and confront the detritus of our past lives — the boxes and boxes of clothing and memorabilia I had forgotten about. I don’t need this I said to myself repeatedly — I don’t need the uncomfortable dress shoes I bought for a job I no longer have, the boring coffeetable books I displayed but never looked at, the 12 extra tea cups I saved for brunches I never hosted, the dusty picnic basket I put on top of the fridge for decoration even though we never made time for picnics — so I started a give-away pile that continues to grow.

And all those linens for our one bed — Morgan and I shook our heads as we unpacked giant boxes filled with the down pillow-top mattress cover, the thick damask duvet and the nine pillows. What bed needs nine pillows? We added the down pillow-top cover to the give-away pile because we’ve grown accustomed to futon-style thinner bedding while traveling, but we spread out and tucked in those expensive sheets and stacked all those velvet pillows in their place. Then Morgan put his hands on his hips, stuck out his chest and theatrically proclaimed, “I feel like a little prince!” which gave me another fit of crazy crying-laughter because this bed — this epitome of our union in comfort and luxury — no longer seemed like a cozy fit. But how long could I justify sleeping in my sleeping bag?

Everything in the house seemed to grow while we were away because our sense of size had shrunk; my bureau dresser, for example. It’s about 4 feet tall, with three columns of drawers in ornately carved mahogany. I began unpacking my things into the drawers on the right-side column because that’s what Morgan and I did whenever we’d unpack in a rental — I’d take the drawers on the right and leave him the left — and as I tried to remember how we divided the drawers in the middle column, I had a going-down-the-rabbit-hole moment of jumbled perception and jarred memory when I belatedly realized that Morgan in fact has his very own dressing area in the adjacent room with his own drawers, and this entire bureau is mine to use. I had totally forgotten this fact of how we used to live. I’m supposed to use this all myself? Why do I need all these drawers? Does this mean I can’t share space with Morgan anymore? I don’t want to unpack here, I never liked these frou-frou brass handles … all those hyper doubts and complaints sped through my mind as I unpacked two pairs of jeans and left the lower drawers empty. Only the drawer for running clothes had enough to fill it.

I was unpacking the clothes from two giant suitcases we used for storage — massive suitcases with wheeled bottoms that we bought long ago, before we realized the benefits of smaller, non-wheeled luggage. “I can’t believe we ever used to travel with those,” Morgan said. And then he looked at the one wheeled suitcase that we had taken on our trip, which was sitting near the bigger ones from storage — the black suitcase we used as a communal school supply and gear bag, which we derisively nicknamed “The Tick” because it looked so bloated and would stick to us when we wanted to get rid of it. Around the world we complained about The Tick, since it seemed so heavy and unwieldy compared to our lightweight clothing packs.

The one regular suitcase we traveled with in addition to our packs, aka "The Tick," flanked by the larger suitcases we used to use.

“Oh my god, did The Tick shrink?” Morgan asked. Indeed, it seemed like it had shrunk when we placed it next to the suitcases we used to use. Travel, I realized, truly had changed our perception of size and necessity. All my negative feelings toward this scuffed-up, black-sheep suitcase that we had lugged around the world melted into feelings of fondness and the realization that it symbolized our simpler-living, road-schooling nomadic life. I declared with sappy emotion, “I love The Tick! I want to keep it forever.”

In addition to moving back in, we faced the reality of literally plugging back in; that is, of re-establishing accounts with service providers such as electrical, trash, phone and cable that all generate bills from which we had been liberated. I cringe daily at the sound of the mailman on our porch delivering junk mail and bills.

We got a new SIM card for Morgan’s cell phone (the old one being leftover from Europe) and for over a week we shared that one phone, since I didn’t want to deal with setting up a land line and didn’t really want my own cell phone. I had this reclusive feeling of not wanting to hear a phone ring and not wanting anyone to contact me — not yet, anyway. The funny thing was, the new SIM card came with a number still registered with someone else’s name, someone named “Dorothy Bean,” which the phone company can’t seem to clear up, so all our outgoing calls show up on caller ID that way. I sort of like the element of disguise. Now I can call Morgan “Mr. Bean” and remember all the times he acted like the bumbling Brit on our travels by circling repeatedly around round-abouts while we hastily determined which exit to take.

I’m afraid I’m coming off like a complainer, and I’d like to say “yes!” when people ask, “Is it good to be back?” In many ways it is good, especially from the kids’ perspectives, since they’re happy to reconnect with friends and walk freely around their familiar neighborhood. And what a gorgeous neighborhood it is. I have renewed appreciation for how lovely these landscaped gardens and well-maintained homes are, having unpacked in so many modest abodes in areas with crumbling infrastructure. And some of the unpacking and settling back in has brought genuine joy. I was happy to  unpack my kitchen tools and restock our pantry, for example, since I’m eager to cook recipes we haven’t tasted in a year.

Reconnecting with friends and neighbors has been the best part of this transition. Several families invited us to their homes for dinners, coaxed us to return to our annual tradition of building a 4th of July parade float, and paid us the ultimate compliments when they said we seemed more mellow and happy. Then, one week after our return, seven extended family members came to stay under our roof for several days, delightfully filling up this house and making it feel more like a home again.

Morgan used our moving boxes to take the lead on building the annual neighborhood float ...

... while I worked with my sister-in-law and Colly (she's in a Wilma Flintstone costume) to put finishing touches on it.

Morgan and two neighbors show off the end result: a Flintstone-themed parade entry for the 4th of July. This is the kind of community fun we missed while traveling, and which eases the transition back home.

Round-the-world travel gave us so much, and yet we missed the connection with local community and extended family. But it still feels weird to be back, and oh how I miss discovering new places, people and perspectives through far-flung travel. I’m trying hard not to lose touch with the positive ways that travel changed our behavior and awareness. I really don’t want to stir up the manic, multitasking, materialistic, controlling, bitchy and provincial parts of my personality that long-term travel helped me tame, nor do I want our stronger family bond to weaken.

I’ll try to write about the challenge of “maintaining change” (that’s not an oxymoron, is it? I hope not) in a separate post. For now, I’m happy to report we haven’t lost that awareness or closeness, and we’re really trying to live differently than we did before the trip — though I admit, that bed and all those pillows feel pretty darn comfortable.

Related posts:

1. “Back to School” Becomes “Leave to Learn”
2. The Sappy Departure
3. One Year Later: The Time-Capsule Travel Letters and the ‘Eat Pray Love’ Backlash

As we stood ordering bagels, we suddenly remembered we had eaten lunch at the same Noah’s on the day before we flew to Buenos Aires in early October. “I feels like we were just here,” Colly said, and I agreed while my chest hiccuped with anxiety.

It felt as though all those months abroad — which had stretched so elastically and netted so much in a single week, so that on the first of every month I’d express disbelief at how much we had experienced — had snapped back and condensed into a blip to make mental space for the task of reorganizing our lives and getting ready to move back into the house.

Checking out of a hotel in Marlow, England, on our last morning before flying back to California.

I’m feeling profoundly mixed emotions upon our return and need to think more about the transition before trying to write much about it. I got weepy on our last night in Marlow, a lovely town outside of London, as we checked out of a hotel a final time and toasted our trip; then, I got teary with joy as we approached my hometown of Ojai last weekend for a reunion. I also am in the process of thinking through the next phase of this blog, so stay tuned and thanks to all of you who’ve read it regularly!

In the meantime, I’m publishing the following list as proof and as a reminder to myself that we really went to all of these places. We called this our “sleepover list” and had fun updating it as we traveled. Most are linked to previous blog posts if we wrote about that destination. Three places are listed twice since we visited there twice, so the number of places totals 83, but the bottom line is that we moved and unpacked 86 times!

The Sleepover List: August 15, 2009 – June 15, 2010:

1. Claremont hotel, Oakland (slept there the night before we left since our house was all packed up)
2. Holiday Inn Express, Fallon, Nevada
3. Days Inn, Delta, Utah
4. My brother and sister-in-law’s cabin on Last Dollar Road in Telluride, Colorado
5. Colorado River campsite during rafting trip
6. Holiday Inn Express, Moab
7. Mountain Village condo near Telluride
8. Mesa Verde National Park motel, Colorado
9. Double Tree Hotel, Durango, Colorado
10. Pearl Street rental home in Boulder, Colorado
11. Quality Inn near Black Canyon National Park, Gunnison, Colorado
12. Telluride family cabin again
13. Red Feather Inn near the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, Arizona (what a dump!)
14. El Portal Hotel, Sedona, Arizona
15. Holiday Inn Express on Route 66, Barstow, California
16. Morgan’s parents’ house in Pacific Palisades, California
17. Casa Ojai Best Western, Ojai, California
18. Embassy Suites near LAX
19. Recoleta apartment, Buenos Aires, Argentina
20. Llao Llao hotel, near Bariloche, Argentina
21. Cabaña at Villa Huinid, Bariloche, Argentina
22. Guardianes del Bayo, Villa La Angosturo, Argentina (aka the place with all the gnomes)
23. La Comarca Suites de Montaña hotel next to the gnome cabaña,Villa La Angosturo, Argentina
24. Overnight on the bus to Mendoza (this link is to Colly’s great blog post about the experience)
25. Casa Glebinias, Chacras de Coria (near Mendoza), Argentina
26. Meridiano Sur hotel, Santiago, Chile
27. Quay West apartment, Auckland, New Zealand
28. First night RV: Waiwera Holiday Park, North Island
29. Second night RV: Beachside Holiday Park near Paihia in the Bay of Islands, North Island
30. Third night RV: Kerikeri Top 10 Holiday Park, Kerikeri, Bay of Islands, North Island
31. Fourth night RV: Kauri Coast Top 10 Holiday Park near Dargaville, North Island
32. Last night RV: Orewa Beach Top 10 Holiday Park, Orewa, North Island
33. Cabin at Blue Lake Top 10 Holiday Park, Rotorua, North Island
34. Van der Boom’s house, Whakatane in the Bay of Plenty, North Island
35. Great Lake Motel, Taupo, North Island
36. Holiday Inn, Wellington, North Island
37. Cabin at Harris Hill farm, Nelson, South Island, New Zealand
38. First night campground in Abel Tasman National Park, South Island
39. Second night campground in Abel Tasman National Park, South Island
40. The Barn backpackers’ lodge, Marahau, South Island
41. Abel Tasman Marahau Lodge, Marahau, South Island
42. Chelsea Gateway Motor Lodge, Westport, West Coast of South Island
43. Karamea Last Resort, Karamea, West Coast of South Island
44. Charming Creek B&B, Ngakawau, West Coast of South Island
45. The one and only Blackball Hilton, Blackball, West Coast of South Island
46. Greymouth Gables Inn, Greymouth, West Coast of South Island
47. Flock Hill Lodge along Arthur’s Pass, South Island
48. Kirkpatricks’ guest house, Queenstown, South Island
49. Meriton apartment, Sydney, Australia
50. Jemby Rinjah Eco Lodge in Blackheath by the Blue Mountains, Australia
51. Albury Country Comfort Motel, Albury, New South Wales
52. Jubilee Lake Holiday Park, Daylesford, Victoria
53. Anchor Belle Caravan Park, Phillip Island, Victoria
54. Apartment at 1 Esplanade, Lakes Entrance, Victoria
55. Cabin at Batemans Bay Big4 Holiday Park, Batemans Bay, New South Wales
56. United States Embassy, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory
57. Apartment at Clifton Suites, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory
58. IBIS airport hotel, Sydney (what a dump!)
59. Kowloon Shangri-La hotel, Hong Kong
60. Oakley Court Hotel, Windsor, England (barely 14 hours between flights)
61. Apartment in the Barri Gotic quarter, Barcelona, Spain
62. Aiguaclara Hotel in Begur, Costa Brava, Spain
63. Renaissance airport hotel, Barcelona
64. Apartment in Rome, Italy
65. Apartment in Venice, Italy
66. Albergo il Focolare, Treviso, Italy
67. Hotel Du Lac on Lake Garda, Malcesine, Italy
68. Apartment in Vernazza, Cinque Terre, Italy
69. One night in the awful hotel-that-shall-remain-nameless, Florence, Italy
70. Hotel Loggiato Dei Serviti, Florence, Italy
71. Hotel Hermitage, Prato, Italy
72. Hotel Campione near Lugano, Switzerland
73. Hotel Cascada, Lucerne, Switzerland
74. Hotel Splendid, Interlaken, Switzerland
75. Apartment on Lake Geneva, Montreux, Switzerland
76. Hotel Perren, Zermatt, Switzerland
77. Hilton Garden Inn, Bologna, Italy
78. Hilton Airport Hotel, Rome, Italy
79. Marriott Grosvenor Square, London, England
80. Oakley Court Hotel, Windsor, England
81. The Grand Hotel, Brighton, England
82. Silverdale B&B, Seaford, England
83. The Compleat Angler, Marlow, England
84. Morgan’s parents’ house, Pacific Palisades, California
85. Lower School dorm at The Thacher School, Ojai, California
86. Morgan’s parents’ condo in Mammoth Lakes, California

That’s it! Next stop, on June 20, home in Piedmont, California!

Related posts:

1. Eat, Run, Love
2. Playing Around Rotorua
3. Two Months To Go

Colly does the bungee jump trampoline against the backdrop of the Brighton Pier.

Like cotton candy, Brighton is a brightly colored swirl of sweet temptation that’s tantalizing to taste but leaves you sticky and queasy.

We went there for a couple of days for the same reason we make an annual pilgrimage to the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk or Santa Monica Pier — because rickety amusement rides on the beach are guaranteed family fun — and we did indeed love to watch the kids on the spinning rides.

On the pier, the world travelers became hurled travelers.

But, good grief, I haven’t seen so many drunk, swearing, sweaty and scantily clad young adults since the time we spent New Year’s Eve on the Las Vegas Strip. Brighton certainly lives up to its party-hearty reputation.

At least it has cleaned up its reputation for seediness. (I don’t mean to sound like such a schoolmarm, but having my kids see a guy puke on his shoes and hear fights erupt in the middle of the night outside our window makes me wary of the place.) The businesses around the central pedestrian area known as The Lanes are cute and well kept. We also enjoyed the park around the Royal Pavilion, a palace built in the early 1800s in a wild style known as Indo-Gothic.

A detail from Brighton's Royal Pavilion, with architecture influenced by the empire's colonialism in India.

So here’s my main tip for families traveling to Brighton and anyone else seeking to cure the beach mecca’s hangover: leave after a day or two, and go explore the quaint Sussex towns of Seaford and Alfriston a half-hour east.

We went to Seaford for the sake of a half-marathon trail race in an area known as the South Downs. Hiking trails crisscross bucolic sheep pastures, connecting a valley formed by the River Cuckmere with the white chalk cliffs overlooking the sea. One segment of the unspoiled coastal cliffs, a series of vertical formations called The Seven Sisters, is part of a large regional park. It’s gorgeous!

On the edge of the South Downs cliffs and shore, running toward the finish of the half marathon.

We checked into a sweet, pet-friendly B&B on Saturday called The Silverdale and ate at a quality family-run Italian restaurant called Diella’s, where the owner clued us in on the coolest little zoo in England, on a quiet country road outside of Seaford: Drusillas Park. Then we walked to the start line of the race on Sunday morning and joined over 500 other runners for a hilly 13 miles. I’ve slowed down quite a bit since I’ve been substituting pub crawls for track workouts, but I still ran my bum off, helped along by the scenery and swift competition of the Seaford Striders.

Runners head for the hills around Mile 2 in the race.

It was the eighth and final running event on our journey, and during the 1 hour and 48 minutes I was on the course, I reflected on the places we traveled for the sake of participating in an event: from the Imogene Pass Run in Southwestern Colorado, to the Buenos Aires Marathon and Patagonia trail marathon in Argentina, to the Croesus Crossing in West New Zealand and Dirt Fest triathlon near Melbourne, to the 10K outside of Venice and the 40K in Tuscany, and finally to here. One piece of travel advice I like to repeat (and wrote about on my other blog) is to design an itinerary around a hobby, be it art history or hiking or whatever. Our passion for running turned out to be a wonderful travel guide, leading us to lesser-known destinations and connecting us with locals in a way that typical travel planning rarely does.

My favorite kind of date: running a race in a new place together.

The race course crossed the main street of Alfriston, a storybook village full of centuries-old Tudor inns.

On the main street of Alfriston, an idyllic and historic town. The half-marathon course crossed this block.

We took the kids there in the afternoon, on our way to Drusillas zoo, and had lunch at a pub that now ranks as one of my favorites in England: The George Inn, established in 1397. As we walked by the bar under a low-slung ceiling, I paused to study the blackened brick fireplace and gnarled wood beams and imagined what it must have been like to gather there in Elizabethan times. Then we took a table in the garden, and I indulged in my favorite British drink: a snakebite (hard cider mixed with ale).

Drinking and dining outside The George Inn.

From there we spent a few hours at Drusillas, which is worth a day trip for any families traveling around this region. The zoo specializes in smaller animals such as tamarins, lemurs and meerkats, with lots of hands-on educational exhibits.

A baby tamarin catching a ride from its parents at Drusillas.

It also has a sprawling play area with all the super fun play structures we don’t have in the States because they’re deemed too risky; e.g., spinning table-top merry-go-rounds without railings and circular treadmills that work like a hamster wheel.

Speaking of spinning, that’s what my head is doing after running around Brighton and its back roads, and transitioning through so many places in such a short time with too many stomach-lurching round-abouts along the way. I’ve described only a fraction of the sights seen and things done in our final week abroad. Suffice to say we’re feeling pooped and resigned to flying back to California in less than 48 hours, with very mixed feelings about ending our time abroad but nonetheless ready to re-establish some routines back home.

But I’m so glad we ended our time in England down here, on the edge of the cliffs and winding around country roads that distill what we love about England.

A quiet Sussex back road.

Related posts:

1. 83 Places, 5 Continents, 10 Months
2. Snapshots of Venezia and Treviso
3. Some Days Are Like That, Even In Switzerland

An image of The Long Walk from the early 1900s. (Photo courtesy thamesweb.co.uk)

Back in mid-April of 2007, I woke before sunrise in a hotel in the shadow of Windsor Castle and tiptoed out to run while Morgan and the kids slept. It was the final day of our family’s Spring Break trip to England. Having no clear idea of where I was headed, I found a trail to a wide strip of grass that stretched like a never-ending rectangular green carpet from the castle’s side gate. I had stumbled upon The Long Walk, the name Charles II gave the route in the 1680s.

Parallel rows of symmetrical trees bordered the neatly mowed lawn, and a wide paved path extended straight down its middle for more than two miles. It was the carriage road, where centuries of processions rode and marched up to the gates, and I stood there virtually alone, dazzled by the dreamy view of the pink-tinged sunrise on the colossus castle that belonged in a fairy tale. Then I sprinted that path all the way to the gates, where a little old lady dressed in a proper navy blue uniform, her gray hair in a bun, happened to be stepping out of a guard’s booth.

I stopped to watch as she slowly but surely walked to the center of the gold-tipped gate that towered above her diminutive frame. She reached in her pocket and pulled out an ancient-looking iron ring that dangled a giant skeleton key, and then she used both hands to turn the key in the lock and push back the iron wall, allowing me to imagine what it would be like to enter as a royal guest. Then she stood more upright, her duty for the morning — probably a duty she had performed for decades, following protocol of centuries — complete.

I distinctly remember lingering at that moment to take in all the details because I felt certain it was a magical, once-in-a-lifetime run never to be repeated. I had a sense then that I wouldn’t, couldn’t return to that spot, and I thus experienced the bittersweet feeling of anticipatory nostalgia — of paradoxically missing something at the same moment it happens, which enhances the experience with appreciation yet also siphons off the fulfillment with a sense of loss.

So why am I recounting this now? Because the other day I returned there for another sprint and experienced the joy of rediscovering a place. The path was, of course, still there and unchanged; that sunrise run three years ago hadn’t been a dream. I felt so profoundly happy to approach the castle again and see details in the architecture I had forgotten — so happy to revisit a destination that seemed somewhat familiar yet ripe for further discovery — and then, like an unexpected bonus, I found the Thames River Path, a gentle dirt trail along the riverside that reveals views of preppy crew teams gliding down the water and colorful houseboats docked along its sides.

Running by the Thames at Windsor & Eton ...

... and admiring houseboats along the way.

Instead of feeling so sad that this trip is ending, the run made me optimistic that our family would continue to journey together if we commit ourselves and set priorities to make travel happen, and consequently we might revisit some of the beloved destinations we passed through before.

We spent a week in London and Windsor — the penultimate week before returning to the States — and questioned whether we were doing the right thing. We had already “done” London (twice, counting our college trip). Wouldn’t it seem tame and familiar? Shouldn’t we use the opportunity to explore somewhere new? I now know we made the right choice, and I would advise other long-term travelers to bookend their journeys with familiar places that ease the transition.

We returned to several favorite attractions, the best being the 900-year-old Tower of London, where we poked around the White Tower and marveled at the centuries of royal armory and crown jewels. But I personally found one of the most interesting things to be Colly’s reaction as we approached the Tower’s entrance, and she said repeatedly, “I remember this!” Kyle, however, mostly said, “I don’t.” The same thing happened when we went to Windsor and revisited a wonderful pub across from the castle, The Horse and Groom; she remembered our previous meal there and even the candles on the tables that dripped so much wax, but Kyle had no recollection. She had just turned 9 when we visited before, and Kyle was a month shy of 6. I’m hopeful now that Kyle, who just turned 9, will remember these travels, and Colly surely will.

Trafalgar Square, where the kids climbed one of the giant lions at the base of Nelson's monument.

We enjoyed hanging out at Trafalgar Square, where the symmetrical fountains and monuments frame a beautiful view of Big Ben and the tall column honoring Admiral Nelson’s victory against Napoleon in the Battle of Trafalgar (the same Nelson that one of our favorite towns in New Zealand is named after), and from there we took the kids to see more Renaissance art and 19th-century Impressionist masterpieces in the fabulous National Gallery next to the square. Their favorite work turned out to be a lesser-known 18th-century artist whose name escapes me and who did a whole series on Venice. We saw the streets we had walked in Venice and marveled that the city looked virtually the same when he painted it almost 300 years ago.

We also discovered new areas of London and particularly liked the vibrant restaurant scene on James Street, where after-work crowds drinking and celebrating the warm almost-summer weather spilled out onto the sidewalk. Along James Street, we got great take-away from Guerrilla Burgers and seafood across the street at Sea Bass.

And for the first time, we took the kids to Ripley’s Believe It or Not. Morgan didn’t want to go because it’s so hokey and high-priced, but I thought it was worth it. Apart from the freak-show oddities and gruesome objects (e.g. lots of co-joined animals, body modification and torture chamber devices), we got to see unusual historical and cultural artifacts (e.g. part of the Berlin Wall). Since I have a fondness for low-brow art, I was amused to see creations such as a portrait of Lady Di made from dryer lint or a replica of the Tower Bridge built from matchsticks.

We also stayed at a hotel, the London Marriott Grosvenor Square, that I have to recommend not only because it was reasonably priced and nicer than expected, but also because the concierge was a lifesaver. We arrived with Morgan in excruciating dental pain, needing an emergency root canal, and Harry the concierge went to extraordinary effort to help us arrange transportation and treatment with Dr. Simons at the Mayfair Dental Practice. Dealing with emergency dental care during travel is truly unpleasant, but all’s well that ends well.

I also love the Marriott’s location, close to Hyde Park, where I returned each morning to run the same routes as three years ago. There’s something so quintessentially British about seeing the early-morning riders trotting their horses along the dirt track of Hyde Park’s Rotten Row, and I felt pulled along by the beauty of their form.

The Tower Bridge -- in Legos!

For the kids, the highlight of London and Windsor was our day at Legoland, where we celebrated Kyle’s 9th birthday. Halfway through our eight hours there, I told Morgan I felt like I was stuck in a waiting room without a book to read, but the kids’ goofy fun made it worthwhile. That, and seeing London re-created in miniature with Legos.

I have no idea when we’ll get back to London and Windsor, but it feels more like “when” than “if.”

Related posts:

1. The Cure for the Brighton Hangover

After 10 months of family travel, I don’t have a comprehensive packing list to share (here’s a good one for starters if that’s what you’re looking for), but I can detail some of the gear and clothing we found indispensable. A lot of essential items seem obvious, so I left them off this list; e.g., our Mac laptops, photography equipment, running shoes, and the iPhone to which we’re truly addicted. (We had the iPhone unlocked and replaced the SIM card in every country to get a local phone number and GPS, which is a pain but doable — and worth it.) Instead, I listed personal favorites that travelers might not think to pack.

I also listed useful supplies for “roadschooling,” and finally a few items we could have left at home — things we brought because we thought we should, but it turned out we didn’t need them.

For families heading off for long summer trips or sabbaticals, I hope this helps make your packing job easier. For those of you who’ve traveled for long stretches of time, please add your tips on what or what not to pack in the comments below.

Can’t Imagine Traveling Round the World Without These:

Colly and me catching a train to Venice with our Osprey Porter packs on back and our daypacks (with laptop holders built in) on front.

Osprey Porter Packs: After months of having this luggage virtually grafted to our sides, it’s hard to imagine life without our Osprey convertible packs. They held up great — no busted zippers or other malfunctions — and we found them comfortable and well-designed. I loved being able to pull out the straps and carry mine on my back when need be; then I’d tuck the straps back in to make it more of a duffel bag when checking it on board. Morgan and I each got the Osprey Porter 90and for Colly we got the smaller Porter 65. For Kyle, we went with a rolling convertible backpack, the Osprey Sojourn 22.Note: I am a firm believer in not using suitcases with wheels, since the wheel frame adds significant weight and you end up having to pick the bag up frequently to carry up stairs anyway. (The very useful site onebag.com has a good discussion on “Wheeled Bags and Other Bad Ideas.”) But Kyle was too small to carry his, so we got one with wheels so he could pull it. We also used an old, small Tumi suitcase with wheels as a “mobile office” filled with books and gear. I hated that clunky, heavy suitcase and wish we could have done without it.

REI Travel Document Organizer: We use this 6″x10″ case to hold our passports and extra credit cards and money. I carried it with my laptop pack, which I always kept in hand or looped around my leg while sitting, until we reached our lodging, and then I’d lock it in the safe (or hide it in folded clothing when no safe was available). I believe in hiding passports and extra credit cards and money with belongings left in the locked room rather than carrying those essential documents while sightseeing because pickpocketing or car break-ins seem more likely than room thefts. When we walked around, we carried only a driver’s license for ID and one credit card so that in case of theft or loss we’d have to cancel only one card. The document organizer made it easy to keep these things together and hide them.

Black Fleece Pullover and Rain Shell: Since I had only a few outfits that I wore repeatedly, I learned to dress in layers for warmth and to wear black as much as possible so dirt won’t show. I dressed up outfits and added color with scarves but basically lived in my black fleece pullover (and a few T-shirts made of high-tech synthetic fabric that dries easily and won’t wrinkle). The kids and I all had waterproof shells rather than thick coats, and they were warm enough for almost-freezing temps when coupled with the fleece underneath and gloves. Morgan decided to bring a thicker waterproof jacket and ended up glad he did, even though it’s fairly heavy, since it’s so versatile  and dressy enough to wear out. In Barcelona, I finally broke down and bought a thicker, dressier jacket to look more fashionable in European cities, but it felt like a luxury rather than essential, and I had to get rid of other clothes to make room in my pack for it.

These are the jackets I recommend, seen here when we're in the cold of Patagonia last October. I'm also carrying the Eagle Creek packable daypack recommended below.

Kindles:We love our Kindles! We started out with two and ended up getting a third, plus we use the Kindle iPhone app for another reading device. Given all the reading we did on the trip, it was a godsend to have a lightweight reading device in lieu of heavy books, and to be able to easily purchase books in non-English-speaking countries. The iPhone Kindle app was particularly useful for travel guides; several times in Italy, for example, we downloaded a Rick Steves guide to a particular city, and we’d refer to it on the iPhone while getting around town and touring a site.

My pack with some of the compression clothing sacks pulled out.

Eagle Creek Compression Sacks:The plastic bags are like giant Ziplocks that come in small, medium and large sizes to hold clothing. You pack your clothes in and squeeze the air out to make the clothes as compact as possible; plus, they work as organizers so you can separate your clothes into different sets rather than having them all jumbled together in the bag.

Swiss Army Knife: I’m amazed by how many times we ate out of cans and used our Swiss Army knife for opening them, or used it for myriad other purposes. I’m also amazed by how many times I forgot that it was in my carry-on bag and it got through airport security anyway.

Our lovely braided rubber clothesline, strung between two chairs in the sun and doing its job.

Braided Rubber Clothesline:We washed clothes in the sink once a week on average, and this little clothesline came in handy every time. It’s designed so you can hang several pieces of clothing from it, rather than just a few pieces draped over. We also stocked up on individual packets of hand-wash laundry detergent.

Headlamp:A lot of packing lists say to bring a flashlight, but I say get a headlamp instead! A couple of times we were in places where the power went out at night, and it was reassuring to have a headlamp so that both hands were free. Also, since the four of us often shared a single room, one of us could use the headlamp as a reading light when the others wanted to sleep.

Shoe Tag ID:Any time I go off on my own to run, I make sure I have this ID tag on my shoe so that if, heaven forbid, I were hit by a car or in some other accident, then I wouldn’t be a Jane Doe. What I like about this new generation of interactive tags from Road ID is that you can update the contact info online, so that emergency responders can go online or call a phone number on the tag to get your medical and contact info and then contact loved ones. This is particularly useful for travel when your contact info frequently changes. I also got two of the company’s dog-tag IDs for the kids to wear around their necks on travel days, in case we got separated in airports or big cities and they couldn’t communicate with authorities about their personal contact info.

Portable External Hard Drive: Prepare for the likelihood your laptop will get stolen or broken during travel. We backed up ours weekly with the Western Digital My Passport for Mac and made sure to pack the hard drive in a separate bag from the laptop carrier.

Really Handy Extras:

GoLite Mini Rain Shell: This paper-thin but powerful windbreaker folds up and stuffs into a pocket-size, ultra-lightweight triangle. I took it with me running and sightseeing frequently, just in case I needed an extra layer. It’s amazing how one thin layer provides so much wind and rain protection. I couldn’t find a link for it online, but the GoLite site (a great company for lightweight adventure gear) might offer it again or something similar.

Running with my GoLite rain shell in the Lake District of Argentina. This jacket weighs only a few ounces and folds into a pocket.

Eagle Creek Packable Daypack:This thin lightweight daypack folds up into a pocket-sized pouch. I liked it better than regular, heavier daypacks for hikes and sightseeing, and it was useful to have another bag to carry things like groceries.

Cheap Plastic Flip-Flops: I bought some in New Zealand when we stayed in lots of campsites with communal showers. They’re useful to slip on and wear in showers with icky floors.

Scissors: We use the scissors in our homeschooling kit all the time. I also brought along high-quality hair cutting scissors to cut Kyle’s and Morgan’s hair from time to time.

Portable Power Strip:We used this small power strip to increase the number of outlets in our lodging to accommodate our laptops. Coupled with the Apple World Traveler Adapter Kit, we could power up anywhere.

Roadschooling Essentials:

I’m listing some of our schooling supplies because they can be useful for family travel even if you’re not doing school on the go.

Pencil Box with Supplies: We have a 5″x12″ hard plastic pencil case that contains pretty much all the supplies the kids need: pencils and sharpeners, scissors, markers, paper clips, ruler and protractor, PostIts, tape, dice and playing cards. The only thing that doesn’t fit in it that we also use a lot: a stapler.

Small White Boards with Dry Erase Markers: We have three 9″x12″ white boards and use them constantly for lessons, especially math problems. They cut down on the need for scratch paper.

E-versions of Books: Most of the kids’ schoolbooks are online or in PDF form. We got login access for their math and science texts, so they can read them online. Colly’s history book publisher didn’t have an online version, so we purchased the book, removed the binding, and took it to a copy story to have the whole thing scanned as a PDF. (Halfway through our trip, however, I decided to get and carry her heavy math book because I was unhappy with the online interface, and our Internet connections were spotty and expensive.) We got most of their books for pleasure reading in Kindle format. We supplemented their e-books with online resources, our favorite being Brain Pop. I can’t say enough about how fantastic Brain Pop is, and it provided a great substitute for TV.

Mobile Scanner:This lightweight gadget is only 11″x2″. We scanned and sent a lot of their work to their long-distance teachers, and this scanner also came in handy a few times when we needed to scan something for personal business.

Journals and Paper: Even though the kids used the laptops daily, good ol’ paper and pencil were still the best for creative writing and drawing. We also brought graph paper for math.

Things We Thought We Had To Bring And Never Used:

Travel Towel: Every place we rented — even the RV — provided towels and other linens. Unless you’re camping the whole time or staying in hostels where no towels are provided, don’t bother bringing a towel.

Toiletry Kit for Carry-On: For the first few months when we flew, I’d include a toiletry kit with our essentials in my carry-on bag in case our luggage got lost. I never used these travel-size duplicates of things in our main toiletry kit, and it ended up being clutter we didn’t need. Keep in mind that unless you’re traveling to a very remote area, essential medicines and pharmacy supplies can be purchased pretty much anywhere.

Guidebooks and Maps: All the info you need is available in e-book format, from websites and from tourist info offices in destinations. Leave the heavy books at home.

Sink Stopper: Why is this on all packing lists? We brought one and never used it, even though we always did laundry in the sink. A plug was always available, or we could have plugged it up with a washcloth.

Final words of advice: Travel light so you can easily carry all of your belongings!

Kyle and Colly packed and carried all their own stuff for the year.

So many times we had to run to catch a train or squeeze into a small cab, and each time we expressed relief that we didn’t have more luggage. It really is possible to live out of a couple of small bags. Plus, there’s the added benefit of teaching our children (and ourselves) to be more self-reliant and less materialistic. The less you bring to carry, the happier you’ll be on the go.

Related posts:

1. When It Rains…
2. Packing It In
3. A Typical Atypical Travel Day

Sunrise on the Matterhorn

I’m sitting on my balcony of the Hotel Perren in Zermatt, Switzerland, listening to the church bells ringing out the day as the sun sets over the sheer 5000-foot cliffs to my right, which look like a crashing wave of rock and green pastureland clinging to roiling waters. Sarah and the kids are relaxing in the room after a great day of hiking, running and sightseeing.  In front of me, the sun surrounds the jutting peak of the Matterhorn in a soft yellow glow. The lucid sky, without a cloud in sight, provides the perfect blue background for the rough, snow-covered and angular structure of the Matterhorn itself. The sunlight falls down over the valley mountaintops to my left, as the sun secrets itself from view behind the peaks but still illuminates the town of Zermatt below.

As I sit here, Kyle comes up behind me and puts an iPod earbud in my ear and starts to play one of my favorite songs ever: Beautiful Day by U2.  I ask him what made him come and play this song for me, and he says, “It reminds me of today.”  I almost get teary.

Words cannot describe — at least mine can’t — how much I have enjoyed being in this part of Switzerland. We almost did not get to experience this sublime place for a couple of different reasons that show how travel can create some of the best experiences out of the most unpredictable ones.

Afternoon sun on Zermatt Valley

We came to Switzerland only after we pulled the plug on the logistically difficult visit to Turkey.  It was my idea to come here since I just always wanted to see the Matterhorn, which I guess is left over from years of riding the Disneyland Matterhorn ride and thinking that if the ride was that cool, then the real thing must be amazing.

Barns on hillside by trail leading up the Matterhorn

Unfortunately, I didn’t really know where it was or how to get here.  So, I found the Matterhorn on Google Earth and saw the town of Zermatt next to it, and saw that it looked like good hiking around the area. But when we arrived in Southern Switzerland, it was pouring rain and snowing in Zermatt. We were worried about driving mountain passes without tire chains and arriving in blizzard conditions with no snow clothes, so we scrapped plans for Zermatt in favor of lower-elevation areas. However, last week while staying near Lake Geneva, we saw the weather improving so we put Zermatt back on the itinerary and made our way here. In short, we almost did not get to see the entire reason I wanted to come to this county.

This morning, I started the day with a run up the Matterhorn trail, which goes up the steep sides of the canyon in front of the Matterhorn and passes 17th-century barns with sheep grazing on the hillsides. Zermatt is filled with barns and structures from the 16th and 17th centuries that are little houses with huge slate tiles for roofs, perched on stone foundations that raise them 4 to 5 feet off the ground.

Example of historical barns and buildings from 16th-17th century

A crazy patchwork of ladders and stairs allow access for the gnomes who must have lived there at some time in the past.

Ladder and door on a 16th-century barn

The trail is almost impossibly picturesque. I was allegedly running (the high-altitude air and steep terrain made me take a lot of walking breaks), but I couldn’t help stopping every few minutes to take another picture with my little camera. The sky in this valley is intensely blue and clear, due largely to the fact that the city banned all motor vehicles many years ago to avoid air pollution that would obscure the views of the Matterhorn from town. Instead of cars, little electric shuttles buzz around the town center like bugs, ferrying people to various parts of town (although, in truth, you can easily walk to anywhere in this small town).

View of Southern Alps toward Italy

I ran up toward the base of the Matterhorn and was surprised to see a little settlement called Z’Mutt. (Zermatt, Z’Mutt … I detect a pattern here.) Numerous historic barn-like structures, which look like troll houses, contained a few restaurants. Not many were open when I ran by, but I just loved the idea that you could hike a couple of miles up this steep trail and be rewarded with a beer and a pizza. I think I’ll try to force-march the kids up here tomorrow. (We were going to take the train to the base of the ski area for a view, but I found out that the train ride, like everything else in Switzerland, is absurdly expensive. The cost is about $70 per adult and half off for kids. The idea of spending $210 to see a pretty view that I can pretty much run up to see was not too exciting.) Besides, the forced march will do the kids good, I tell myself.

When I came back to the hotel room after my run, the sun was still shining and I couldn’t help but say to the kids over and over while pointing out the window to the great snowy horn-shaped peak in the sky, “It’s the Matterhorn!” When that wore out, I started on the song (the theme song to my Venice video), “Whassa matta-you” but changed it to, “Whassa matta-horn.”  The kids found it funny, or at least put up with me. At least I know they were happy since I was so goofy happy.

Kyle (and Colly below) getting ready for the ascent on the Matterhorn in the background

There are not too many days that are so special you know you will remember them the rest of your life, but today was one of those days.  Had we been here a week ago, it would have been snowing and cloudy and we would not have even been able to see the Matterhorn.  Sometimes, things just have a way of working out, and we have to remind ourselves that they do.

Kyle making friends with rodents in the town square.

We started this 11-month trip in Telluride, which is also a stunningly beautiful part of the word and similar to Zermatt, and it seems to make cosmic sense that we are winding down the trip in Switzerland. I will miss days like this when we return, but know that the days like today are special because they are rare, precious and beautiful.

Nighttime in Zermatt

Related posts:

1. Some Days Are Like That, Even In Switzerland
2. 83 Places, 5 Continents, 10 Months
3. The Swiss Cascade and Castle That Inspired Poets (and Us)

Lauterbrunnen

Over the past few days, we’ve glimpsed Switzerland at its prettiest and most poetic (which is such a relief after the stormy sky and mercurial moods detailed in the previous post).

Standing under Staubbach Falls.

The drive from Lucerne to Interlaken revealed alpine beauty that rivals even the Colorado Rockies and New Zealand’s Southern Alps. We checked into a cozy family room in a friendly little hotel, aptly named Hotel Splendid, and immediately headed out to explore before rain returned.

I’ve never seen as many waterfalls as we saw on the drive to Lauterbrunnen, a small town seven miles up the valley from the better-known Interlaken. “Lauter brunnen” means “many fountains” or “loud wells,” and there are 72 of them in and around town.  The waterfalls stream over sharp cliffs colored with alternating shades of dark and light gray, and then they’re swallowed by swaths of forests where the lighter green of new growth contrasts with the darker evergreens.

We stood in a meadow under Lauterbrunnen’s beloved Staubbach Falls, all of us feeling warmed by the sun and awed by the stream of mist floating down in the wind. I thought the moment couldn’t get any better, but then it did, because we saw a little plaque that indicated we once again were following in Goethe’s footsteps. He visited this spot in 1779 and was inspired to write the poem Spirit Song Over the Waters, which we read and discussed right there at the base of the falls until Kyle ran off to chase some sheep. (The next day Kyle wrote in his journal about the beauty of the waterfalls and concluded, “But most of all I love the mountains. They give me ideas for my mind.” I agree!)

After days of rain and indoor time, Kyle was so happy to run around here.

Overall, we really enjoyed Interlaken; I only wish the town could demolish its tacky modern high-rise hotels that look utterly out of place against the charming historic cottages done in quintessential Swiss-German architecture. The town’s original buildings look like they’re lifted from a Hansel and Gretle storybook, all woodsy and decorated with patterned carvings and stenciled paintings.

German is the dominant language in this region, but as is the case everywhere in Switzerland, we heard multiple languages and tasted a variety of cuisines. Our favorite meal was at a surprisingly authentic Mexican restaurant, El Azteca, where the Portuguese twentysomething waiter spoke so many different languages to the diners around us that I finally asked him (in Spanish) how many languages he speaks. He said six, as though it were no big deal (German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and English)! One thing I love about Switzerland: It has solidified the kids’ desire to study a second language in school, which before this trip they had groaned about as though it would be an endless chore.

A well-marked trail network branches out through the valley, and Morgan and I left the kids alone in the hotel room one morning to run together (which we only do when we feel certain it’s a safe place, with someone we trust at the receptionist desk available to help in case of emergency). We ran a path back toward Lauterbrunnen and once again marveled at the views — until a cloudburst drenched us with rain so freezing that we turned back. Well, the sun was nice while it lasted!

Morgan on our rainy run. No wonder the grass is so green and the waterfalls are so full around here -- it's really wet!

After Interlaken, we crossed over to the French part of Switzerland and settled on the north side of Lake Geneva. We checked into a terrific apartment in the town of Montreux, about a half hour from Lausanne, and rejoiced to be in a rental with a kitchen again. We have stayed in too many hotels recently and therefore celebrated the opportunity to cook simple meals and avoid overpriced restaurants. The apartment overlooks the lake and has a playground in front.

Our apartment building in Montreux isn't terribly pretty ...

... but the view from its balconey sure is.

The kids quickly made friends with three siblings (who are completely trilingual — German, French and English) from the apartment below us. We met their parents, who invited us down for dinner, and it was such a treat to get to meet some locals.

One morning, after the kids hit their schoolbooks for about an hour and a half, we gathered around the laptop to learn about the history of Chateau de Chillon and to read Lord Byron’s poem The Prisoner of Chillon. The castle is just a mile away from the apartment, so we packed a picnic and set off walking along the lakeside trail to spend much of the afternoon exploring the medieval masterpiece. We’ve visited many castles along the way, but this was the best restored and had wonderful displays enhanced with period furniture and artifacts.

Morgan called up, "Rapunzel, Rapunzel!" when he took this shot of me in one of Chillon's towers.

Byron’s words — written in 1816 after he imagined how the prisoner Bonivard must have felt during his six years chained to a pillar there during the 1530s — came to life as we poked around the dungeon. Morgan excerpted lines from the poem for captions to some of the photos in this slideshow (click the play button, then the “full screen” icon in the bottom right corner, then the “show info” tab in the upper right corner to read them).

This is turning out to be a great week not only for seeing Switzerland, but also for homeschooling. I’ve been meaning to write a followup to our early post on homeschooling, since families planning similar long-term trips have been asking about how we do it, how many hours a day the kids spend on school, and that sort of thing. I’ll try to write it soon, but suffice to say that their learning is intertwined with travel more than ever and is difficult to quantify because learning happens all the time, wherever we go. We managed to strike what feels like a good balance between sitting indoors and working through their core curriculum, and going outside to learn more spontaneously and experientially.

Speaking of which, right now we’re headed to the Musee d’Alimentarium, a food museum in neighboring Vevey that explores the history and politics of food production as well as the science of nutrition and food digestion. It may not inspire poetry, but likely will be food for thought!

A statue of Charlie Chaplin gazes at a giant fork in the water outside Vevey's food museum. As we often say during this trip, "That's something you don't see every day."

Related posts:

1. Some Days Are Like That, Even In Switzerland
2. 83 Places, 5 Continents, 10 Months
3. Changes Ahead

Our view of Lugano, Switzerland, from the hills of Campione.

“This is one of those days,” I said on our first full day in Switzerland as rain fell in sheets outside the window, obscuring the Alps.

We were sitting cross-legged on a hotel room floor and eating lentils out of a can for lunch while making innumerable Skype calls to apartment managers, hotels and the One World airlines ticket desk. While the kids gloomily plugged away at their math lessons, Morgan and I busied ourselves with research to redo our itinerary to avert freak Swiss snowstorms and British Airways strikes. When I needed a break, I washed clothes in the sink (“No laundromats in Switzerland,” the hotel clerk informed us, “everyone have their own washer”) and blew them dry since it was so cold they wouldn’t dry on their own.

I'm drying a sock, not intending to air my dirty laundry

But my spirits didn’t sink too low, because I know full well that unpredictable swings from great days to frustrating ones are inherent in long-term travel. Just two days earlier, on our last full day in Italy, I had declared, “This is the best day.” I ran across mountains in Tuscany for a 40K (24 mile) trail event, from the small town of Prato to the tiny village of Montepiano.

Italy and neighboring countries have a vast network of trails connecting remote regions, with this symbol to guide the way. This trail was part of the Prato to Montepiano run in Tuscany.

Along the trail, I paused to snack on incredible buffets laid out by the friendliest volunteers. I had never seen anything like it: Out in the middle of nowhere, near 4000-foot summits overlooking rolling green hills, teams of sweet gray-haired Italians handed out bruschetta, roast meats, pasta, cakes and cookies, cheese and red wine to runners and hikers. They all fussed over me when they learned that I’m American and that it happened to be my birthday. I can’t imagine a better taste of Tuscany, or a better birthday present.

At this aid station halfway through the trail marathon, these volunteers poured me red wine and dished up penne pomodoro.

An adage that I repeat while racing marathons also applies to travel: “There will be good times and there will be bad times, and neither will last very long.” That means it’s wise to savor any mid-race rush of positive emotions but exercise restraint and not pick up the pace too much, because fatigue and pain surely lurk around the corner; and on the flipside, don’t despair and give up when feeling lousy, because a second wind surely will come soon. So it goes with this journey, as shown by the contrast between our magical days in Cinque Terre and nightmarish arrival in Florence: Savor the good days and don’t sweat the disappointing ones. The four of us often cope with the down days by repeating the last line from the classic children’s storybook Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day: “Some days are like that, even in Australia” — changing “Australia” to whatever country we’re in.

Our travel day from Italy to Switzerland also alternated between funny and frustrating. We loaded up Mario (the nickname for our rental car) and found our way onto the autostrada, which anyone who’s driven in Italy knows is a white-knuckle experience. First you have to find the on-ramps (which are few and far between), each of which has a stressful electronic toll booth to figure out, and then you have to merge with cars going 80 mph in the slow lane. I used the GPS on our iPhone to navigate, but the little blue dot showing our position often was delayed, so more than once I missed telling Morgan to exit and we got stuck going on miles-long detours. We must have circled the outskirts of Milan four times and spent an extra 10 euros on tolls due to these inadvertent “longcuts.”

Hungry from the longer-than-expected drive, we decided it was time to experience Autogrill, which is the Italians’ answer to fast food and rest stops.

Autogrill: Way better than Taco Bell or Subway.

This is a special chain of restaurants and minimarts literally straddling the autostrada — like a bridge with the cars zooming underneath, with parking right next to the highway — so travelers can get off and on the freeway without having to go through a toll exit. The kids had been asking to go to one the whole time we’ve been in Italy, but we always said no because we wanted to avoid fast food and sample local establishments. Well, we should have listened to the kids, because the Autogrill rocks! Leave it to the Italians to serve affordable fresh dishes for “fast food” such as risotto, grilled meats, gourmet fresh panini, and a salad and antipasti bar with delicious grilled vegetables and tabouli.

We crossed over into Switzerland and immediately noticed that people drive slower. The snow-capped mountains became progressively higher and more picturesque, and we were dazzled by the views in spite of the overcast sky. We arrived at a nice but not particularly memorable hotel in the small lakeside town of Campione, about five miles from the popular city of Lugano. (By staying on the outskirts rather than in the center of major destinations, we’re cutting our lodging costs significantly.)

A chapel in Campione.

The rain cleared enough on one afternoon for us to explore a lovely tulip-filled park in Lugano and window shop at stylish stores with prices as steep as the Alps.

Cheap thrills: The kids love these rocking horses found in Lugano and elsewhere in Switzerland ...

... and so does my rockin' husband!

Yesterday we climbed back into Mario and drove two hours north to Lucerne, a place as perfect and precious as the carved cuckoo clocks for sale in the souvenir shops. The route took us through the 10.5-mile-long Gotthard Road Tunnel, the third-longest road tunnel in the world (the first being in Norway). It’s so long that I drifted asleep shortly after Morgan entered it, and when I woke up, we were still driving through the dark! If not for my nap, I surely would have freaked from claustrophobia.

Our plan was to get lunch as soon as we got to Lucerne, so I searched TripAdvisor on the iPhone and found an out-of-the-way pseudo Mexican diner called Crazy Cactus, which supposedly was good and relatively cheap. We got there and ordered one small chicken fajita plate to share, one half-portion of nachos for Colly, one appetizer-size quesadilla for Kyle, two drinks for the four of us to split (a Fanta and a large sparkling water) … and the bill came to $55 Swiss francs, or almost US$50! Oh how we missed Baja Taqueria on Oakland’s Piedmont Avenue at that moment.

Lucerne is lovely in spite of (or because of?) its cost of living. We checked into a fun and fairly affordable hotel called Cascada and set off to walk across the 14th-century Chapel Bridge, rebuilt in 1993 after some bozo dropped a cigarette and set the span on fire.

A view of Lucerne's Chapel Bridge showing its tower ...

... and the view of Chapel Bridge with the waterfront where we ate at Pickwick Pub.

The bridge leads to the Old Town square, full of Alpine architecture with flag-topped turrets and gold-rimmed clock faces that must have inspired the designers of Disneyland’s Fantasyland. We discovered well-priced pub grub along the waterfont there at Pickwick’s, and for the second time that day (the first being at Crazy Cactus) I heard wait staff speaking both Spanish and German — such a cool combination! This polyglot culture inspires me to study language more.

Lucerne looks lovely even in the rain.

Today, with rain still pouring down, we headed to the Verkehrshaus, aka Lucerne’s Museum of Transport, where we enjoyed seeing a model of the interminable Gotthard Road Tunnel mountain we drove through and a National Geographic documentary in their IMAX theater.

My Swiss miss and her little bruder at the transportation museum, in front of the model of the mountain with the looooonnnnngggg tunnel.

The road trip resumes tomorrow; next stop: Interlaken. Our itinerary changed quite a bit because we’re sticking to lower elevations to avoid the snow. We also extended our stay in one place (Montreux, on Lake Geneva) long enough to rent an apartment, since it’s becoming unbearably expensive to stay in hotels and dine out. But the biggest change to report, which I’m sad but relieved about, is we canceled our short trip to Athens. Going there this month ultimately seemed too risky and stressful, especially since we’re flying British Airways and they plan strikes on both days we were scheduled to go in and out of Athens. Greece now joins Turkey, Kenya, Costa Rica, Peru and too many other places to name on our “someday” list.

Meanwhile, we’re truly looking forward to seeing more of Switzerland and England, and if another May snowstorm sneaks up or an Icelandic volcano gets cranky or locusts fall from the sky, we’ll take pictures and try to laugh about it.

Related posts:

1. 83 Places, 5 Continents, 10 Months
2. The Swiss Cascade and Castle That Inspired Poets (and Us)
3. Eat, Run, Love

A pano of Florence (click to enlarge) seen from the hill of Piazza Michelangelo.

I have one piece of advice I like to tell pregnant women about how to handle labor and delivery: “Expect the unexpected.” The same goes with travel. The saying went through my head as we marched in stony silence in the rain, loaded down with all our bags, about a half mile from one hotel to another on our first full day in Florence.

We had arrived at the train station the previous afternoon after another figure-it-out-as-we-go, hurry-up-and-wait, run-to-make-the-transfer day of train travel. (Reading the Italy train schedule and decoding the ticketing process is about as easy as figuring out which IRS form to use.) Hooray, we made it! But then we entered our hotel, and the next 12 hours went down as one of those low points that pushed me to the last resort of parental optimism, whereby I tell the kids, “Someday we’ll laugh about this.”

A street near the Duomo, not far from our hotel.

We had booked ourselves into a hotel not far from the Duomo. The location seemed great. The website looked nice. The TripAdvisor.com reviews were good enough. The hotel manager, an American expat, seemed friendly via email. Best of all, we could get a three-room family unit for just 150 euros a night — what a deal! Most decent hotels in the European big cities we’ve visited charge around 200 for a standard room and require us to get two rooms or a pricey suite to accommodate the kids; hence, we’ve mostly rented apartments, which are more affordable. We reserved this three-room bargain for all eight nights in Florence.

Three things travelers should remember, along with “expect the unexpected”:

• Beware if a hotel’s website showcases photos of nearby tourist attractions and emphasizes its location rather than its rooms.
• Being recommended by Cheap Sleeps In Italy and Eurocheapo is not necessarily a good thing.
• If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

The cab dropped us off in front of an unremarkable four-story building that blended in with all the other centuries-old buildings on the block. A small sign listed the hotel’s name along with a handful of other tenants. We pushed a ringer, heard the door buzz and let ourselves in.

Call me crazy, but I expected to see a hotel lobby — you know, something like a receptionist’s desk, a sofa, perhaps a bouquet of flowers. Instead, we walked into a cold, dim entrance with a dirty marble floor and walls painted industrial green. It was empty except for some bikes locked to a metal post. A stairway with a cage-like lift at its center led upstairs.

We heard footsteps coming down, and a young woman — not the one with whom we had been in contact by email — said as a way of greeting, “I’ll unlock the lift for your bags.” Oh, okay, and hello. We piled the bags into the elevator and she instructed us to go to the second floor. I ascended the stairway with dread as the realization dawned this wasn’t a hotel but rather a collection of rooms for rent, the kind that might qualify for a Section 8 voucher back in the States.

She unlocked our door and led us into a narrow annex that contained a rickety desk with stacks of used guidebooks and other ephemera from previous travelers. A mini fridge sat on the floor, and on top of it were a few mismatched mugs and a rusted hot pot. A bunch of dusty dried roses hung as decoration. Oh my god, I thought, I’m back in college on one of those weekenders where we have to crash on the floor at someone else’s rental.

Suddenly, the lights went out, and the woman smacked a button on the wall. “In Italy, electricity is very expensive,” she said by way of explaining why the lights were on a timer. Then she left.

I poked around “the mini bar.” The fridge held somebody’s expired milk and leftover spaghetti sauce, and the hot pot contained calcified water deposits floating around.

Three rooms led off the annex, each with forlorn-looking furniture and its own small, ancient sink. But what really disturbed us were the windows, which were above eye level and made us feel as though we were in a basement instead of on the second floor. The toilet and shower were relatively new and clean, but they were in an impossibly small room connected to the hallway, and a weirdly handwritten sign on a slip of paper taped above the toilet said: Please Keep Bathroom Clean For Others. Clearly, we had rented a group of three rooms with a shared bathroom, not exactly the “family unit” I had envisioned.

Morgan and I looked at each other and voiced what the other was thinking: There’s no way we could spend eight nights there. We could barely stomach the prospect of one night.

“Don’t unpack yet,” we told the kids, and we promptly got online to research alternative lodging. We had made our hotel deposit via PayPal and paid for only one night, so the manager didn’t have our credit card number to charge us for the additional nights we had reserved. We were seriously contemplating “doing the skedaddle” (a phrase I got from Jeannette Walls’ wonderfully wry memoir, The Glass Castle); i.e., secretly leaving and skipping out on obligations.

We googled and called around and finally found a well-reviewed three-star hotel that sounded fabulous (too good to be true?) with a two-bedroom suite, and we could check in the next day. The manager said it normally goes for over 300 euros nightly but he’d give it to us for a special rate of 215. And he only had it available for five nights, so we’d have to leave Florence two days earlier than expected. Fine, I said, trying not to sound too desperate — we’ll take it.

Were we doing the right thing, suddenly moving out and paying significantly more per night? What if the new place was nearly as bad, and what would we do for the final two nights when we needed to be in the Florence area? (We’re here for the duration of the week because I’m running a trail marathon near the city on May 8.) We didn’t know — we just wanted to get the hell out of that room and get our heads around the situation, so we headed out for food and drink.

Eating at Eby's -- the calm before the storm.

We found exactly what we needed, just a half-block from the flophouse: a hole-in-the-wall burrito place! We couldn’t remember the last time we tasted tortillas, guacamole or Mexican spices. ¡Qué buenísimo! Eby’s Latin Bar at the corner of Via dell’Oriuolo and Santa Croce is un tesoro (a treasure) — a blissful break from pizza and pasta, with a wide selection of non-Italian beer. I ordered a Belgian ale and Morgan got a wicked brew called Lucifer. We topped it off with a sugary crepe. Boy, did that dinner cheer us up and fortify us for the night ahead, during which partygoers and drunks sang and screamed outside our window well past 1 a.m.

The next morning we woke bleary from an awful night’s sleep and prepared to leave. We debated one more time whether and how to return the keys and break the news to the manager. We could (a) just go and leave the keys in the room; (b) make up a “family emergency” excuse; or (c) be honest, explain the room wasn’t what we expected and emphasize the inability to sleep with the nighttime noise, and apologize. Honesty is the best policy, we told the kids, and Morgan went next door to the manager’s apartment while I started taking the luggage downstairs.

Less than a minute after Morgan emerged from the manager’s room saying, “Okay, let’s go!” a woman in her pajamas stepped out looking stricken. She had a shock of uncombed hair and big, fearful eyes that made her small frame look even thinner. “You can’t do this to me!” she said, stopping us in the hall. Her hands and voice were shaking as she became more enraged. “Eight nights! I set aside three rooms for eight nights! What am I supposed to do? There’s no way I can rent them out now! You can’t do this!”

She began detailing her financial troubles and raged again, “Do you know what you’re doing to me?”

Colly and Kyle stared at her, mirroring her big-eyed fear. I told her I was terribly sorry and would talk to her about it, but first I needed to take care of the children. I led the kids downstairs with our bags and told them to wait there.

I could describe the scene further, but later on my daughter wrote about it in her journal, and her perspective captures it better than I could:

“I’m sorry, we have to leave,” a hushed voice says.

“But you can’t just leave,” a higher, more panicked voice says.

“I’m really sorry,” the hushed voice says again.

The voices argue for a long time. Meanwhile, my brother and I are sitting on a cold hallway floor trying to make out what’s going on upstairs. The hallway is all concrete with cracked, pealing paint on the wall. I stare at a faded picture across from me of Mary holding baby Jesus.

“How long do you think we’ve been sitting here?” I ask my brother.

“I don’t know, ten minutes?” he replies.

“My butt’s numb,” I aimlessly say.

“Mine too,” he says.

What’s going on? We’re moving. Well, we move a lot, but this time we’re not supposed to be moving …

We finally got out of there, but first we gave the manager an additional 200 euros to partially compensate for her loss. I still feel sorry and guilty about her situation (hence I’m not publishing the name of her hotel) and lousy about the high cost of our mistake.

The rest of the week did, thankfully, go well. Our new hotel, Loggiato Dei Serviti, is better than we could have hoped, and we would expect to pay almost double what they’re charging us for the impressive two-room suite. Built in 1517 (!), the hotel used to serve as guest rooms for a monastery. It sits next to a church in a big old city square called the Piazza della Santissima Annunziata.

Our much-improved hotel room at Loggiato dei Serviti ...

... and the view out our window.

We were so relieved to arrive there, and we expressed new appreciation for hotel amenities. “It’s amazing,” Morgan joked, “they have these people in the lobby who smile and carry your bags!”

The hotel is around the corner from the Galleria dell’Accademia, where we viewed Michelangelo’s David, and just down the street from the Duomo, where we hiked the 414 steps up the campanile. We also have run around the hillside behind the Piazza Michaelangelo, studied Botticelli’s masterpieces at the Uffizi, marveled at re-creations of da Vinci’s contraptions at the very cool Leonardo da Vinci Museum (the kids’ favorite museum here by far), and discovered two fantastic restaurants I’d highly recommend to any Florence visitor: La Giostra (a slow-food gourmet gem, just a few doors from Eby’s burritos), and Ristorante Accademia in Piazza San Marco (I crave their wholewheat pasta with lamb ragu).

We leave Friday, which works out well — we now realize that five full days are enough for Florence — and we’ll spend two nights not far away in the town of Prato, near the start line for the mountain marathon. Then we hit the road on Sunday to start the Switzerland loop.

In spite of the rough landing, we’ve had several good days homeschooling and sightseeing here in Florence. I can hear us years from now reminiscing about David in the buff, Venus in the clam shell … and that livid lady in the spooky hotel!

Ponte Vecchio over the Arno.

The kids and I check out the base of a 13th-century church, San Miniato al Monte, above Piazza Michelangelo.

Related posts:

1. Some Days Are Like That, Even In Switzerland
2. A Typical Atypical Travel Day
3. Eat, Run, Love

A view from the Cinque Terre coastal trail, with the town of Vernazza coming into view.

Last night I read Goethe and ate divine pesto, and this morning I ran across a mountain and climbed back into bed with Morgan.

It’s all about life, Italy and the pursuit of happiness.

(Bear with me while I explain what Goethe has to do with it …)

I didn’t expect to pick up 18th-century German Romanticism more than twenty years after my last college lit class. I’ve been eating up delectable novels and memoirs like Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love and told myself I should ingest some historical fiction or classics (similar to how I reach for bran flakes and skim milk to balance out the pasta and wine).

Then, around the same day, we serendipitously stumbled upon Goethe. His name was everywhere. We were in the town of Malcesine on Lake Garda, a giant drop of blue in Northern Italy hanging like a bead off the skirt of the Alps, and were spending five nights there for no better reason than because three months earlier, in New Zealand or somewhere, Morgan had looked at Italy on Google Earth, saw the splotch of blue and the steep topography around it, and said, “I wanna go there!”

Kyle on a snowy ridge in the Alps above Lake Garda during a hike he took with Morgan.

As we drove the freeway up from Verona and the steep mountain pass down through Turbole, we started noticing inns and restaurants named after the German literary great.

Once we settled into our lodge, Morgan logged on to research why Goethe was such a big deal in this neck of the woods. “You gotta read this,” I soon heard him say.

We found ourselves following in Goethe's footsteps.

I looked over his shoulder at a newspaper article from 1986 about local bicentennial celebrations of Goethe’s sojourn to Lake Garda: The 37-year-old Goethe set off for Italy from Weimar at 3 A.M. on Sept. 3, 1786, in the midst of a full-blown midlife crisis. Impulsively, he took a short leave of absence from his post as the right-hand man to the young duke of Saxe-Weimar, jumped into a coach without a servant or much luggage, assumed the name Filippo Moller and left for what turned out to be almost two years of renewal in the Mediterranean. … In Italy, Goethe experienced what he called a rebirth, living a life “exactly like a youthful dream.”

I wound up entranced by Goethe’s early novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, and learned more about his Italian journey while touring the 6th-century Malcesine castle, a place he explored after docking his boat there due to bad weather.

The castle and town of Malcesine, which Goethe visited 224 years ago.

Ever an artist, Goethe pulled out his sketchpad and settled in to draw the castle. An exhibit at the castle detailed how the stress of Goethe’s job left no room in his life to pursue artistic interests, and how by radically changing his circumstances, the poet hoped to get closer to the meaning of his existence.

It will come as little surprise to those who know us that Morgan and I could appreciate the motives behind Goethe’s odyssey, much as I could relate to Elizabeth Gilbert’s decision, detailed in Eat, Pray, Love, to spend a year of self-inquiry through travel. It’s trite but true that the most satisfying kind of travel involves contemplating the meaning of life, and discovering and pursuing new interests along the way. It’s part of what we’ve been doing, and with a mere six weeks remaining until we return to California, we’re spending more time reflecting on where we’ve been — not just in the past year, but in the two decades we’ve been married — and what we might do next.

The topic came up again over dinner on the patio of the apartment we’re renting this week in Vernazza, one of the five impossibly beautiful villages that make up the coastal region known as Cinque Terre.

The town of Vernazza, with our apartment in the corner of the building on the far right, directly above the cafe umbrellas (that's our laundry hanging out the kitchen window).

The patio has a staircase that leads two flights down to the small town square and harbor, so the kids periodically ran from dinner to the beach. We opened a white wine harvested from the hillside outside our window, and served a rotisserie chicken and baguette from a deli downstairs. For the side, we cooked fresh pasta, covered it with locally made pesto, sautéed green beans and sliced an heirloom tomato (which isn’t labeled “heirloom” here — it just is). An outdoor restaurant sits right on the other side of the apartment terrace, and at one point a waiter, who had been observing our family meal with some amusement, came over and handed us a giant bowl filled with a couple dozen garlicky steamed mussels garnished with lemon wedges, compliments of the chef, just to be nice.

We lingered over the plates covered with mussel shells and chicken bones and looked across the water at the steep hill, where innumerable layers of dark gray rock stretch across in diagonal lines and then curve, dip, and rise again, as though charting geologic time, and we wondered how many millions of years it took the hill to push up from the sea. Then we looked over to the 14th-century church, so pretty against the pastel-colored buildings around the town square, and peered down to check on our kids, who were climbing on boulders protruding from the water, and we heard their giggles float up on the wind.

The church and hillside vines across from our apartment at sunset.

It was in so many ways the most satisfying dinner, and the potency and transience of the moment made me teary.

It’s not just that packing up and leaving home — and in the process leaving the security that comes with a familiar routine, a generous income and a solid reputation — forces change and exploration (of self as well as of surroundings) in a way no amount of therapy ever could. What moved me is the way in which this journey has delivered constant reminders — in the form of spectacular natural history as well as human artifacts such as Roman ruins and medieval castles — of the brevity of our time on Earth and the degree to which we’re microspecks in the millennia, so what can we do but seek happiness through relationships and experiences, and do the best we can with our greatest gift and trace of immortality — our children — during the limited time that we do have?

Kyle and Colly hanging out at the harbor after dinner while we watch from our apartment above.

I paused after that paragraph for a two-hour run. While Morgan and the kids slept in, I climbed the narrow coastal trail linking the towns of Cinque Terre.

I’m running more these days in part to prepare for a 35K trail race on my 41st birthday two weeks from now, which will be through a valley outside of Florence. Morgan is caring for the kids and arranging transportation so I can do the race, which is really giving me the gift of all the drama and endorphins that go with a tough mountain run, and what can I possibly give him in return on his birthday in September, after all he has given me? I smiled at the passing idea of a Rembrandt hat and cape so he could dress up like Goethe for Halloween.

But the main reason I’m running more, just as I’m letting myself eat and lounge around with Morgan and the kids more, is to soak in the sensations of these destinations and explore them as fully as possible before we head back home.

Kyle and I make a toast to each other with gelato cones.

As I navigated the rocks on the tapering trail and glanced over the edge to the ocean below, I considered something several people have said in casual conversation: “You must be sad the trip is coming to an end.” Oh yes, I really am, I automatically reply. But as I ran that cliff edge, I realized that assumption is only partly true; more than sad, I’m fundamentally grateful we’re heading home in mid-June.

Our days like this are numbered.

I’m thankful the trip has an endpoint because it is that very ending that enables me to so fully appreciate these numbered weeks. It’s that return date on the calendar that made Colly reach for my hand and squeeze it as we walked along the lakefront in Malcesine, and prompted her to say with maturity and tenderness beyond her 12 years, “I’m going to miss this so much.”

Along my run, I met an Italian man on the trail who had a creased face and a cigarette dangling from his mouth. He was carrying a gardening tool and looked stooped over as he walked toward a row of vines on the steep terraced hill. Generations of families have carved out a living by working the soil in this remote corner of the country, and it’s a safe bet he was carrying on a family tradition. I said buongiorno as I ran toward him, and he smiled and raised his eyebrows, a look of admiration crossing his face as he paused to study me and perhaps imagined what it must be like to run for fun. I wish he could have known how much I admired him at that same instant; he might be surprised that in that moment, I wanted to be less the fleeting, carefree passerby and more the local with a harvest to reap.

Morgan and I have talked over dinners and during runs about how we really can’t see our family joining the growing ranks of modern-day gypsies who travel indefinitely and call themselves “digital nomads” as they work and homeschool via the Internet wherever they might be (though anything is possible). We want to go back for the kids’ sake. This trip has been undeniably beneficial for their personal growth and education, as well as for our family bond, but they yearn for the friendships and familiarity that only their school and neighborhood can give. And we want to get back to aspects of life that we put on hold: maintaining a home, reading the local news, lending a hand to help in the community, socializing with friends, developing and finishing projects, earning the satisfaction of a job well done. Those things all really matter. The challenge, we know and vow to remind ourselves regularly, will be to preserve as much as possible the values and visions, and the rhythm of life and closeness with each other, that we rediscovered between Argentina and Italy.

Morgan took this shot of me near the north end of the Cinque Terre trail near Monterosso before we turned around and headed back.

Related posts:

1. One Year Later: The Time-Capsule Travel Letters and the ‘Eat Pray Love’ Backlash
2. 83 Places, 5 Continents, 10 Months
3. Some Days Are Like That, Even In Switzerland

Getting to Venice from Rome was one of those days, at times completely nutty but oddly fitting with our new sense of normal.

When we woke Colly and Kyle up early with the phrase, “It’s a travel day,” they knew to pack, check under beds, and look for chargers and adapters left in outlets. We reminded them to eat a good breakfast since we’re not sure where or when lunch would be, and brush teeth quickly so we could pack the toiletry bag. The Rome apartment was the 63rd place we’ve unpacked and slept in since leaving home August 15, so they knew the drill.

Morgan and I packed up this bedroom in our Rome apartment.

We had to put the place back in order before the apartment owner came by at 8:30 a.m. Checking out of a hotel is what you do on vacation; checking out of an apartment while leading an itinerant life is something else completely. We had to do chores such as dishes and debate what groceries to keep. (I regrettably left behind breakable bottles of olive oil and balsamic, but I crammed leftover breakfast cereal into baggies.) The apartment manager showed up, returned our deposit and made a phone call in Italian to help us figure out how to check into our Venice place. The clock was ticking to catch our 9:45 train, so I enlisted the kids to guard our luggage in the lobby while Morgan finished the checkout and I went in search of a cab.

I walked six blocks toward the Coliseum to find a taxi queue, armed with only an Italian phrase book to explain that I would need the driver to pick up our family and then go to the station. The cabs were lined up as expected, but the first few were too small to transport all of us and our stuff. I approached a larger car that was fourth in the row, knocked on the window and said, Buongiorno, parla inglese per favore? He said the Italian version of “not really,” so I proceeded to use mostly Spanish, adding an “eh” sound on the ends of words.

The driver understood but then had to get out and exchange words with each of the drivers ahead of him so there would be no hard feelings that he was getting out of line. They exchanged lots of words — they seemed to be talking about family and sports — but finally we got on our way and I directed him back to where Morgan, the kids and our bags were waiting on the curb. We piled in and drove ten minutes, which cost 8 euros according to the meter, but the driver said in English, “No, it’s 12 because you have luggage.” We rolled our eyes and forked over 12.

At the station, multiple doors led to dozens of platforms, all of them crowded and everyone rushing. We had about 20 minutes to get our tickets and find our train. Morgan located an electronic ticket window, but it was broken; he found another, which was broken too. I waited with the kids and studied the train schedule to find our platform while Morgan found a third ticket dispenser that worked. Then he discovered the system had no record of the reservation that we made online three days earlier. With only 15 minutes left until departure, he had to go through the whole process of buying four seats, not knowing if they were still available or if we’d be able to sit together.

Colly and Kyle, meanwhile, stood by with a look they’ve developed this year: a very adult-looking blank expression, honed through myriad security lines and customs interrogations, that indicates they’ve switched to autopilot and are ready to cope with whatever happens next. At one point Kyle did a dramatic hyperventilating thing and said in double time, “I’m scared! We’ll miss our train! What’ll we do!” and for a second I thought his head might spin around, but then just as quickly he slipped back into a deal-with-it mode.

I cheered when Morgan pulled a piece of paper from the machine. Then we all rushed, as best as we could, to a platform half the station away. We found our train, but then we had to find the car with our seats. Once we found the right car, we encountered an aisle jam-packed with people and luggage. Our seats were toward the other end, so we told the kids to squeeze through and hold them for us while we figured out how to load and store our four packs and the heavy black rolling suitcase (the one we nicknamed “the tick” because it’s always bloated with schoolbooks and equipment and is such a pain).

We found ourselves stuck at the doorway, surrounded by people and struggling with bags. Morgan hopped off, ran down the platform to the car’s other door and ran back to tell me there was storage space down there. He told me to get the bags off and help him take them down to the other end. I looked at him, mildly aware of my armpit sweat soaking through my shirt, and tried to keep my voice calm as I said, “We are not stepping off this train when our children are seated in the middle and it’s leaving any second.”

Fine, he told me, we’ll split the difference; he hopped off again with as many bags as he could carry while I stayed and slowly maneuvered the rest of our stuff. In a minute, I looked down the aisle and saw him approaching me. Bag by bag, we squeezed past other travelers, took our seats with the kids and exhaled. “That was interesting,” Morgan summed up.

Victory! We made it on the train, got seats and found a place to stash our bags.

I abandoned my earlier good intention of homeschooling on the three-hour train ride because I wanted to zone out and figured the kids did, too. Colly pulled out her laptop and began creating a spoof Power Point presentation with clipart. Kyle watched The Simpsons on his iPod and read a chapter of Bridge to Terabithia. Pretty soon they were both sound asleep, and when they woke up at the Venice station, we realized we were famished.

Mmmmm ... train station pizza hits the spot.

We got off the train and headed for the station’s pizza bar. Colly and Kyle finished their slices and asked for gelato, so Morgan fished out some euros and told them they could have some if they figured out how to order it themselves. They wandered off on their own, out of sight — such is the trust, or foolish lack of concern, that we have developed after eight months on the road — and they came back grinning with scoops of stracciatella, the Italian version of chocolate chip ice cream. “Did you say grazie?” I asked, and Colly said, “Of course” with a “duh, Mom” tone, as though mildly insulted to be reminded to attempt to speak the language.

From there, it was just a few steps to the water taxi hub where we took in our first dazzling view of Venice. “Wow!” we all said, and just stood there, no longer in any hurry. This, I explained to the kids, is a place where not much has really changed over the centuries. Look, a city with no cars! Look, water lapping at the front doors! Look, buildings all built before Columbus even set sail! “Wow!” we all said again.

We pulled out the iPhone, which carried an Italian SIM card and local number thanks to Morgan’s cleverness, and called the not-very-helpful apartment manager who gave us baffling directions and told us a security code to punch in the door. Then we had to figure out which canal, boat, ticket and stop to choose. From there, everything progressed by trial and error, a classic case of three-steps-forward-and-two-back: buy four tickets, get on the wrong boat; no, no says the captain, pointing, quello (that one). Off the boat, down the dock, onto another taxi; no, no says another captain, pointing at a ticket machine. Oh, capisco, I get it, we gotta validate our tickets. Off again, fumble with the machine until a stranger takes pity on us and demonstrates the right way to do it. Finally we’re on our way — to where?

On our way down the Gran Canal to find our apartment.

“Um, excuse me,” I asked a couple from Hong Kong who spoke English and held a map of the canal, “can I take a look?” We realized that we had about 12 stops to go.

“You know, most families who come to Venice probably spend months planning the details,” I mentioned to Morgan, “and we’re just making this up as we go.”

We relaxed and soaked in the sights of the gondoliers standing and propelling their beautiful long boats and nodding hello to the water taxi captains who zoomed by in their fancy speedboats with the highly varnished wood sides. There were so many details to observe on all the buildings — so many mossy and sooty reliefs of faces and gargoyles that have looked down on travelers like us for who knows how many centuries. We went along the whole S-shaped Gran Canal before finally arriving at our stop, just past Piazza San Marco.

We heaved our packs on our backs for the last time that day and headed toward an alleyway a couple of bridges away. Around a nondescript corner and behind a gelato shop, we found the apartment front door, and as if by magic, the security code worked. The door opened to another extremely small passageway with nothing but a spiral staircase almost as steep and narrow as a ladder. Feeling like Alice in the rabbit hole but in reverse, I climbed up and braced myself for whatever we’d find on the other side of the next door.

The waterfront where we got off ...

... and the alley where we found it.

The apartment door was oddly decorated with sparkly smoked mirror panels that looked more Vegas than Venician. I opened it, and the first thing I saw was a remodeled bathroom with a large tub. “Oh, this is nice!” I called down to the others who were still navigating the staircase. Then I looked down the hallway to the rooms. “Oh, uh … this is weird!”

I saw a main room with exposed wood beams and antique hardware around the windows that gave a feel of Old Italy — but its orange sofabed and linens looked borrowed from a nursing home. The kitchenette, circa 1975, fit into a closet constructed of fake wood paneling. Then Morgan made the announcement we all have come to dread: “No WiFi, no data port.” Ugh, no Internet, no Skype.

I looked at the oddly oversized, decades-old microwave oven that sat perched like modern art on a tiny, teetering table in the middle of the hallway-that-passed-for-a-kitchen. Of course there would be no Internet in a place like this. Oh, well.

Our apartment had a lovely view, but ...

... the interior could have used some updating.

“C’mon, let’s go check things out,” I said. We dumped our stuff, secured our laptops and hid our money and passports as best as we could, and headed back out to explore. The kids, visibly wilting, perked up at the prospect of another gelato. (Our nutritional standards, like most aspects of our lives, have loosened up considerably.)

So goes our first-day-in-a-new-place routine: Find the market, buy some fresh milk and fruit. Scope out restaurants and the main streets leading to the main sights. Find a park with a playground and a good place to run. In Venice, this involved getting tangled in tour groups and lost down dead-end streets. Glassy eyed and loopy with growing fatigue, we had little sense of purpose or direction other than filling our stomachs and finding our way back.

We crossed San Marco Square ...

... explored streets like this ...

... and occasionally got lost in narrow passageways like this.

We used Morgan’s TripAdvisor iPhone app to search for nearby restaurants and were overwhelmed by listings for overpriced yet mediocre dining options. We didn’t want to cook in the slightly creepy new apartment, which didn’t have a proper stove to cook on, but we didn’t want yet another slice of pizza or overpriced noodles.

Then three things happened that reaffirmed my faith that things have a way of working out on days like this, as long as we get creative and don’t give up:

(1) We found a grocery store and I asked the checkout clerk, in broken English and Italian, if she had any restaurant recommendations for an affordable, good-quality place to eat. (Foolproof travel advice: When in doubt, ask a local.) She eagerly wrote out the name and directions to a restaurant not too far away. We had passed it earlier — it looked like nothing special, just long picnic tables covered with red-checked cloths and a TV playing sports — but we went there a few hours later, and sure enough, we were rewarded with a cheap but hearty and authentic meal.

(2) We had seen one of Anthony Bourdain’s foodie travel shows that profiled Venice on an airplane, in which he spotlighted one special hideaway where the seafood is remarkably fresh and the preparation is phenomenal. We figured it would be impossible to find in the maze that is Venice. And then, walking back to our apartment from the market, something caught my eye in the window of a restaurant: a small collection of stickers. One was from Michelin Guide and the others were for Italian food awards. I zoomed in for closer inspection at the menu. At about the same time, Morgan recognized the exterior from the show. Yes, it was Al Covo, the restaurant Bourdain profiled, and it was only about 30 feet from our front door. Of all the places it could be in Venice, it was virtually right under our nose! “This means,” I said, “you and I can have a date and leave the kids in the apartment watching a movie while we eat. We’d be so close, they could come get us if anything goes wrong.” And so we did a couple of nights later — and it was magical, and the kids loved having a movie-watching night on their own.

A couple of nights later, Morgan and I had a date here.

(3) Back at the apartment, Morgan figured out a way to wire the cell phone to the laptops and siphon a connection from Vodafone so we could have some Internet connection via the cell phone. The guy is a genius.

This day actually happened eleven days ago, and I felt ambivalent about taking the time to record these details in one of my longest blog posts yet. But then I thought about how we’ve had several more travel days in just the past week, each unique but similar in their unpredictability and sense of discovery. These travel days blur together, and I feel the ones from the first half of our trip slipping from memory. I want to be able to show others who ask about our trip what it was really like — how we functioned as a family while getting from one point to another — but mostly, I want to keep these days in mind to savor when I’m sitting in my permanent address and wanderlust, always simmering, heats up.

Related posts:

1. Snapshots of Venezia and Treviso
2. Eat, Run, Love
3. In the Backwoods of Blackball, Not Your Typical Hilton

Whereas Venice’s charm began to wear off after two days — due to inflated prices, hordes of tourists, and the sense that most everything there is preserved for show rather than for real — I would gladly spend many more weeks here in the Treviso area. We have two wonderful hosts to thank — Berkeley transplant Serena and her Italian husband Luciano, whom we met last summer at a running event — for showing us their home and taking us to a trail race today. Molto grazie!

Two restaurants any traveler to this area should try: Al Covo in Venice (one of Anthony Bourdain’s recommended hideaways) and Toni del Spin in Treviso. While I can’t recommend our Venice apartment, I definitely recommend our relatively affordable little Treviso inn, Albergo il Focolare.

This past week, while I became hopelessly stalled writing a longer post describing our arrival to Venice, Morgan became ever more inspired to take exquisite photos (and to produce a silly short video, which is at the end of this). I don’t want to hold back his photos or delay an update on where we’re at, so consider this a sample and a promise of more to come. Meanwhile, I’ll endeavor to whittle away at my long-drawn-out, only-my-parents-would-care-to-read-this longer draft.

Kyle and Colly peak out of our Venice apartment, which was on the waterfront about a quarter mile from Piazza San Marco. The location was great, but the interior was not so great.

Quintessential Venezia! Just about every alleyway leads to a canal view like this.

Morgan shot this right outside our apartment. I couldn't help smiling and spinning around this lamppost.

The kids and I peak over Rialto Bridge, the oldest bridge spanning the Grand Canal. (It was rebuilt in 1591 -- hey, that's relatively modern!)

Then we transitioned to Treviso, where more than anything else we wanted to do … laundry!

It's amazing what passes for fun sometimes.

A typical scene in Treviso's town center -- mostly closed to cars, it hums with shoppers in open-air markets. This is right around the corner from our hotel.

We met Luciano and Serena in their hometown of Mareno and explored wineries and castles around small towns such as Follina.

We woke up at dawn to go with the kids and Luciano and Serena to a 12K trail race in the tiny town of Refrontolo ...

... and were rewarded by this race course, which meandered through vineyards. A lot of the course was much steeper and muddier than this stretch! Best of all, the race organizers gave participants bottles of wine instead of T-shirts.

If you’d like to get a feel for our Venice gondola ride, check out this video — and blame Morgan for the choice of background music.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Related posts:

1. A Typical Atypical Travel Day
2. Eat, Run, Love
3. Some Days Are Like That, Even In Switzerland

If you arrive at St. Peter's Square at sunrise, you're rewarded with a view of this ...

... and this.

I know, it’s incredible to be able to say not only that we started the day with the Pieta, but also, “I was running laps around the Circus Maximus.” The circus is a half-mile oval track in a dirt and grassy area where Julius Caesar and subsequent emperors through the 4th century used to come down from their palaces on the adjacent Palatine Hill and join tens of thousands of spectators to watch chariot races. Only a few remnants of the starting gates remain, but it’s easy to imagine the thundering hooves and wheels picking up speed on the straight-aways and the brutish drivers who struggled to keep their balance in the bumpy carts, sometimes crashing and dying on the curves.

That’s one of the best things about being here in Rome: I really can picture the ancient people who no longer seem so ancient and better understand how they went about their lives.

On our first day, we explored the remnants on Palatine Hill, in between the Forum and Circus Maximus, to find clues about the everyday lives of ancient Romans.

But Rome does not reward the visitor easily. Rome Fatigue sets in within 24 hours, the symptoms being a throbbing head, aching feet and a defensive stance toward others. My elbows stick out to navigate crowds while my hand grips my bag to prevent theft. I cram info from guidebooks and try to interpret it for Colly and Kyle, whose eyes glaze over after a couple of hours — their heads are spinning from learning about the Renaissance 500 years ago and the Republic 1500 years before that (which makes Paul Revere’s house that we visited in Boston a year ago seem virtually modern). At least we are blessed with beautiful weather; I definitely would not want to visit during the worst of the summer’s heat and crowds.

The antidote to the fatigue is good food, lodging and company, and we’ve been blessed with all three. We’re sharing the week with Morgan’s parents, and it’s delightful to spend time with them here. We combined resources to rent a top-floor apartment with a rooftop patio overlooking the Coliseum, which is an ideal place to unwind and contemplate the tired but true saying, “In Rome, the past is always present.”

Morgan on the rooftop of our apartment with the Coliseum in the background.

For the kids, one of the best things about Rome was being with their grandparents!

I decided to make a list for would-be Rome travelers of some of the things that make Rome maddening, so that you’re forewarned, and other things that make it completely worthwhile:

• Rome Airport’s baggage claim: a perfect example of the city’s groaning inefficiency. Baggage from at least 10 different flights funnel onto each dirty, creaky carousel, and some of the bags have been popped open (by thieves? by customs? who knows) and spill clothes. Hordes of stressed travelers huddle around, blocking access or view of the carousel, so grabbing a piece off becomes a contact sport. Several separate companies handle the airport’s baggage operation, and as we waited an hour before glimpsing our packs, I spun theories on the rivalries, deals and kickbacks that must have developed the system and prevent it from streamlining.
• Queues and entrances to major sites: by 10 a.m., the lines to get in to see anything worthwhile stretch for blocks. Each place has multiple lines to multiple entrances, all of them tangled. You have to walk around, squeeze through clusters of tour groups and decipher clues from surrounding conversations to know if you’re standing in the right line because helpful signs in Rome are as scarce as public bathrooms.
  

  Big crowds and high prices are unavoidable around hot spots like Trevi Fountain.

• Price gouging near the tourist sites: Restaurants lure you in with delicious-looking panini that costs only 4 euros (about $5.40 US) for a big-sized sandwich, but they don’t list the price for drinks. When the bill comes, you discover that a skinny 10-ounce can of soda also costs 4 euros each and a small gelato costs 6 euros. We spent 56 euros ($75) on a simple lunch of two paninis, one cheese pizza and one salad because $26 went to buy three Diet Cokes and two Fantas. Thank goodness we skipped dessert.
• Traffic and street crossings: Most intersections go something like this: “Kids, hold my hands, get ready, now run! No, wait, aghhh — Jesus! Okay, now!”

And here’s why everyone should try to visit Rome at least once in their lifetime:

• St. Peter’s Basilica: Nothing prepared us for the size, scale and grandeur of The World’s Biggest Church. We got there when it opened at 7 a.m. to view it unhurried and uncrowded (a few hours later, lines stretched longer than a football field). It’s not just the Pieta that makes it worth a pilgrimage; it’s the frescoes, the palatial marble mosaic floors, the preserved 300-year-old Pope’s remains in view, the nearly 2000-year-old bronze statue of St. Peter whose toe has been rubbed off by a millenium of faithful kisses, the light and color and gold … it’s stunning.
  

  St. Peter's Basilica covers six acres and stretches two football fields from one end to the other.

  

  Michelangelo designed the dome when he was 71; others finished it after he died in 1564. It's 430 feet high. Each of those letters on the gold ribbon, which quote Jesus talking to St. Peter in the Bible, are 7 feet tall.

  Early-morning services were going on, reminding us we’re in a working church, not a museum. Our progressive Presbyterian kids, who are used to sitting cross-legged around a female pastor who plays guitar and sings folk tunes, watched wide-eyed as priests, nuns and altar boys genuflected and mumbled in Latin. Then we hustled out, walked about a half mile to the Vatican’s other side, bypassed lines already a quarter-mile long and entered at 8:30 a.m. with our pre-booked tickets. When in Rome, get up and go early.

• The Raphael Rooms and Sistine Chapel: I feel lame even attempting to describe their magnificence; all I can say is the experience brings learning to life and manages to condense the history of humankind into a few glorious rooms of frescoes.
  

  Our view of Raphael's School of Athens. That's Plato and Aristotle in the middle, and Plato (on the left) is painted with da Vinci's face. After the Pope let Raphael get a sneek peak at the Sistine Chapel, Raphael returned to the already-finished painting and added that brooding figure sitting on the steps with orange pants, which is Michelangelo as Heraclitus, aka "The Weeping Philosopher."

  We figured out who’s who in the School of Athens painting, speculated on the relationship between Raphael and Michelangelo, craned our necks up at the chapel’s panels, and were awestruck by the fearsome Last Judgment wall (which Michelangelo painted 23 years after the ceiling and which captures his growing disillusionment with the church and the Counter-Reformation). Kyle really admired the way Michelangelo painted his chief critic heading toward Hell naked and with a serpent wrapped around him, the snake’s head strategically positioned over private parts.

• The Vatican Museum before the Raphael Rooms and Sistine Chapel: I approached this unbelievably large warehouse of art with the wrongheaded attitude that we had to “get through it” to get to Raphael and Michelangelo. Boy am I glad we slowed down, as it was a fabulous collection that captured so much of what Colly has studied in her sixth-grade Ancient History book over the past six months. We saw writing tablets circa 2500BC that were a hallmark of the Sumerians’ civilization, Egyptian coffins and mummies, and Greek and Roman sculpture that inspired the Renaissance greats.
  

  It's a special day when you get to say, "No climbing on the sarcophagus, kids."

• The Arch of Titus: Out of all the ancient ruins we’ve toured (which is a lot), this one arch — the oldest extant one in Rome, built in AD81 — held my attention perhaps more than any others. Its reliefs honor a terrible moment in history: when Titus led the Roman army to Jerusalem in the year 70 to put down the Jewish Revolt, sack their riches and sacred objects, and destroy their great temple (the Western Wall, aka Wailing Wall, is what remains). The Romans then used the stolen money and slave labor to build more of their great city.
  

  A detail from the Arch of Titus in the Forum. It was built one year after the Coliseum and is about 50 feet high.

  

  Here I am trying to explain it to Kyle. He liked how some of the details looked like architectural details on Piedmont homes.

  It’s fascinating to see the aesthetic details of the arch — for example, an S-shaped corbel with decorative patterns that reminds me of the carved corbels of our own house — and to feel drawn to the Romans who made it, but on the other hand be appalled by the brutality and injustice of their empire. Likewise, the Coliseum stirred in me both admiration for their engineering feats and disgust for their bloody entertainment.

  

  You might say the Coliseum is bloody brilliant.

• Authentic, slow-cooked regional cuisine: Since we don’t speak Italian and we’re in a tourist-oriented spot, it took some work to find a special, locals’-favorite restaurant, but we did. I highly recommend Il Bocconcino, right around the corner from our apartment on Via Ostilia, for anyone looking for a meal near the Coliseum.

I think I’ll stop before I inflict Rome Fatigue on any readers patient enough to stick this far. We leave Rome and take a train for Venice on Monday. Here’s a slide show of Morgan’s Rome photos (if you play it, I encourage you to click the icon on the bottom right corner of the flickr screen to enlarge to full screen view). Colly’s photos follow below.

Colly took her own photos and did her own slide show! Be sure to enlarge it to full screen, then click the “show info” option in top right corner to see her captions. Ciao for now!

Related posts:

1. A Typical Atypical Travel Day
2. Some Days Are Like That, Even In Switzerland
3. Eat, Run, Love

A slice of Costa Brava countryside near Begur.

In reality, we took a bus north to the region known as Costa Brava, which translates as “wild” or “brave” coast. Begur sits among a string of medieval villages and seaside hamlets connected by walking paths carved into the cliffs.

Begur is about 2K inland from this tiny neighborhood called Sa Tuna ...

... and here I am with the kids on a stretch of the coastal trail that connects Sa Tuna with other beaches.

An hour and a half after leaving Barcelona, we were getting kissed on the cheeks by the couple who run a boutique hotel called Aiguaclara. It’s housed in one of several mid-19th-century mansions built around the town square by colonial entrepreneurs who went to Havana in the 1850s, made boatloads of money on tobacco and other products, and came back to build their dream homes by the coast. Aiguaclara is done in a Spanish neo-classical style, which means hallways and stairs made of terra cotta and decorative ceramic tiles, doorways carved in thick wood and embellished with antique hardware, and railings and balconies finished with ornate wrought iron.

The Hotel Aiguaclara

The owners decorated it with a blend of antiques and mid-20th-century modern furnishings, so part of the hotel feels authentically 19th century while other parts feel frozen in the ’50s or ’60s. The windows look out to a hill crowned by an 11th-century castle, and right outside the door, the narrow cobblestone lane leads to a town plaza humming with families strolling and church bells ringing. It’s simply one of the most special, loveliest places we’ve visited so far.

This 11th-century castle crowns Begur's highest hill. We hiked or ran up to it several times to take in the coastal views.

Castles pop up all around Begur. This one is about 100 feet from our hotel.

This is a typical street in Begur, lined by a few of the homes in town built by barons who made their money in the 1850s in Cuba.

We got to know the hotel quite well and spent more time there than anticipated due to an illness that knocked all five of us down for two days straight. Thank goodness we felt so comfortable there, and the owners were so helpful and caring, because a virus virtually turned us inside out and left the kids frightfully feverish. Finally, the kids felt well enough to go outside and walk about 200 meters to Begur’s town square and eat a few spoonfuls of gelato.

Before and after we got ill, we had several meals here around Begur's main plaza. The castle on the hill is peaking through in the background.

Sadly, Cheryl had to leave before we all fully regained our health, but at least we had one magical day together in Costa Brava before we all got sick, during which we explored the nearby medieval town of Pals.

Cheryl took this shot of us standing under an archway dating back to the late 700s and leading to the village of Pals.

This pano of Pals (click to enlarge) shows how the medieval village has been meticulously restored and maintained.

Easter Sunday goes down as another atypical and memorable holiday on this trip. We skipped church (I didn’t want to subject the kids to a Spanish-language Mass, during which they might go yackety-yack midway through), but we did have a delightfully nontraditional pagan dinner that stretched late into the evening. Finally we were able to eat, and boy were we hungry, so we went to another tiny neighborhood on the coast called Aiguafreda and settled into the sofas and recliners that surround cocktail tables in the Vintage Lounge. The out-of-the-way restaurant and hotel is perched like an enclosed balcony on a terraced hill overlooking the pounding waves and coastline. I had discovered the place during a run, literally stumbling upon steps to its front door as I navigated the coastal trail. It’s called the Vintage Lounge and Hotel because it sits next to what had been a famous but short-lived five-star hotel in the 1960s, and the owners salvaged furnishings from there to decorate the place and turn it into a hip retro hideaway that truly captures the feel of another time and place.

We feasted on French- and Italian-inspired tapas like grilled tuna and risotto with truffle essence while playing backgammon with the kids and listening to the bossa nova strains of “The Girl from Ipanema.” After 9 p.m., the tables began to fill with beautiful and trendy-looking young couples whose conversation seamlessly switched from French to Catalan and Castilian. Then the lounge owner, a woman named K.C. who’s about our age, came over to find out more about this family from California. It turns out she’s from Southern California, went to the University of Colorado, married a French man and settled in Costa Brava about 20 years ago. They have two kids and speak four languages in their home (English being the fourth), and they designed and opened the Vintage Lounge and adjacent Vintage Hotel a little over a year ago. We drank up the conversation as well as the scene, inspired by the place and the example set by that woman. One of the best things about this trip is the people we meet along the way.

In hindsight, Costa Brava was the perfect place for us all to get sick and do almost nothing. The region feels like a dreamlike retreat from the rest of the world. I’d love to go back someday and do nothing more than explore more of its streets, coves and hills.

Pals in Pals: Colly took this shot of Kyle, me, Morgan and Cheryl walking in Pals.

This is Colly with her awesome godmother exploring the Costa Brava coast on an unusually cold day. Thank you, Cheryl, for spending your vacation with us!

Related posts:

1. Drinking Up Barcelona
2. 83 Places, 5 Continents, 10 Months
3. Some Days Are Like That, Even In Switzerland

In the Plaza Real near our apartment, next to one of Gaudi's lampposts.

My elementary-level Spanish, packed away for four months since we left Argentina, re-emerged when we landed in Barcelona and I asked the cab driver, “Puede usted llevarnos a esta direccion?” (Can you take us to this address?) I caught enough in his rapid reply to understand that he could take us close, but then we’d have to walk part of the way because our street is so narrow that it’s closed to cars. Once again we found ourselves grateful to be traveling light enough to carry everything on our backs, with just one heavy rolling suitcase that functions as a mobile office.

About 15 minutes later the cab pulled over to the curb along Las Ramblas — the pedestrian boulevard bordering the Gothic Quarter (in Catalan, Barri Gòtic), famous for street vendors and sidewalk performers — and the driver gestured past Plaza Real (or Plaça Reial). As we walked to find our new home for the next ten days, we paused to gaze at the vibrant 19th-century public square that would serve as our extended front porch. The square is formed by apartment buildings with arcades on the ground floor that house a string of open-air cafes, where multitudes stroll by or sit and drink red wine at midday while musicians perform, artists sketch and philatelists swap stamps. I hear snippets of every Romantic language and know just enough Castilian Spanish and French to decipher the hybrid that is Catalan, which the signs are written in. At least a dozen palm trees fill the plaza and surround an elaborate black fountain flanked by Gaudí’s outlandish lampposts — my first glimpse at Gaudí’s intoxicating, Seussical style. Balconies above are fronted by intricate wrought-iron railings and greenery, and wooden shutters frame the windows. We’re living here?! I thought, and I couldn’t stop exclaiming to Morgan, “I love it, I love it!”

We found our apartment on one of the narrow cobblestone streets leading off the plaza, which like so many streets in the maze-like Barri Gòtic curves and confusingly intersects with other one-lane thoroughfares. Our apartment reminds me of a San Francisco flat since it has a narrow hallway and tiny kitchen with bedrooms to one side, and elaborate detailing carved into its doors and windows. It occupies a corner where the first-floor businesses are a natural foods deli, a rotisserie chicken grill, a pizza parlor and a sex shop.We’re just one floor up, so we can stand on the balcony and watch pedestrians stream past and hear the bar hoppers throughout the night. It’s noisy — as I write this at 6 a.m., a drunk is screaming in Italian outside — but we use earplugs and mostly like the festive buzz, which quiets down only from about 7 a.m. to 1 p.m.

The view of our street, Calle Vidre, from our apartment in the Barri Gotic.

We have been here more than a week already and it’s hard to say where the time went. I have done nothing particularly productive or quantifiable other than homeschool the kids for several hours here and there, and run. The other hours are a blur of walking, sightseeing, reading, eating and drinking, and I keep losing track of the time and day. The light in the Barri Gòtic looks crepuscular for much of the morning as well as the afternoon since the sunlight penetrates the shadowy thoroughfares only at midday.

Thankfully, running in the morning reorients my senses; while the kids and Morgan sleep late, I leave the apartment bleary-eyed and head up to Mountjuic, a mountain overlooking the Mediterranean and the city. The run winds through botanical gardens, around a 16th-century castle, past a hillside of utilitarian-looking stacked crypts (giving a whole new meaning to the phrase “self-storage unit”), and then around the 1992 Olympic stadium.

When I reach the castle at that early hour, I encounter just one security guard and perhaps another runner or two, and as I cross the drawbridge over the moat and gaze over the ramparts to the panoramic views below, I’m awed and haunted by the history underfoot. It’s not a very pretty castle; it’s intimidating and spooky. It served as a fort and prison for ruthless rulers over the centuries, most recently in the late 1930s when 173 people, including Catalonia’s president, were executed by firing squad during the Spanish Civil War. It helps me understand why Barcelona fiercely promotes its Catalonian identity and language, since it was repressed as recently as the 1970s.

Inside Castell de Montjuic ...

... and the view of Barcelona below, with La Sagrada Familia's tall spires showing in the center.

Before I return to the apartment, I stop and buy croissants and baguette from a panaderia, which we’ll munch on throughout the day. We’ve been sleeping at odd hours and grazing food more than having regular meals. I’m finding it nearly impossible to eat and drink moderately in the midst of this nocturnal, pedestrian-oriented cafe and bar culture. Tapas (small plates of food meant to be shared) and pinchos (hors d’oeuvre-size portions on a stick) dominate the menus and make every meal seem like happy hour, when you want “just one more.” Copious amounts of wine and beer flow, and since virtually everyone gets around by walking, taking the metro or riding one of the free bicycles available around town, people can drink without worry of a DUI.

(Tip if you visit here: Restaurants around Las Ramblas and Plaza Real on the whole are mediocre; head up to the Eixample district for the best bite. Of all the tapas bars we tried, Cuidad Condal — also spelled Ciutat Comtal — was the best, followed by Taller de Tapas).

Morgan's brother, Randy, showed up and enjoyed strolling the streets with us. This is on Calle Ferran, one of the main thoroughfares in the Barri Gotic.

The scenes outside our window and throughout the city, coupled with this apartment lifestyle, combine to strike a tonic chord in Morgan and me that makes us feel like we’re in college again. Flashbacks to our lives from when we were half our age intensified when our back-to-back visitors arrived: First Morgan’s brother, Randy, came for a visit while in Europe on business, which was 24 hours of fun; and now our lifelong friend from college, Cheryl, is living with us for the week. Thank goodness the kids are here to keep me behaving, otherwise I might be tempted to light up and wear as much eyeliner as I did during my late-’80s goth phase.

Hangin' with Cheryl on a hike up Montjuic. Everywhere we go around Barcelona, we encounter interesting public art, like this sculpture in the background.

Silliness aside, there’s something about this city that makes me feel more intellectual and impassioned, more yin than yang, than I’ve felt anywhere else on this trip, which finally leads me to Gaudí. I can’t write about Barcelona without writing about Catalonia’s hero and most famous architect, Antoni Gaudí, but I hesitate because words fail me when I try to describe the experience of visiting his seminal works, especially La Sagrada Família.

La Sagrada Familia's Nativity Facade

One detail out of hundreds on the facade.

La Sagrada Família left me awestruck by the audacity of his vision — that one person can think so big, and have so much faith in God and confidence in himself, to embark on a radical project so grand in scale that it would take much longer than his lifetime to complete. He started it 128 years ago, and today, dozens of masons and carpenters are still busy at work in its center, determined to fulfill his vision. We gaped at the figures and symbols on the Nativity and Passion façades and towers — the longer you look, the more you see — and I started to feel a bit dizzy after staring at the details that all curve and blend asymmetrically like melted wax on candlesticks. Inspired by nature as much as by Christianity (because, of course, he saw the two as inseparable), Gaudí created columns that branch out like trees and weave together in a fantastic stone canopy — but like a brilliant Jesus freak on LSD, he also saw intricate, spiraling patterns in all living things, as perfect yet as wild as a collection of overlapping spirograph drawings, so he pulled the patterns of hyperbolic paraboloids and twisting ellipsoids and other trippy shapes out of thin air and sculpted them into this ever-growing monument, which is supposed to be finished by 2026, the 100th anniversary of his death. Gaudí died by accident, hit by a tram, and ten years later the church was trashed and his workshop was destroyed during the Civil War. When I see how the construction bounced back and carries on, I also view La Sagrada Família as a testament to the resiliency and good inherent in the human spirit.

A look at the interior of La Sagrada Familia ...

... which has been a busy construction zone for more than a century.

I’m astounded by the originality and diversity of Gaudí’s works, as Morgan’s photos from Park Guell and Gaudí’s apartment show better than I can describe:

Colly, resting on one of the swaths of mosaic-covered benches at Park Guell, studies Gaudi's spire and the city below.

And here's part of Park Guell from the front, set against perfect spring weather.

Gaudi's curves and ironwork are on display on this apartment building. I think the man was a genius.

I’ve focused perhaps too much on Gaudí when this city has so much to offer; we love its shopping boulevards, its museums (Picasso and Dali are right around the corner), its redeveloped waterfront, and mostly its unique identity and cross-cultural style.

The kids loved our day at the beach area known as Barceloneta, not far from Barri Gotic yet as different as day and night.

We leave tomorrow to drive up to the Costa Brava town of Begur for six days before heading to Rome, and I think I need the breather of a small coastal town before Rome bowls me over!

Related posts:

1. The Costa Brava Retreat
2. 83 Places, 5 Continents, 10 Months
3. A Typical Atypical Travel Day

Plus, I’m still mentally recovering from the odyssey of getting here. We got ensnared by the weekend British Airways strike, which canceled our connection from London to Barcelona. We almost went to Helsinki — twice — first because the toilets on the 13-hour Hong Kong to London flight malfunctioned, creating a mid-flight emergency (nothing messy, but drink service was suspended and passengers were asked to “hold it” as best as possible). The captain was making contingency plans to land in Finland when someone managed to get the toilets’ vacuum system working again.

We arrived at our hotel in Windsor mid-afternoon London time but our bodies were telling us it was midnight in Hong Kong. The kids were zonked and Morgan was bumbling like Mr. Bean. We soon found ourselves sipping pints in the very British library of our hotel (picture a grand fireplace flanked by framed hunting scenes) with a very starched and tweedy British couple sitting nearby and  giving us curious looks. When Morgan casually stood up and reached for a musty book to browse, the entire shelf of century-old tomes tipped and lurched, and he had to throw both his arms up to prevent it from collapsing. I doubled over with suppressed laughter and then went to our room and fell asleep at dinnertime.

We almost went to Helsinki for a second time the following day. Because of the strike, we were re-booked on a Finn Air flight with an absurd detour and five-hour layover in Helsinki en route to Barcelona. We checked out of the Windsor hotel after spending just 13 hours there and arrived back at Heathrow at 5:30 a.m. Right before we checked in with Finn Air, we found out that British Airways had brought in a substitute plane and crew at the eleventh hour for a flight to Barcelona that day, and we snagged four of the seats on it.

A few hours later, we were in rickety seats in a 757 belonging to a Portuguese-based carrier I had never heard of called EuroAtlantic. The age of the flight attendants ranged from about 18 to 21. The pilot had some reassuring gray hairs, but his co-pilot looked like a groovy yoga instructor. A bald, hulking maintenance worker speaking some Eastern European language I couldn’t recognize kept pacing the aisles, making last-minute checks and looking perplexed while communicating to the Portuguese-speaking crew in broken English. I became convinced that the plane was held together with chewing gum and baling wire and we were all going to die somewhere over France, but Morgan made me laugh when he did his best gee-willikers impression of Mickey Rooney telling Judy Garland, “I know a barn we can use to put on a show!” I could just imagine some mid-level manager at British Airways declaring moments earlier, “I know a plane we can use to get to Spain!”

But all’s well that ends well. Now I’ll try to reconstruct some of our highs and lows in Hong Kong.

We arrived from Sydney on March 12 without a hitch and checked into a gorgeous hotel room at the Shangri-La in Kowloon, which sits across the water from Hong Kong Island.

The view of Hong Kong Harbour from our hotel room in Kowloon.

Morgan and the kids on the waterfront promenade with our hotel, the Kowloon Shangri-La, in the background.

The Shangri-La was the only decent hotel that would allow the four of us to sleep in one room (the kids and me sharing a king-size bed and Morgan on a rollaway), whereas virtually every other place would require us to have two rooms or a suite, which would be prohibitively costly. The room was a godsend, as we needed a retreat from the streets below. I joked that I wished I had a T-shirt that said in English and Cantonese, “I don’t want to buy a watch or a handbag” because sidewalk hawkers constantly tried to sell me one.

We really loved this stylish, spacious hotel room.

Here we are on a typical side street off the swanky shopping strip along Nathan Road known as The Golden Mile.

My kaleidoscopic impressions include tall, narrow apartment and office buildings packed together in astounding high density; clean, efficient subway trains jammed with polite people whom I always felt safe around; jumbled, chattering market stalls overflowing with knick-knacks and knock-offs; and quiet, solemn corners in parks and public squares where dozens of people meditatively tuned out the city and practiced tai chi. The backdrop to it all was a gray sky that blocked the sun and masked the island’s mountains. Smog and clouds perpetually shrouded the city, and I felt the pollution in my eyes and lungs.

We sampled some restaurants and hit the main tourist attractions with mixed success. The famous tram to The Peak was terribly crowded and not nearly as fun or interesting as old-time funiculars we’ve ridden elsewhere; plus, the tacky mall at the top, along with the mucky sky, diminished the experience of viewing Hong Kong from above. At least we discovered the peaceful and pretty Hong Kong Park on the way and admired exotic birds while walking through its impressive aviary.

I screwed up our attempt to view the Hong Kong Heritage Museum, which supposedly is the best and newest museum and is located in the outlying New Territories district. I read that its opening hours are “Monday – Saturday, 10 – 6” but didn’t read far enough to see it also said, “Closed Tuesdays” and you guessed it, we chose Tuesday to go. We were so disappointed to go all the way out there and find it locked up and deserted! The museum is housed in an impressive complex meant to showcase traditional Chinese architecture, but sadly, its beauty is enhanced by its juxtaposition with some of the tallest, most packed-in and impersonal apartment high-rises I have ever seen.

Almost everywhere I looked, I saw apartment buildings like this.

We left the New Territories determined to make a pilgrimage to the Giant Buddha, far away on Lantau Island near the airport, even though we were getting a late start and it would take four transfers on the subway. We ended up having an entertaining time figuring out the subway system and reached our destination at the end of the line about an hour before access to the Buddha closed. Having not done my research ahead of time, I had no idea that we then had to take a loooooonng gondola ride up and over a mountain.

The 25-minute cable car ride to the Big Buddha sweeps visitors across the mountains of Lantau Island.

I tried to suppress my fear of heights and enjoy the kids’ enchantment of the view from the glass-bottomed floor.

The gondola ride was a little too long and high for my liking ...

... but the kids loved lying on the gondola's glass bottom and watching the water and forest below.

We finally got to the erstatz Ngong Ping visitors’ village at the base of the Buddha, where a mountain of souvenir shops and cafes overshadow the Po Lin Monastery, and hurried to hike to the Buddha before the last gondola departed. It was worth it when we scaled the 250 steps and gazed at details not visible from a distance; the massive bronze monument really is awe-inspiring. We were disappointed, though, by the dearth of information available explaining the statue’s history and construction. (We found out later it was built in 1993; we were under the mistaken impression it was quite old.)

We made it to the Big Buddha! It was worth it.

We topped off that fast-paced afternoon with a stroll through the Temple Street Night Market, an experience no Hong Kong visitor should miss. The street fills with scores — perhaps hundreds — of vendors who haggle a mind-boggling array of traditional trinkets, electronic gadgets, fake-designer clothing and mounds of plastic junk.

Warning: walking around Hong Kong at night can lead to sensory overload.

One of countless vendors at the Temple Street Night Market.

I got a clearer idea of how people get used to living and raising a family in Hong Kong when I made a connection with a friend-of-a-friend and her family. A high school classmate emailed to say I should contact her friends Stephanie Oana and and Joe Osha because they’re from Oakland and have two kids about the same age as Colly and Kyle. They live in the community of Stanley, on the south tip of Hong Kong Island. The kids and I took a cab to their house (while poor Morgan stayed behind to cope with stomach troubles), and when we emerged from a long tunnel, the three of us said “how pretty!” as we saw steep hills covered with greenery. It’s easy to be in Hong Kong and forget you’re on an island until you find yourself on a narrow, curvy road like the one toward Stanley, which brings sandy beaches into view.

Colly and Kyle with the Osha-Oana family from Oakland on the Stanley waterfront.

I had a thoroughly enjoyable afternoon and dinner with them, as it turns out we have a lot in common and used to live close to each other in the East Bay. They’re living in a condo-like development filled with other ex-pats, and the units are blessed with a rare feature in Hong Kong neighborhoods: a front door that goes directly outside to a play area (as opposed to one that leads to a hallway and elevator).

We wrapped up the week at the Disneyland Hotel, which turned out to be surprisingly classy in terms of service and décor, with lovely landscaping and a waterfront location. I braced myself to dislike Disneyland for its crowds and artificial environment, but it turned out to be a place where we unwound, felt free to run around, encountered few lines and even felt close to nature. HK Disneyland is much smaller than its Anaheim counterpart, with only one roller coaster (Space Mountain), but we found it charming — in part because it brought out the little kid in our quickly maturing preteen. Both Colly and Kyle admitted to liking the corny “It’s a Small World” ride because when they saw the singing and dancing dolls representing different cultures and countries, they could say, “We’ve been there!” or, “I want to go there someday!”

There was something weird but delightful about going round the world on the Small World ride from the vantage point of Hong Kong. In my head I flipped through all the places we’ve been and then pictured the Hong Kong skyline and started singing, “It’s a tall world.”

Celebrating Colly's 12th birthday at Hong Kong Disneyland was a real treat.

Although Hong Kong won’t make our Top Ten list of favorite places, I’m definitely glad we made the week-long, eye-opening stopover there. Here are a few more photos from Morgan:

Related posts:

1. A Little Bite of Hong Kong
2. 83 Places, 5 Continents, 10 Months
3. Branching Out on Lago Nahuel Huapi

Kyle put on a brave smile but didn't really like the mystery meat in the dim sum

Heading to Hong Kong, the kids’ biggest concern — and curiosity — centered on what they would eat for the week. They were relieved to find that just as English is ubiquitous, so too is Western-style food. I confess we often succumbed to familiar fare, but at least we tried a few restaurants where whole fowl hung in the windows and menu items reminded us of things we feared while swimming in Australia (e.g. shark fins and jellyfish). Our real Chinese meals turned out to be nutritionally awful for the kids since they preferred heavily battered, deep-fried things bathed in sweet sauce, accompanied by mounds of white rice and washed down with orange Fanta.

Our most interesting meal actually took place at a Japanese-style grill and sushi house, where live lobsters were burned rather than boiled (it turned my stomach to see them try to crawl away) and giant whole oysters spun and twitched when they hit the heat. I captured a bit of it on video, along with Colly’s comic attempt to help make fried rice:

Click here to view the embedded video.

We also caught the sights and smells of authentic Chinese food at the carnival-like Temple Street Night Market, where open-air diners ate steaming plates of noodles topped with unidentifiable fried marine life that minutes earlier had been swimming in buckets on the sidewalk.

Throngs of diners at the Temple Street Night Market.

We avoided eating strange-looking critters on a stick but enjoyed lots of skewers of grilled meats. Rather than try many Chinese dishes, I was inclined to order the fabulous Thai and Indian curries offered in many different types of restaurants. My stomach held up well, but Morgan got food poisoning or caught a virus that killed his appetite for several days. For all we know, it could have been the Subway sandwich he ate that day and not the dim sum that did him in.

We ended our week at Hong Kong Disneyland, where the food is far superior to what’s available at Disneyland in Anaheim — not that that’s saying much, but at least we had relatively healthy Chinese-style meals there to balance out the kids’ intake of cotton candy.

We had a delicious lunch in Adventureland next to the Jungle Boat ride. I doubt the Disneyland in California would serve the kind of fresh food we found here -- things like sauteed cabbage and green beans.

On our final night, we feasted on a scrumptious international buffet for Colly’s birthday dinner at the Disneyland Hotel’s Enchanted Garden Restaurant. We never expected premium-quality sushi, shellfish, curries, dim sum, satays, roasts, naans and creative salads at a place where Mickey, Piglet and Tigger repeatedly interrupted our meal for photo opportunities, but it goes down as our best dinner in recent memory. (Admittedly, this may have less to do with Disneyland’s kitchen staff than with our need to redouble our efforts to eat like locals and try new tastes.)

The birthday girl at her birthday dinner, where the international buffet was far higher in quality than we expected.

Kyle’s first trip through the buffet line demonstrated what an 8-year-old American boy craves after a week in Hong Kong: hot dog, plain crackers, lamb, a crab leg, and M&Ms from the ice cream topping line. To his credit, he also gobbled up some strawberries when we arrived.

Kyle's top picks at the buffet line made me wince.

Now we’re headed to Barcelona, where I pledge to try weird and wonderful tapas!

Related posts:

1. From Hong Kong to Here, Dazed and Amused
2. Christmas in a Manger at Nelson, New Zealand
3. 83 Places, 5 Continents, 10 Months

A great place to start the day: drinking coffee outside the ambassador’s house.

Regular readers of this blog know of the National Lampoon Vacation-esque lodging we sometimes find ourselves in — establishments such as the Blackball Hilton (dorm-style rooms with recycled hospital beds) and the Abel Tasman Barn (two toilets to share with fifty other backpackers). More recently, we became aficionados of flimsy cabins at campervan parks. We now feel as though we’ve scored some fancy digs if we stay in a place that has carpeting made for indoor use only.

Imagine how we felt, therefore, upon arriving at the place we were invited to stay in Canberra: the United States Embassy! (Cue the banjo music as the Smiths, with beach sand still in their hair, drive through the security gates in their bird-poop-covered, packed-to-the-roof dented rental…)

The new U.S. Ambassador to Australia, Jeff Bleich, and his wife, Becky, are our friends and neighbors from Piedmont, and their daughter has been close with Colly since preschool. We couldn’t wait to reconnect with familiar faces, and Colly was virtually bursting with pent-up preteen desire to socialize with an old friend.

Nonetheless, we admittedly felt a wee bit intimidated when a uniformed butler opened the door and led us into the grand entranceway of the three-story Colonial-style brick mansion, where marble busts of Ben Franklin and George Washington keep watch. But then Becky came down the red-carpeted stairway and immediately put us at ease, and we soon felt at home — or at least, as though we could relax and thoroughly appreciate the family’s company and their surroundings. While I’ve never met other ambassadors, I’d wager a bet that the warmest and most down-to-earth one lives at the U.S. Embassy in Canberra.

The Telstar Tower on Black Mountain, seen from a lakeside trail.

And what about Canberra? Rather than disclose details of our time at the Embassy, I’m here to set the record straighter (in my own small way at least) about Australia’s often-mocked capital, which many wrongly believe has the pulse of a koala. The city struck me as analogous to Sacramento, our state capital that outsiders dis for being home to legislators and bureaucrats and say that its best quality is its relationship to other places (“halfway between San Francisco and Tahoe!”).  Similarly, many assume that the only people who’d want to live in Canberra are public servants, and they mention that at least you can easily get to Sydney or Melbourne from there. In his 2000 book Down Under, Bill Bryson joked that its civic slogan could be, “Canberra: Gateway to Everywhere Else!” or, “Canberra: There’s Nothing to It!” or even, “Canberra: Why Wait for Death?”

But just as I very much like Sacramento as a leafy, livable place that hums with political movers and shakers, so too did I find Canberra delightfully green, livable and politically intriguing.

We got our first view of the city and its surrounding foothills from atop the Telstar Tower on Black Mountain, which looks like a Christmas tree topper stuck on a hill. It’s worth a visit to get a better sense of how the master-planned city was laid out nearly a century ago, after Sydney and Melbourne reached a compromise to put the capital between them (170 miles south of Sydney and 410 miles from Melbourne) and then held an international competition to choose a designer.

Viewing Canberra from the top of the tower with the Bleich family.

The meandering, irregular border of sprawling Lake Burley Griffin, named after the Chicago architect who won the design contest, contrasts nicely with the perfect geometry of streets around Parliament and the city center, which are laid out in symmetrical circles connected by streets like spokes on wheels. Not surprisingly, Morgan and I loved the lake and the marathon-length trails surrounding it!

Morgan along the shores of Lake Burley Griffin. We both liked how it’s just a short run to get back to nature in this city.

We also toured the Australian War Memorial and its museum with the Bleiches, and I was glad to see the kids genuinely impressed by the beauty of the stained-glass dome and by the sobering number of fallen soldiers’ names.

The girls view part of the War Memorial.

Kyle on the steps of the War Memorial, with the Parliament Building way in the background.

Canberra certainly has plenty of museums, monuments and government buildings worth visiting — Bryson’s line, “there’s nothing to it!” is funny yet off-base — but I want to recommend two less-obvious places to visit. First, for grown-ups, is the Mount Majura Vineyard, where we sampled some of the most complex and tasty wines I’ve had this side of the equator. What impressed me is that this relatively small winery could get so many varietals and blends so right; of the four whites and four reds I tried, none was a dud.  I also liked how it’s less than 15 minutes from the city center yet feels utterly pastoral.

At the Mount Majura winery with Jeff and Becky Bleich.

Second, for kids and grownups alike, is Questacon – The National Science and Technology Center.

Kyle gets ready to experience the free-fall exhibit at Questacon, which drops kids down a vertical slide to help them understand the feeling and science of zero gravity.

Few science and tech museums rival San Francisco’s Exploratorium, but I’d say this one does. Simply put, it was great — we had a blast and learned a lot.

I’m truly grateful to (and inspired by) our hosts in Canberra who helped us wrap up our Australian leg on a sky-high note. As recent blog posts detailed, we had a not-entirely-satisfying time on Phillip Island and along the coast. (During one low point, I gloomily contemplated my own alternative slogans for Australia, such as, “Down Under: Overpriced and Overrated!”)

Between the time we were cracking up along the coast and arriving in Canberra, we had much more fun than expected in an unassuming coastal village called Batemans Bay. We stayed at arguably the best camper park in New South Wales (Batemans Bay Big 4); discovered a, like, totally awesome surf school and spent two days surfing (Broulee Surf School); and were thrilled by the lions, tigers and red pandas at a fantastic out-of-the-way zoo (Mogo Zoo). Canberra capped off what turned out to be my favorite week in this country, and now I’d encourage anyone who heads to Sydney to visit the capital too.

I meant this post to be about Canberra but can’t help tacking on these surf pics from Broulee Beach. S’later!

Morgan catches a wave.

I feel like an old dog trying to learn a new trick.

Colly makes it look easy ...

... and so does Kyle!

Related posts:

1. 83 Places, 5 Continents, 10 Months
2. Sydney Wet and Wild
3. Halfway There Together: Surprises and Changes So Far