Away Together

A slice of beach and blue around Abel Tasman National Park.

New Zealanders use the term “adventure” loosely to market pretty much any activity under the sun. I was skeptical we’d experience a true  adventure here, especially if it were safe enough to involve the kids, but then my lifelong friend Carolyn, who moved to the South Island two years ago, booked a three-day kayak trip for our two families along the coast of Abel Tasman National Park. I had never kayaked before (unless you count an hour in a hotel lagoon in Hawaii), but how hard could it be? I had visions of paddling on glassy blue water and sipping wine with old friends while our kids played on a beach. Besides, we’re all old pros at camping. We were game.

Three days at sea and camping in the forest together seemed like a reunion too perfect to be true. We arranged to meet them on the Sunday after New Year’s. (more…)

The view of Nelson from Harris Hill (click to enlarge).

Sarah writes: We just wrapped up our most unusual and special Christmas ever, which we celebrated at a rental cottage in Nelson, New Zealand. Ending the year here and being on this journey together is the ultimate “gift that keeps on giving.” Since my 8-year-old son Kyle spent part of his homeschooling week writing about this place, and Morgan took terrific photos, I decided to hand this blog post over to them. I hope you enjoy Kyle’s very own blog post and movie!

Mom and me homeschooling on our deck.

Right now I’m at Harris Hill. It is in Nelson, N.Z., which is at the top part of the South Island. It is at a farm with animals like a hairy pig, goats, sheep, calves/cows/bulls, dogs, ponies, horses, llamas and chickens. It has a view of the blue bay, and since we’re near the ocean, it’s windy! The wind makes the grass look like waves. (more…)

We spent the past week in Rotorua, a North Island city famous for adventure sports and stinky geothermal sites. Perhaps no other city in New Zealand, or anywhere, has come up with more ways to thrill tourists (and make them part with money) with “adventure” broadly defined. You can luge, river raft, sky swing, sky jump, bungee jump, jet boat, kayak, off-road race and mountain bike. Plus, there’s the ZORB, a giant rubber ball that bounces down a hill with a person sliding and rattling around inside it. We went on the luge and let the kids try the ZORB (just once, because of its exZORBitant prices):

The Rotorua Tourism Board will probably be upset to hear me say these activities generally seem overrated and overpriced. Our best times around Rotorua involved spending free time for free. (more…)

Arriving at our cabaña, we discovered that "los gnomos" are part of its charm.

Our arrival to Villa La Angostura, about an hour north of Bariloche, set the tone for a wacky week. Driving the windy road on the shores of Lago Nahuel Huapi thrilled us with views of snow-capped Patagonian peaks but made poor Kyle throw up all over himself in the car. When we eventually reached our cabaña complex, called Guardianes del Bayo, we probably looked as bad as we smelled because an icy rain and wind left us bedraggled and shivering.

The living room decor includes antlers and this little gnome.

As we unloaded our belongings and cleaned up the mess, my eyes took in a babbling brook that cut through a well-kept lawn and a cluster of wood cabins, flowing past a play structure and under several arched footbridges. Then my ears caught a tune from long ago that was piped in from speakers somewhere — The Carpenters’ “Top of the World.” Karen Carpenter’s saccharine voice singing “I’m on the top of the world, lookin’ down on creation …” floated through the breeze and became a tape loop in my brain.

Then I began to notice pointy red hats on little bearded figurines inside and outside our cabaña. And then the sign with our cabaña’s name: Los Gnomos.

With a mix of shock and awe — uh-oh and oh, wow! — we realized we had booked ourselves into some kind of fairy-tale lodge where everything seems a little bit off. (more…)

Morgan and I spent a lot of time last week doing travel research and making reservations while the stormy weather kept us mostly inside.

Before Morgan and I left in mid-August, we talked a lot about how there will be times when traveling gets tough, when we feel fatigued and worried about the myriad consequences of uprooting for a year, and when we second-guess our choices. We knew we’d feel homesick not just for home per se, but for friends and familiar routines, and we might feel pangs of regret. That’s why we added the “no regrets” phrase to our tagline — not because we’re blithely traipsing off in the world with nothing weighing us down but our backpacks, but rather because we knew from the start that doubt might haunt us, just as first-time home buyers flirt with buyers’ remorse when the repairs pile up and bills come due. “No regrets” is shorthand for “no turning back, so let’s make this work, and in the long run we’ll look back and be so glad we did it.” Or in Spanish, vale la pena. It’s what we say to each other and to ourselves to bolster confidence and commitment, because what we’re doing takes an occasional pep talk.

Last week was one of those weeks. (more…)

Long-term family travel is ripe for self-doubt. We rented out our home, pulled the kids out of school, dug deep into savings, reduced our stuff to what we can carry, jeopardized professional relationships, drove away from our neighborhood, and promptly stopped hearing from more than half of our friends.

Are we doing the right thing? And what exactly are we doing, anyway?

When the circumstances and those questions haunt me on a night like this — when I survey our family and our belongings consolidated into a shoebox of a room in a dumpy motel, and I consider our plans (or rather, our lack of planning) in the months ahead — I take solace and find humor in the loose-knit, far-flung network of other families who also decided to uproot their lives and experience a nomadic existence. (more…)

Subtle graffiti on this sign on the way into Telluride ("pricy" conditions may exist) signals locals' ambivalence toward the town's growth and gentrification.

This weekend, Sept. 4 – 7, Telluride’s annual film festival will transform the town. Its population of about 2200 will triple and its main street, Colorado Avenue, will be packed with visitors. I’ve never actually been to Film Fest but hear the scene is undeniably cool, and my family got a kick out of spotting Ken Burns outside of our favorite burrito place (La Cocina de Luz) the other night.

As a quasi-local lifelong lover of Telluride, I can’t help feel some reverse snobbery and sadness that a lot of these festival-goers — like a lot of skiers who briefly visit in winter — miss out on some of the more authentic, historic and out-of-the-way treasures that make Telluride what it is. For them, I offer this alternative weekend guide to Telluride, with apologies to The New York Times Travel Section for copping its “36 Hours” format. (The Times published its own “36 Hours in Telluride” in January of 2005, which was geared toward winter activities and dining and shopping downtown.)

Friday afternoon: Arrive in Telluride. Got that? TELLURIDE, not Mountain Village. I have heard dear misinformed friends say, “Oh, I love Telluride!” and then reveal that they spent a week in Mountain Village over Christmas break, as though the two towns were synonymous. They are not. Mountain Village is an oversized, overpriced and soulless master-planned golf and ski village-with-no-sense-of-community carved into the mountain above Telluride in 1987 and connected to town by a gondola. (more…)

We took time to stop at parks, like this one in Fallon, NV. The kids were delighted to find rusting and not-entirely-safe playground equipment from a previous generation. Colly forgot the word for "merry-go-round," since she so rarely sees one, and said, "They have one of those tables that spins!"

The four of us plus the dog just drove 1100 miles from Northern California to Southwestern Colorado, and along the way we avoided family feuds and never resorted to Happy Meal bribery (as in, “If you can be patient until the next town, then we’ll stop at McDonald’s”). The kids agreed it was one of the “funnest” long car trips in recent memory, and they didn’t seem to mind that we had no DVDs, no video games and limited personal space in the tightly packed Subaru Outback wagon. Here’s what I learned or was reminded of regarding car travel with kids as we passed the miles:

• Take time to get there. We divided the trip into 3 days and 2 nights, even though it can be done pretty easily with just one overnight. Arriving at our midway destinations with time to spare allowed the kids to swim in the motel pool and play at local parks.
• Share the music and listen together. We all have our own IPods and could have driven with earbuds firmly implanted, in our own little worlds. Not that there’s anything wrong with that for some of the time, but we chose to listen to one IPod at a time (trading off between the kids’ playlists and ours) and played it through the car stereo for all to hear. The upside: the conversation kept going, and the kids were happy that we were willing to listen to their music. (more…)

All packed up and ready to go. Goodbye, home!

“Why are you crying, Mom?” Kyle asked this morning as I pulled away from my next-door neighbor’s hug. “Are you sad or happy?”

I thought about what had unleashed the tears: the final walk through our bedroom, where the hardwood floors echoed from emptiness because nearly everything is in storage. Then the last good-byes. It hit me that I will miss our home and neighborhood terribly. It also hit me that everything we had planned during the past six months had come down to this moment, and all the work and difficult decisions had made us ready to go — and we really, finally were ready to go — so I was crying tears of relief. And also, I was indeed happy that at this crossroads in our lives, when a great deal is transitioning personally and professionally, we had chosen to go in a direction that Morgan and I believe will keep changing us for the better even after the trip is over.

“Both,” I finally answered.

“Well,” Kyle said, “if you’re sad and happy, that makes you sappy.”

I am sappy, so much so that the family began mocking my sentimentality last week. “This is the last time we’re going to Crogan’s,” I said the other night as we approached a favorite pub. “Awww,” said Colly, her voice dripping with pity, “and this is the last time we’re touching this crosswalk button!”

“The last time” became a running joke until Morgan got the last word on our final morning at home. He marched to the bathroom after coffee and Cheerios and proclaimed, “This is the last dump!” (more…)

People keep asking (somewhat skeptically), “What about school during your trip — are you homeschooling?” I keep answering (somewhat defensively), “No; our kids will do the same work as they would do in school, with real teachers assigned to help them, so they won’t fall behind.” I expound on the educational benefits of the trip and explain that we’re taking the year off largely for the kids’ sake. But inwardly I’m less confident, and all summer I have worried about “back to school” — about the transition to schooling our kids on the road.

My "roads scholars" pictured earlier this summer near Tahoe.

I know it’s kind of crazy, because we’ll encounter extraordinary educational opportunities at every turn. Plus, most wise people recognize that learning takes place all the time and is more apt to blossom outside the confines of a classroom. So why the worry and resistance to the idea of homeschooling? (more…)