Touchstones

One of the things I loved most about my childhood was the sense of rhythm and almost of ritual, the notion that things would come around every year that could be counted on. I think predictability is one of our most basic human needs. Some people of course seem to need it so much more than others, and perhaps children more than adults. Having touchstones throughout the year brings a sense of comfort and a respect for the turning of the seasons of life.

One of the things I have most grown to anticipate this time of year is our annual camping trip at Waldo Lake. I know I've probably posted similar photos every year, of us doing similar things - floating in boats, swimming in crystalline waters, kids catching frogs, hiking through woods, the spectacular beauty that is Waldo. Every year the kids are changed, but the landscape is not. The frogs are different of course, but catching them is not. Perhaps the water molecules from last year's lake have gone up into clouds and traveled around the globe and rained in Botswana and the water molecules in the lake this year were a fog bank around Bristol at this time last year, but yet the lake looks the same.

This year we were blessed with a stretch of unbroken lovely fall days. The frogs were plentiful, from the tiny "fingernail frogs", just the size of my pinky nail, to these glorious golden bumpy frogs with sparkling eyes, to camouflaged tree frogs that you have to be eagle-eyed to spot. The water was warm enough for kids to swim and float in, and for me in my wet suit to hang out in (the perks of being a triathlete mom is having the wetsuit that lets me hang out in cold lakes with my kids all afternoon).

The kids brought bikes with them and took off en masse for a group bike ride led by mountainbiking mom extraordinaire, Maria. They suddenly looked 5 years more grown up setting off like that.




Of course, time does have a way of marching on and some things change. For years, we brought our faithful and wonderful camping dog Sabre on our Waldo lake excursions. In his final year, I even brought my Burley trailer and wheeled him on the trails around the lake when he was too feeble to walk. Then he was gone, and I spent a few moments last year crying when I saw people with dogs that looked similar to Sabre.



This year of course we have Callie, and its her inaugural year camping. As a small dog, she has the added perk of riding in the kayak (something Sabre surely would not have done, as fearful of water as he was depite his Labrador heritage). We say she's the "bow wow of the bow" and she enjoyed being ferried over to an island where she could be a wild leash-free dog for awhile without our worrying that she would chase a squirrel into the wilderness and never be heard from again.


One of the other things I value about this camping trip, besides the sense of the earth coming 'round again and the changing of the seasons and spending time with friends who we haven't seen enough of over the summer is that the kids get plenty of time to just be kids. Without computers and games and electronic distractions of any kind, they can spend hours in a happy mob keeping a balloon in the air, cheering each other on. Even my big 13 year old (who often vaccilated between the adult conversation by the campfire and the games of the children) was caught up in the excitement of chasing a balloon through the forest.

















In the end, the trip is really about everything important in life: family, friends, nature, beauty, fun, seasons, rituals, and appreciating the great gifts we are given here on earth. I am grateful for yet another ride around the sun, another season at Waldo.

Home Again

We're back home, semi-coherent at best. Having gotten approximately seven hours of sleep in the last 48 hours, I'm just about shattered and am going to kick off to bed soon. Last night I went to sleep pretty easily, but then woke at 1:30. Just as I was knocking back off asleep at 4:00 am, the kids woke up. {sigh}. Jet lag sucks. Next time I swear I'm going to try the melatonin thing.

But, our trip was just wonderful. Rome, the biking, Tuscany, Firenze (Florence), Siena, Pisa, the Cinque Terra, all just marvelous. Well worth the jet lag and then some. I journaled every day we were there, and took about 3,500 photographs, so I decided I will just type in my journal entries here along with photos as I sort through them. So I can share our journey in a time-delayed fashion, since we didn't bring a laptop along to blog along the way.

So after two days back in Oregon, here's just a few observations about things I really loved about Italy and things I missed about home:

Loved:

The train system. Totally amazing. No doubt about it, the US needs to be moving in this direction. The trains were on time, fast, smooth, efficient, easy to get tickets for, and very reasonably priced. Even the Eurostar, which we splurged on for our last leg of the journey only cost us 80 Euro for our whole family from Florence to Rome (and at 155 mph as clocked by our GPS, it was worth it for the "wow" factor!)

Missed:

Free toilets and drinking fountains. Toilets cost as much as one Euro per person (making a pee stop for a family of four into an almost $6.00 affair with the exchange rate what it is)! Drinking fountains are almost non-existant except some spigots in the piazzas.

Loved:

Italian drivers were the epitome of courtesy to us as we were cycling. Actually, I love the whole way that traffic flows seamlessly there with the drivers aware of what others are doing around them. It might look chaotic at first to an American eye, but it makes total sense. In 165 miles of biking, we never had a driver be anything but polite to us.

Missed:

Roads without traffic. Other than the dirt backroads that we took, most roads had far more cars on them than rural roads here.

Loved:

Fresh local produce everywhere. The nectarines were to die for - right off the tree and so ripe.

Missed:

Real breakfast. I can't exist on a croissant and black coffee, especially not when biking four hours a day!

Loved:

The agriculture integrated into every little nook and cranny. Kitchen gardens, even in front of apartment buildings with huge trellises of tomatoes and rows of herbs and peppers. Fence lines covered with grape vines. Olive trees everywhere.

Missed:

Trees in the city. The cities there are very densely populated, which makes them compact and very easily walkable, which is great! But I missed the trees that cover our town. Coming back, our city just looked so incredibly lush and green and lovely, especially now that many trees are starting to turn.

All in all, it was hard to come back, but I was looking forward to it as well. Italy is a lovely country with warm and friendly people and gorgeous scenery, history, and culture. I hope to return some day, for sure. But we stayed just enough time to start getting homesick and I'm glad to be back with our garden and animals and friends here too.

Italy Update #2

Hi all, just a quick update from Arezzo, halfway through our biking trip. So far everything has gone just perfectly. The weather here has been unseasonably cool, which basically means not nearly as roasting hot as it usually is here right now. So it's been perfect for biking. Our routes have all gone well, with an occasional assist from the GPS and a few unplanned detours, but all fun. We've biked lots of backroads through vineyards, sunflower fields, and around Lake Trasimeno. The towns have been just beautiful little jewels of medieval streets, castles, and churches. The kids have been doing great, we've gone over 100 miles so far, they are absolutely loving it! We have three more days of biking, and then it's on to Florence, Pisa, and the Cinque Terra for some relaxing last few days.

So far, we've biked through Perugia, Asissi, Castiglione del Lago, Cortona, and Arezzo. On to San Giovanni Valdarno, Pontessieve, and Firenze. People everywhere are extremely gracious and enthusiastic about our bikes. Lots of "Bravo!"s shouted from passing cars, house and store windows, and other cyclists, and occasional crowds gathered asking questions when we stop. I'm grateful I learned enough Italian to communicate, and I've found that I can make myself understood quite well (nice surprise). Motorists here are great toward bikes.

Our hotels have all been terrific, and the people who run them extremely gracious(especially about finding a place to put our huge bike contraptions). All in all, things couldn't be better, it is the trip of a lifetime for sure!

Tetris with Suitcases

So here's a little-known factoid about me - long ago in a former universe, I was a tester on the game of Tetris. This was back when I worked on the first Microsoft Games pack, yes the very same one that also brought you Freecell (you know who you are, all you Freecell addicts out there!) The approximately 80,000 games of Tetris I have played in my lifetime (getting paid to do so, mind you) are coming in handy as I attempt to pack four people's clothing into two carry-on backpack/suitcases.

Hubby in all of his wisdom bought us these handy packing cubes, so it's just a matter of getting everything to fit in the appropriate cube, and then getting all the cubes into the suitcase. Now with Mackenzie's clothes, this is a no-brainer. Being your basic twelve-year-old boy, the kid can exist for approximately eight weeks on one pair of shorts and one t-shirt (he does change his underwear, I'll hand him that much). With Asa's clothes, it's another question. It takes her at least three outfits just to get through the day. That's not counting the several pairs of pajamas that she might wear in the course of an evening (one pair for lounging, one pair for hearing stories read, another pair that's just the right temperature and texture for sleeping in). Hubby and I both tend more toward Mackenzie's end of the spectrum, I have no idea how this clothes-hound daughter of mine came along. Remember, this is the girl who loved her first set of shoes SO MUCH (she was 11 months old) that if she woke up in the middle of the night and she wasn't wearing them, she screamed and wailed. Clothing for her, for three and a half weeks? Bring on the U-Haul truck! Hubby's job of disassembling and packing our bicycles into suitcases along with tools, first-aid kit, spare tires, tubes, patches, chain links, grease, etc. simply pales in comparison.

Other than that, the news from here is that we're almost ready to roll. I've got all of our nights' stays booked through the first two weeks. It's very eclectic, I think we're hitting every sort of accomodation available:

hotel
hostel
farm "agriturismo"
B&B
resort
pensione
apartment

We'll be in Rome for a week, then we're training it to Perugia where we unpack the bikes, and pedal our way through the Tuscan countryside through Cortona and Arezzo and up to Florence. At that point the bikes get packed away again and we have a few days in the Cinque Terra to recuperate before we head back to Rome to celebrate Asa's birthday and then fly home.


We have taken several good rides with the kids, the bikes, and the rolling suitcase contraptions, including one good one through the rolling hills of the wine country just outside of town. I think it was a suitable fascimile for the type of terrain we're likely to encounter. One weekend we did 65 miles with the kids over three days, so I think we're ready on that front.

I have spoken Italian to several people over the phone by now, and have been understood and had people reply back to me in Italian and understood them! I have emailed in Italian. So I have some little confidence that I will do okay in the places where there are few English speakers. I only know the present tense of verbs, so my Italian will be sounding something like "I am being in Rome next week and am to be needing a room", but I figure that will have to do, I have no time to memorize perfect and pluperfect and past participles.

We're not taking a laptop along (I can hear your collective gasp of disbelief from here) so I may or may not be updating my blog while we're gone. It will depend on the availability of cyber cafes along our route, and my desire to spend any time in front of a screen while the duomos, the wineries, the Roman ruins, and the gelatterias call my name.