Tending a small fire.
Building a fort is summer.
6.24.2013
Building a Fort
Every kids needs a fort. From blankets to branches to whatever, a little place to build and set it up into your own space seems like a normal kid thing to do. My brother recently visited us and spent several days in the woods working on a fort masterpiece.
Mixing the mud mortar of pine straw, forest debris, dirt, and water.
An opportunity to get along and work together, even if it only lasted a few minutes.
Starting to come together.
A place for their collection of found objects in the forest. A turtle shell, broken glass, plant fiber twine, and some nails.
Getting muddy in the pit.
Tending a small fire.
Tending a small fire.
6.22.2013
Question Answered
And the winner is.....a fabulous and exotic adventure to the orthodontist for my 8th grader! The itinerary includes monthly visits to get hardware tightened followed by soft foods and complaining! Can't wait!
All sarcasm aside, we decided to take a summer off from a big trip. I am a little sad by it but on the bright side we can relax for weeks and weeks and rejuvenate ourselves for the school year to come. I am looping back to sixth grade after spending 3 years with the same students helping (?!?!) them to navigate (survive) middle school. I start the 2013 school year with a new group of kiddos, all fresh faced and scared, right out of elementary school. I like sixth graders, they still have some little kid left if them, but not too much. They are still excited about life and want to be around adults. However, they are like baby sharks. Cute and adorable, until you stick your hand in the tank to pet them, then they will not hesitate to chomp it off. This is my veteran middle school teacher husband's analogy.
A summer at home has many silver linings. For one, I will finally be around to tend the garden. By the time we return from abroad each summer the thing looks like a jungle.
The raised boxes have a few varieties of eggplants, peppers, and tomatoes. Growing up the string trellis are pole beans. There is also lots and lots of basil which I will make into a year's worth of pesto.
Flowers in the sunniest spot of the yard attract bees and butterflies. We grow parsley and fennel for the swallowtails which support 3-4 generations of butterflies each summer.
The pineapple guava tree bloomed recently. If we are lucky we will have fruits!
Sky blue hydrangeas fill the yard. Love.
We will also be around to observe the barred owls that live in the woods behind our house.
You can just see the owl at the top of the picture below.
And we will have more time to climb trees.
The kids can practice getting along with one of the only activities they enjoy doing together, playing minecraft.
I'm sure we'll go to the beach a lot and have friends over for dinner. It's going to be a very relaxing summer!
All sarcasm aside, we decided to take a summer off from a big trip. I am a little sad by it but on the bright side we can relax for weeks and weeks and rejuvenate ourselves for the school year to come. I am looping back to sixth grade after spending 3 years with the same students helping (?!?!) them to navigate (survive) middle school. I start the 2013 school year with a new group of kiddos, all fresh faced and scared, right out of elementary school. I like sixth graders, they still have some little kid left if them, but not too much. They are still excited about life and want to be around adults. However, they are like baby sharks. Cute and adorable, until you stick your hand in the tank to pet them, then they will not hesitate to chomp it off. This is my veteran middle school teacher husband's analogy.
A summer at home has many silver linings. For one, I will finally be around to tend the garden. By the time we return from abroad each summer the thing looks like a jungle.
Sky blue hydrangeas fill the yard. Love.
We will also be around to observe the barred owls that live in the woods behind our house.
You can just see the owl at the top of the picture below.
And we will have more time to climb trees.
The kids can practice getting along with one of the only activities they enjoy doing together, playing minecraft.
I'm sure we'll go to the beach a lot and have friends over for dinner. It's going to be a very relaxing summer!
1.21.2013
The Question on Everyone's Mind
After the New Year, every acquaintance, friend, and coworker I run into wants to know where we are planning to go this summer. Its a right of passage for this family to go to some far flung place for weeks and live out of a backpack in a foreign land on a crazy cheap budget. We have been living a dream that was a decade in the making. Our family travel resume includes Costa Rica 2009, Peru 2010, Dominican Republic 2011, and Colombia 2012.
Right around this time of year, for the past four years, I usually begin to dream and plan where we will escape to for three weeks this summer. I start looking at costs, trolling travel blogs, studying flight price patterns and investigating the logistics of visas and vaccinations. I often have a list of places we are considering and a mixture of angst and excitement about each one. When people ask me about where we are going in the summer I really love telling them. I have really liked being this family that stretches itself into experiencing other cultures and countries, that takes 15 hour bus rides, eats street food for dinner, and sleeps in dumpy hotels to be able to afford the whole thing.
This year's answer is different and not exciting at all. When I say it it comes out as a long story and people really don't want to hear it. Our choices this year don't reflect our family dream but instead indicate that detours and circumstances get in the way of dreams and plans. People don't really care to hear about it, it's boring.
But since you are here you must want to know. There are a few answers to the excitement saturated query of "So, where are you guys going this year?"
Answer 1: We are going to the orthodontist! Our middle schooler needs braces this summer and the cost just about equals the cost of an international trip (around 6k).
Answer 2: If Luis gets accepted into the principal fellows program we are not going anywhere because the opportunity comes with a 10k pay cut. Not only will we stay home this summer, but also the next and likely the following summer as well. A 10k pay cut is pretty significant. It curtails our ability to save for an international trip and retirement for that matter. We are looking at two very lean years ahead if he gets this fellowship. Jet setting to South America will not be in the cards. Although, we still will be eating a lot of rice and beans. Very few applicants receive this fellowship so my doom and gloom prediction is likely unwarranted. We won't know anything until April or May.
Answer 3: We are talking about taking a driving trip out west to visit national parks. A few ideas are being thrown around....northern California and the redwood forest, or deserts of the southwest like grand canyon, slot canyon, four corners etc, or Yellowstone National Park. To keep the cost under 3k we would have to camp every night. Luis has been wanting an American trip for quite a while. I have been fighting it tooth and nail. It's expensive! And it's the opposite of adventurous. It's touristy. It's too damn easy. It's boring and predictable. Luis is about ready to say its an American national park trip or nothing. I can feel it. He wants to issue an ultimatum. Maybe if I just give in this once I won't have to do it again. Just get it over with. I feel like such a bitch.
Answer 4: Two weeks in Las Galeras, Dominican Republic staying in that off the beaten path dirt cheap bungalow hiking to deserted beaches and reading a stack of novels in a hammock. This trip we could do for 3k including airfare. I dream about going back to the DR. I was so happy and relaxed there that I even forgot what I do for a living, and thats really saying something. Going to the dominican republic feels indulgent when I consider the need for braces, the possibility of a substantial paycut, and the fact that I need to throw in the towel and let my husband choose where we go for once.
Answer 5: We are skipping a year because we are saving to go to Brazil for the 2014 World Cup. This is my soccer obsessed son's dream. From what I know about the costs of traveling to Brazil and the likely price inflations of the world cup I can't imagine how we would afford this trip even without any of the previous answers! It would take three years of saving and not traveling in the summer. It will be impossible if Luis gets that fellowship.
So you can see that I don't have an exotic answer this year. I don't usually go into detail for most people, I usually just joke around and say we are going to the orthodontist. It gets a good laugh and takes the pressure off, plus it is true. Nothing can be considered until we find out about the fellowship program in the spring.
The fact that these are champagne problems is not lost on me. Despite my rant I don't see the glass as half empty or half full, But I am grateful to have a glass.
Right around this time of year, for the past four years, I usually begin to dream and plan where we will escape to for three weeks this summer. I start looking at costs, trolling travel blogs, studying flight price patterns and investigating the logistics of visas and vaccinations. I often have a list of places we are considering and a mixture of angst and excitement about each one. When people ask me about where we are going in the summer I really love telling them. I have really liked being this family that stretches itself into experiencing other cultures and countries, that takes 15 hour bus rides, eats street food for dinner, and sleeps in dumpy hotels to be able to afford the whole thing.
This year's answer is different and not exciting at all. When I say it it comes out as a long story and people really don't want to hear it. Our choices this year don't reflect our family dream but instead indicate that detours and circumstances get in the way of dreams and plans. People don't really care to hear about it, it's boring.
But since you are here you must want to know. There are a few answers to the excitement saturated query of "So, where are you guys going this year?"
Answer 1: We are going to the orthodontist! Our middle schooler needs braces this summer and the cost just about equals the cost of an international trip (around 6k).
Answer 2: If Luis gets accepted into the principal fellows program we are not going anywhere because the opportunity comes with a 10k pay cut. Not only will we stay home this summer, but also the next and likely the following summer as well. A 10k pay cut is pretty significant. It curtails our ability to save for an international trip and retirement for that matter. We are looking at two very lean years ahead if he gets this fellowship. Jet setting to South America will not be in the cards. Although, we still will be eating a lot of rice and beans. Very few applicants receive this fellowship so my doom and gloom prediction is likely unwarranted. We won't know anything until April or May.
Answer 3: We are talking about taking a driving trip out west to visit national parks. A few ideas are being thrown around....northern California and the redwood forest, or deserts of the southwest like grand canyon, slot canyon, four corners etc, or Yellowstone National Park. To keep the cost under 3k we would have to camp every night. Luis has been wanting an American trip for quite a while. I have been fighting it tooth and nail. It's expensive! And it's the opposite of adventurous. It's touristy. It's too damn easy. It's boring and predictable. Luis is about ready to say its an American national park trip or nothing. I can feel it. He wants to issue an ultimatum. Maybe if I just give in this once I won't have to do it again. Just get it over with. I feel like such a bitch.
Answer 4: Two weeks in Las Galeras, Dominican Republic staying in that off the beaten path dirt cheap bungalow hiking to deserted beaches and reading a stack of novels in a hammock. This trip we could do for 3k including airfare. I dream about going back to the DR. I was so happy and relaxed there that I even forgot what I do for a living, and thats really saying something. Going to the dominican republic feels indulgent when I consider the need for braces, the possibility of a substantial paycut, and the fact that I need to throw in the towel and let my husband choose where we go for once.
Answer 5: We are skipping a year because we are saving to go to Brazil for the 2014 World Cup. This is my soccer obsessed son's dream. From what I know about the costs of traveling to Brazil and the likely price inflations of the world cup I can't imagine how we would afford this trip even without any of the previous answers! It would take three years of saving and not traveling in the summer. It will be impossible if Luis gets that fellowship.
So you can see that I don't have an exotic answer this year. I don't usually go into detail for most people, I usually just joke around and say we are going to the orthodontist. It gets a good laugh and takes the pressure off, plus it is true. Nothing can be considered until we find out about the fellowship program in the spring.
The fact that these are champagne problems is not lost on me. Despite my rant I don't see the glass as half empty or half full, But I am grateful to have a glass.
9.26.2012
A family book study
Even though school has started, and our summer of travel long over, I am posting this travel related piece anyway. Since I wasn't sure if slogging through Colombia for three weeks was enough to make the kids despise me, we've decided to do a family book study, complete with chapter by chapter mini projects and the dreaded discussion questions, for the next few weeks. Luis came up with the idea and chose the book, The 21 Balloons by William Pene du Bois. The kids are aghast that we could come up with yet another way to ruin their lives. As middle school educators we are keenly adept at conjuring up ways to torture kids.
The book, written in 1947, is actually pretty interesting. I am surprised that a book exists that we could all enjoy, but then again I have never tried to do something like this before. In a nutshell, the story is about how an explorer came to be found in the Atlantic Ocean among 21 balloons when he had only departed San Francisco 40 days earlier in a single hot air balloon. I have been writing the discussion questions and coming up with the mini projects as I read.
We do the discussion parts at meal times to take advantage of the captive audience. The very first page describes two kinds of travelers...one kind is all about getting to the destination and enjoying it when you get there, the other kind is all about the journey. We talked about which type of travelers we were and under what circumstances. We related the styles to the different experiences we had in Colombia.
For our hands on project we designed our own hot air balloons using helium balloons.
In chapter 2 when Professor Sherman finally reaches San Francisco to tell his balloon adventure story "a hero's welcome is prepared" by decorating the city with all kinds of balloons. We prepared our own hero's welcome by making mini hot air balloons.
Half way through the project someone decided we should let our balloons go when we were finished.
Maya added a note for the lucky finder of her balloon.
They look pretty cool! Even though we got in at least 3 arguments during the making of these things, I would say it was a pretty successful family project. The kids definitely forgot all about how much they hated it.
And the balloons are free!
Since all they really want to do is have maximum screen time, the next task involved doing an Internet search of hot air balloons capable of crossing an ocean. Then they were to design and draw their own ocean crossing balloon. They could use any of the features they learned about but they had to include at least one of their own design. For all the moaning and groaning they did on this task they each produced a pretty good drawing.
Jack made a four level structure. His features furniture made of bamboo for its lightness and a propane powered stove. His "food floor" is stocked with turkey, mutton, cheese, pickles, bread, and water.
This is a birds eye view of Maya's ocean crossing balloon basket, which is actually an inflatable boat. A pantry stocked with meats, fruits, veggies, and water on one side and a pillow and blanket with a journal and a pile of books on the other.
Her design was in two parts. This second drawing shows the side view of her boat/basket.
The main character crash lands his hot air balloon on Krakatoa and encounters an inventive and utopian society. We had some nice conversations about what kind of characteristics and skills would make a person good candidate for living on a small uncharted island. Each of us, like the islanders, had to come up with an invention that would make island life easier.
Reading this book together was a nice bridge from travel to home, in part because it was all about travel and also because it gave us reason to spend time together which is something we get pretty used to doing on the road.
We had grand intentions of building a hot air balloon out of tissue paper and powered by sterno fuel or candles as a grand finale...but as the start of school approached we became increasingly apathetic. Building a hot air balloon remained on our family "to do" board for weeks, and I think it is still there. It's certainly doubtful that we will do it now that school is in full swing and the kids are in constant book project mode. Anyway, like Colombia, the family book study had highs and lows but was worth it all the same.
The book, written in 1947, is actually pretty interesting. I am surprised that a book exists that we could all enjoy, but then again I have never tried to do something like this before. In a nutshell, the story is about how an explorer came to be found in the Atlantic Ocean among 21 balloons when he had only departed San Francisco 40 days earlier in a single hot air balloon. I have been writing the discussion questions and coming up with the mini projects as I read.
We do the discussion parts at meal times to take advantage of the captive audience. The very first page describes two kinds of travelers...one kind is all about getting to the destination and enjoying it when you get there, the other kind is all about the journey. We talked about which type of travelers we were and under what circumstances. We related the styles to the different experiences we had in Colombia.
For our hands on project we designed our own hot air balloons using helium balloons.
In chapter 2 when Professor Sherman finally reaches San Francisco to tell his balloon adventure story "a hero's welcome is prepared" by decorating the city with all kinds of balloons. We prepared our own hero's welcome by making mini hot air balloons.
Half way through the project someone decided we should let our balloons go when we were finished.
Maya added a note for the lucky finder of her balloon.
They look pretty cool! Even though we got in at least 3 arguments during the making of these things, I would say it was a pretty successful family project. The kids definitely forgot all about how much they hated it.
And the balloons are free!
Since all they really want to do is have maximum screen time, the next task involved doing an Internet search of hot air balloons capable of crossing an ocean. Then they were to design and draw their own ocean crossing balloon. They could use any of the features they learned about but they had to include at least one of their own design. For all the moaning and groaning they did on this task they each produced a pretty good drawing.
Jack made a four level structure. His features furniture made of bamboo for its lightness and a propane powered stove. His "food floor" is stocked with turkey, mutton, cheese, pickles, bread, and water.
This is a birds eye view of Maya's ocean crossing balloon basket, which is actually an inflatable boat. A pantry stocked with meats, fruits, veggies, and water on one side and a pillow and blanket with a journal and a pile of books on the other.
Her design was in two parts. This second drawing shows the side view of her boat/basket.
The main character crash lands his hot air balloon on Krakatoa and encounters an inventive and utopian society. We had some nice conversations about what kind of characteristics and skills would make a person good candidate for living on a small uncharted island. Each of us, like the islanders, had to come up with an invention that would make island life easier.
Reading this book together was a nice bridge from travel to home, in part because it was all about travel and also because it gave us reason to spend time together which is something we get pretty used to doing on the road.
We had grand intentions of building a hot air balloon out of tissue paper and powered by sterno fuel or candles as a grand finale...but as the start of school approached we became increasingly apathetic. Building a hot air balloon remained on our family "to do" board for weeks, and I think it is still there. It's certainly doubtful that we will do it now that school is in full swing and the kids are in constant book project mode. Anyway, like Colombia, the family book study had highs and lows but was worth it all the same.
7.22.2012
Colombia Wrap Up
Some final thoughts on costs and a top 10 list for Colombia.
I have added up our expenses.....we spent 152$ a day for the four of us to travel in Colombia, or about 38$ per person. This budget includes everything but our airfares. It covers in country transport (buses, taxis, motos), food, snacks, bottled water, hotels, activities, and souvenirs (we didn't buy that much).
I was expecting Colombia to be much cheaper. I did hours and hours of research for this trip, but I was still surprised to pay 65$ a night for a hotel room. In Colombia they charge by the person, unlike at home where you can get a 40$ room at a motel 6 and sneak/cram 4 people in there. Staying in a dorm room for 10$ per person a night would have reduced our costs but our family needed the space and privacy afforded by a double room with its own bathroom.
We didn't do a ton of activities so that helped save s bit of money. I think most people would have done a lot more activities than we did. We held back because of the costs and because our kids will only tolerate one excursion a day, and don't like to do activities two days in a row. This works to our benefit because half the time (who am I kidding, more than half the time!) they just want to hang out at the hotel. When you do independent budget travel with kids looking for a place to eat three times a day is plenty of culture for them. Walking to a town plaza and eating ice cream is plenty enough activity. They don't to feel the need to "do" a country. They can just barely "be" in another country.
Food wasn't a huge budget breaker. An average meal with soup, chicken, rice, beans, tostones, salad, and a fresh juice costs about 6$. Since the portions are huge we just ordered 3 meals for all of us. Our usual routine was to make our own breakfast in the hotel from food we purchased in a market the day before. If the place had a kitchen we'd buy stuff to make omelets, if not then we'd eat bread, fruit, and an avocado. For dinner we always scoured the area for street food which was excellent fun. We could eat fried chicken and potatoes at one cart then move on to empanadas and the next. Street food dinners would cost the entire family less than 10$. We could have spent less on food by always staying in a hotel with a community kitchen and cooking most of our meals there. Cooking and eating like a local would have cut our food budget easily in half, as we found grocery store food (the exception being American and European foods) to be pretty cheap.
There's really no getting around the high cost of transportation. Our bus tickets from Sincelejo to Medellin and from Medellin to Tolu costs us 450$. Could it have been cheaper if we didn't take the big comfortable Brasilia buses? I don't know because I didn't go from counter to counter at the bus station surveying the prices of all the other companies looking for a small, rickety, uncomfortable bus to travel overnight. I was more interested in comfort and safety than saving money in this case. Getting in and out of Mompos cost us about 200$. We had a snafu each way which led to taking expensive and lengthy rides in hired cars. In Medellin we over spent on a taxi we used to go all over town looking for a hotel that didn't exist. Otherwise, our bus, moto, taxi travel was pretty straightforward. Transportation mixups are par for the course when you travel independently, there's no one to figure it all out for you so mistakes along the way are bound to be made.
Lastly, we could have reduced our daily budget by eliminating the daily ice cream/sweet treat. I am pretty sure this would have caused a total mutiny as it can be a bright spot in an otherwise difficult situation. The daily treat was also used as a bribe, straight from the parent of the year tool box. Also you need to consider all the times when they upped the ante to more than one treat a day, to which I usually obliged.
A note about safety in Colombia. Without hesitation I will say that we felt completely safe in Colombia. Not even once did we have to duck for cover in a cross fight between paramilitaries and drug lords! Seriously though, there is a lot of police and military presence everywhere you go in Colombia and it does create the feeling that someone is keeping the peace. I definitely felt more safe in Colombia than I do in my home town. At home I fear gang activity, break ins, kidnapping, and gun violence. Makes me think we need a battalion of machine gun slinging national guardsmen patrolling our neighborhoods and public spaces here at home. The average law abiding citizen would be significantly safer, especially from gang activity. Luis said that this was a really republican attitude for me to have. Whatever. I'm just sick of the way gangs have taken over neighborhoods around here and I'd like to see our armed forces do battle with them. Oops, did I just say that? Anyway, using a little common sense (not walking around drunk late at night with wads of cash with a fancy camera strapped around our neck) security was not an issue for us.
What people say about Colombians is also true, they are pretty nice and friendly. Colombian tourists are a particularly happy group of people. They seem genuinely thrilled to be exploring their own country. We didn't meet a ton of other travelers, except a few in some of the hotels we stayed in. The travelers we did talk with were the typical 20 something backpacking type, most of whom were pretty awestruck that we were doing independent backpacking travel with our kids. We certainly did not meet, or even see, foreign tourists traveling with children. With the exception of the Colombian American family we met at the coffee factory in Minca, we didnt meet or notice any Americans in the entire 3 weeks....except at the airport, so we must have been running around somewhere!
We each came up with our own top ten best things about our trip to Colombia list. Here's mine, in no particular order:
1. San Antero mud volcano
2. The food
3. The futbol game in Medellin
4. The old city in Cartagena
5. The Metro and night time cable car in Medellin
6. River trips in Mompos and Tolu
7. Pozo Azul in Minca (riding the motos and jumping off the rocks)
8. La Victoria Coffee Plantation and drinking coffee
9. Interesting and challenging modes of transportation
10. Limeade
It feels good to make a top ten on what I liked about Colombia. It hasn't been easy to describe the trip in glowing terms when people ask how it was, but making this list...much like making a gratitude list....makes it obvious that we had many good times and experienced much happiness and wonder.
I have added up our expenses.....we spent 152$ a day for the four of us to travel in Colombia, or about 38$ per person. This budget includes everything but our airfares. It covers in country transport (buses, taxis, motos), food, snacks, bottled water, hotels, activities, and souvenirs (we didn't buy that much).
I was expecting Colombia to be much cheaper. I did hours and hours of research for this trip, but I was still surprised to pay 65$ a night for a hotel room. In Colombia they charge by the person, unlike at home where you can get a 40$ room at a motel 6 and sneak/cram 4 people in there. Staying in a dorm room for 10$ per person a night would have reduced our costs but our family needed the space and privacy afforded by a double room with its own bathroom.
We didn't do a ton of activities so that helped save s bit of money. I think most people would have done a lot more activities than we did. We held back because of the costs and because our kids will only tolerate one excursion a day, and don't like to do activities two days in a row. This works to our benefit because half the time (who am I kidding, more than half the time!) they just want to hang out at the hotel. When you do independent budget travel with kids looking for a place to eat three times a day is plenty of culture for them. Walking to a town plaza and eating ice cream is plenty enough activity. They don't to feel the need to "do" a country. They can just barely "be" in another country.
Food wasn't a huge budget breaker. An average meal with soup, chicken, rice, beans, tostones, salad, and a fresh juice costs about 6$. Since the portions are huge we just ordered 3 meals for all of us. Our usual routine was to make our own breakfast in the hotel from food we purchased in a market the day before. If the place had a kitchen we'd buy stuff to make omelets, if not then we'd eat bread, fruit, and an avocado. For dinner we always scoured the area for street food which was excellent fun. We could eat fried chicken and potatoes at one cart then move on to empanadas and the next. Street food dinners would cost the entire family less than 10$. We could have spent less on food by always staying in a hotel with a community kitchen and cooking most of our meals there. Cooking and eating like a local would have cut our food budget easily in half, as we found grocery store food (the exception being American and European foods) to be pretty cheap.
There's really no getting around the high cost of transportation. Our bus tickets from Sincelejo to Medellin and from Medellin to Tolu costs us 450$. Could it have been cheaper if we didn't take the big comfortable Brasilia buses? I don't know because I didn't go from counter to counter at the bus station surveying the prices of all the other companies looking for a small, rickety, uncomfortable bus to travel overnight. I was more interested in comfort and safety than saving money in this case. Getting in and out of Mompos cost us about 200$. We had a snafu each way which led to taking expensive and lengthy rides in hired cars. In Medellin we over spent on a taxi we used to go all over town looking for a hotel that didn't exist. Otherwise, our bus, moto, taxi travel was pretty straightforward. Transportation mixups are par for the course when you travel independently, there's no one to figure it all out for you so mistakes along the way are bound to be made.
Lastly, we could have reduced our daily budget by eliminating the daily ice cream/sweet treat. I am pretty sure this would have caused a total mutiny as it can be a bright spot in an otherwise difficult situation. The daily treat was also used as a bribe, straight from the parent of the year tool box. Also you need to consider all the times when they upped the ante to more than one treat a day, to which I usually obliged.
A note about safety in Colombia. Without hesitation I will say that we felt completely safe in Colombia. Not even once did we have to duck for cover in a cross fight between paramilitaries and drug lords! Seriously though, there is a lot of police and military presence everywhere you go in Colombia and it does create the feeling that someone is keeping the peace. I definitely felt more safe in Colombia than I do in my home town. At home I fear gang activity, break ins, kidnapping, and gun violence. Makes me think we need a battalion of machine gun slinging national guardsmen patrolling our neighborhoods and public spaces here at home. The average law abiding citizen would be significantly safer, especially from gang activity. Luis said that this was a really republican attitude for me to have. Whatever. I'm just sick of the way gangs have taken over neighborhoods around here and I'd like to see our armed forces do battle with them. Oops, did I just say that? Anyway, using a little common sense (not walking around drunk late at night with wads of cash with a fancy camera strapped around our neck) security was not an issue for us.
What people say about Colombians is also true, they are pretty nice and friendly. Colombian tourists are a particularly happy group of people. They seem genuinely thrilled to be exploring their own country. We didn't meet a ton of other travelers, except a few in some of the hotels we stayed in. The travelers we did talk with were the typical 20 something backpacking type, most of whom were pretty awestruck that we were doing independent backpacking travel with our kids. We certainly did not meet, or even see, foreign tourists traveling with children. With the exception of the Colombian American family we met at the coffee factory in Minca, we didnt meet or notice any Americans in the entire 3 weeks....except at the airport, so we must have been running around somewhere!
We each came up with our own top ten best things about our trip to Colombia list. Here's mine, in no particular order:
1. San Antero mud volcano
2. The food
3. The futbol game in Medellin
4. The old city in Cartagena
5. The Metro and night time cable car in Medellin
6. River trips in Mompos and Tolu
7. Pozo Azul in Minca (riding the motos and jumping off the rocks)
8. La Victoria Coffee Plantation and drinking coffee
9. Interesting and challenging modes of transportation
10. Limeade
It feels good to make a top ten on what I liked about Colombia. It hasn't been easy to describe the trip in glowing terms when people ask how it was, but making this list...much like making a gratitude list....makes it obvious that we had many good times and experienced much happiness and wonder.
7.19.2012
So how do you afford this anyway?
I've been promising a post for some time now explaining how we manage to fund these trips on teachers salaries, which as you may know are appallingly low in our county. In fact they are projected to be even lower as another pay cut is expected to be issued this year. A pay CUT. Never mind the fact that teachers here haven't received a raise in over four years and the cost of our health benefits have increased.
So how are we managing to still take three week international trips with two kids? While I am not going to embarrass myself and divulge our income, I will tell you that this can be easily figured out on the county schools website. If you have never looked into what a teacher makes in our county, be prepared to be unpleasantly surprised. Ah, but I digress. I'll try to explain how we have been able to make this work and hopefully I don't come across as pious or holier than thou.
First of all, we have very little debt. No student loans, no credit card debt, no car payment. The only debt we have is a mortgage payment which we have refinanced to be pretty low. Not being in debt means we live within our means. We have 9$ cable and a cheap cell phone plan. We don't save a hellava lot for our kids college educations. We both drive cars that are over ten years old and we only buy what we can pay for in any given month.
Every month when we get paid I put 600$ into a savings account which nets us 6000$ a year to spend on a three week trip. Our maximum daily budget is 150$ to include lodging, transport, food, activities and excursions, and trinkets to bring home. With this daily budget we can spend up to 700$ on airfares each which limits the places in the world we can go.
No student loans was a result of some deliberate choices and some luck. I went to community college for two years which was dirt cheap. Then my parents paid for a year of university, I worked, and I met Luis, who helped me pay for the last year. As for graduate school, I had a graduate assistantship. Luis had the GI bill and various scholarships to put him through college and he worked the whole time.
I do realize that our financial lives can be ruined by one large medical disaster or accident, or a hurricane. We haven't run into huge life sucking major expenses like braces. More than likely, the year my kid gets those (and we know he will be getting them) we aren't going anywhere but the orthodontists office. My kids aren't old enough to drive, so we aren't being bled for 200$ a month in car insurance for a new teenage driver. When Luis starts graduate school we will have a huge tuition bill to navigate. Won't be going anywhere for those years either. When he does his year long internship thats gonna be a mighty huge pay cut because he wont be working! Oh yeah, when my 12 year old car or Luis' 16 year old truck bites the dust were gonna need some new wheels....and won't be going anywhere that year either. All signs point to the grim reality that this recent trip to colombia may have been our last for a really long time. That just about makes me cry, but really theres not much i can do about it is there? I am also oddly superstitious so just by typing this post I have made myself vulnerable to the good luck gods who are now jealous of our up until now fortunate existence.
Another part of having enough money to travel with is attitude. A little history on why we don't feel deprived of life's embellishments while we save for travel. Luis and I have been together for over 20 years and have always lived off of very meager incomes. As students we were broke, and we resisted the urge to borrow money because being in debt is a horrible ball and chain. Then when he got his first job I decided to stay home and raise kids. So we lived on this ridiculously low teachers salary with two kids at home! There are several things we did for this near decade that allowed this to happen for us. One, we found ways to make a little extra money under the table like lawn mowing, handyman work, babysitting, and sewing. We made a lot of the things we needed and fixed what was broken. We trash picked (well, I did), went to tag sales, and received many hand me downs. In fact, our kids dressed exclusively in hand me downs the whole time. I breastfed and we coslept negating the need for formulas, prepared baby foods, and nursery furnishings. I cannot underestimate having the benefits of WIC and Medicade that the kids and I utilized during those at home years.
I guess you could say that after 19 years of being frugal and essentially living off the same amount of yearly income and having amazing luck were used to being thrifty, resourceful, and in constant depravation mode.
So when both kids were finally in school and I went back to work, what stopped us from going crazy and buying new cars and iPhones? This is another long story. Do you have time?
Waaaaay back in 1995 we had to make a choice. And it wasn't a choice I wanted to make, in fact I was downright pissed that I was being asked to make it. The kind of choice that, when you are in your early twenties and still feel entitled to your parents financial support, when made will have a profound impact on your life. You just don't know it at the time. And like most kids you resent your parents for putting any boundaries on your dreams of doing nothing forever.
We were living in Chicago at the time. We committed to staying for a year at a cheap apartment in the city while working two jobs to save up for a round the world trip with no definite end. We had just come back from many months spent in India, South East Asia, and Central America and we're seriously and hopelessly bitten by the travel bug. We had decided during that time of our young lives that traveling, specifically shoestring budget backpacker nomad type traveling, was the absolute number one priority in our lives. We were bitten at just the right time in life I think, to always have it in our blood. And so here we were saving our pennies working 16 hour days just so we could go off again on a big explore.
Enter my mom. My mom, who in an act of self preservation, told us that we needed to have a plan for what we were gonna do when we returned. She had a litany of friends whose twenty something kids had returned home to live, no, leach, off of their parents because they hadn't bothered to make plans after college, as in finding a job and a place to live on their own. These friends of hers did nothing but complain about these lecherous kids, and yet they never did a thing about it. They didn't kick them out or even require them to pay rent. These parents were miserable, they complained to my mom, what with having an extra mouth to feed and loosing their privacy and all. Never mind that these twenty somethings were slobs to boot.
My mom had resolved to not let this happen to her. So she told us that we better have plans when we returned. When we returned? Geeze, that's half the fun of it! Who knows what we are gonna do when we get home? And who wants to think about when we come home? What a buzz kill. We were living in the moment, baby! Who needed plans?
Then she let the hammer fall. We'd better have some plans for when we return BECAUSE WE WEREN'T GOING TO LIVE WITH HER (and ruin her life like her friends kids). Hold it, you mean she wasn't going to catch us when we fell? What kind of mother.......humph, you know I was pissed. Really, why can't we just do whatever we want, spend all our money, and have the old rents to fall back on? Let them pick up the pieces, we deserve our fun in life!
But she was serious. She kinds freaked us out a little. So we made some plans for our eventual return. We made some plans to go to college and find careers already!
Put the brakes on and hold the phone. Careers? Uh, no, we were too good for the likes of a nine to five career. Chained to a company for 30 years begging for a few days off at Christmas? That lifestyle is for our parents generation thank you very much. What fun is that anyway? Who even LIKES working? And HOW do people travel the world working 50 weeks a year anyway?
Asking these questions led us to pursue the only kind of employment you can have that affords ample time off....teaching. Now, I am sorry to anyone who thinks that we had any other REAL motive for getting into our profession. Sure, we like kids, we dig that "ah ha" moment in our students, and all that fluff. But the real reason we chose our careers is because we would have to spend the least amount of time doing them. Oh sure we have a bunch of more mature motivations for being educators nowadays. But that's how it started.
And that leads us back to those broke ass college days, which you already know about. A combination of luck, deliberate choices, not many financial disasters, and teachable moments- that's how we afford international travel on a teachers salary.
So how are we managing to still take three week international trips with two kids? While I am not going to embarrass myself and divulge our income, I will tell you that this can be easily figured out on the county schools website. If you have never looked into what a teacher makes in our county, be prepared to be unpleasantly surprised. Ah, but I digress. I'll try to explain how we have been able to make this work and hopefully I don't come across as pious or holier than thou.
First of all, we have very little debt. No student loans, no credit card debt, no car payment. The only debt we have is a mortgage payment which we have refinanced to be pretty low. Not being in debt means we live within our means. We have 9$ cable and a cheap cell phone plan. We don't save a hellava lot for our kids college educations. We both drive cars that are over ten years old and we only buy what we can pay for in any given month.
Every month when we get paid I put 600$ into a savings account which nets us 6000$ a year to spend on a three week trip. Our maximum daily budget is 150$ to include lodging, transport, food, activities and excursions, and trinkets to bring home. With this daily budget we can spend up to 700$ on airfares each which limits the places in the world we can go.
No student loans was a result of some deliberate choices and some luck. I went to community college for two years which was dirt cheap. Then my parents paid for a year of university, I worked, and I met Luis, who helped me pay for the last year. As for graduate school, I had a graduate assistantship. Luis had the GI bill and various scholarships to put him through college and he worked the whole time.
I do realize that our financial lives can be ruined by one large medical disaster or accident, or a hurricane. We haven't run into huge life sucking major expenses like braces. More than likely, the year my kid gets those (and we know he will be getting them) we aren't going anywhere but the orthodontists office. My kids aren't old enough to drive, so we aren't being bled for 200$ a month in car insurance for a new teenage driver. When Luis starts graduate school we will have a huge tuition bill to navigate. Won't be going anywhere for those years either. When he does his year long internship thats gonna be a mighty huge pay cut because he wont be working! Oh yeah, when my 12 year old car or Luis' 16 year old truck bites the dust were gonna need some new wheels....and won't be going anywhere that year either. All signs point to the grim reality that this recent trip to colombia may have been our last for a really long time. That just about makes me cry, but really theres not much i can do about it is there? I am also oddly superstitious so just by typing this post I have made myself vulnerable to the good luck gods who are now jealous of our up until now fortunate existence.
Another part of having enough money to travel with is attitude. A little history on why we don't feel deprived of life's embellishments while we save for travel. Luis and I have been together for over 20 years and have always lived off of very meager incomes. As students we were broke, and we resisted the urge to borrow money because being in debt is a horrible ball and chain. Then when he got his first job I decided to stay home and raise kids. So we lived on this ridiculously low teachers salary with two kids at home! There are several things we did for this near decade that allowed this to happen for us. One, we found ways to make a little extra money under the table like lawn mowing, handyman work, babysitting, and sewing. We made a lot of the things we needed and fixed what was broken. We trash picked (well, I did), went to tag sales, and received many hand me downs. In fact, our kids dressed exclusively in hand me downs the whole time. I breastfed and we coslept negating the need for formulas, prepared baby foods, and nursery furnishings. I cannot underestimate having the benefits of WIC and Medicade that the kids and I utilized during those at home years.
I guess you could say that after 19 years of being frugal and essentially living off the same amount of yearly income and having amazing luck were used to being thrifty, resourceful, and in constant depravation mode.
So when both kids were finally in school and I went back to work, what stopped us from going crazy and buying new cars and iPhones? This is another long story. Do you have time?
Waaaaay back in 1995 we had to make a choice. And it wasn't a choice I wanted to make, in fact I was downright pissed that I was being asked to make it. The kind of choice that, when you are in your early twenties and still feel entitled to your parents financial support, when made will have a profound impact on your life. You just don't know it at the time. And like most kids you resent your parents for putting any boundaries on your dreams of doing nothing forever.
We were living in Chicago at the time. We committed to staying for a year at a cheap apartment in the city while working two jobs to save up for a round the world trip with no definite end. We had just come back from many months spent in India, South East Asia, and Central America and we're seriously and hopelessly bitten by the travel bug. We had decided during that time of our young lives that traveling, specifically shoestring budget backpacker nomad type traveling, was the absolute number one priority in our lives. We were bitten at just the right time in life I think, to always have it in our blood. And so here we were saving our pennies working 16 hour days just so we could go off again on a big explore.
Enter my mom. My mom, who in an act of self preservation, told us that we needed to have a plan for what we were gonna do when we returned. She had a litany of friends whose twenty something kids had returned home to live, no, leach, off of their parents because they hadn't bothered to make plans after college, as in finding a job and a place to live on their own. These friends of hers did nothing but complain about these lecherous kids, and yet they never did a thing about it. They didn't kick them out or even require them to pay rent. These parents were miserable, they complained to my mom, what with having an extra mouth to feed and loosing their privacy and all. Never mind that these twenty somethings were slobs to boot.
My mom had resolved to not let this happen to her. So she told us that we better have plans when we returned. When we returned? Geeze, that's half the fun of it! Who knows what we are gonna do when we get home? And who wants to think about when we come home? What a buzz kill. We were living in the moment, baby! Who needed plans?
Then she let the hammer fall. We'd better have some plans for when we return BECAUSE WE WEREN'T GOING TO LIVE WITH HER (and ruin her life like her friends kids). Hold it, you mean she wasn't going to catch us when we fell? What kind of mother.......humph, you know I was pissed. Really, why can't we just do whatever we want, spend all our money, and have the old rents to fall back on? Let them pick up the pieces, we deserve our fun in life!
But she was serious. She kinds freaked us out a little. So we made some plans for our eventual return. We made some plans to go to college and find careers already!
Put the brakes on and hold the phone. Careers? Uh, no, we were too good for the likes of a nine to five career. Chained to a company for 30 years begging for a few days off at Christmas? That lifestyle is for our parents generation thank you very much. What fun is that anyway? Who even LIKES working? And HOW do people travel the world working 50 weeks a year anyway?
Asking these questions led us to pursue the only kind of employment you can have that affords ample time off....teaching. Now, I am sorry to anyone who thinks that we had any other REAL motive for getting into our profession. Sure, we like kids, we dig that "ah ha" moment in our students, and all that fluff. But the real reason we chose our careers is because we would have to spend the least amount of time doing them. Oh sure we have a bunch of more mature motivations for being educators nowadays. But that's how it started.
And that leads us back to those broke ass college days, which you already know about. A combination of luck, deliberate choices, not many financial disasters, and teachable moments- that's how we afford international travel on a teachers salary.
7.11.2012
Tough Travelers
And they are indeed, tough travelers. If they were a few feet taller they'd fit right in with the scruffiest of twenty something backpackers. Maya practically has dreads and Jacks shoes are so beat up they are being held together by threads (in fact they did finally break this evening while we were walking through the old city in Cartagena. He had to walk back to the hotel barefoot which was disgusting).
I am really proud of them for making it though three weeks in Colombia. There were tears and temper tantrums for sure, but many happy times doubling over with laughter at the many inside jokes we created along the way. The smell of our stinky clothes that have been washed once in three and a half weeks is pretty powerful, especially in this small hotel room.
And speaking of our hotel, we are staying at La Magdalena again, having made a one night reservation through booking.com like last time. Wouldn't you know it, they remembered us, had our room ready, even called us by name. They seemed genuinely happy to see us again. The street food vendor at chorizo katy remembered us too, from three weeks ago,when we walked by, calling out to us, hey amigo! Of course we had to buy a little bag of his sausage and potatoes. At Mulato Sabor where we had lunch for three days in a row when we first got to colombia were so pleasantly surprised to see us when we walked in this afternoon.
So what they say about Colombian people being so nice really is true, and we knew it all along (well, except for preadolescent boys, see previous post from mompos). We didn't come here for the sights, actually we didn't really know what kind of sights Colombia would be famous for. We didn't come here because the people were rumored to be nice. I guess we came here because it's something not many people do, and we wanted to do something and go somewhere really unique and different, yet relatively affordable. I mean, really, who goes to Colombia? We do!
Most people, including us before we came here, think that Colombia is totally off limits because of security issues. But when we met backpackers in Peru back in 2010 who had been to Colombia we were intrigued about their glowing reports of traveling in Colombia. I read a jillion lonely planet thorn tree forum postings about how safe this country actually is and that was reassuring as well. Colombia has such a bad rep for being dangerous, but like I have said before, I felt completely safe here all the time day and night....except for that nasty river port town. The safe feeling wasn't entirely due to police presence either. We have experienced that before in other countries and sometimes it makes us feel safer (Peru) and sometimes it doesn't (panama). I think part of the reason we felt safe here was the energy from Colombian tourists. There were just so many of them, everywhere we went. These folks seems to be enjoying traveling around their country more than any other people we have encountered...even if they do leave all that darn trash everywhere.
A few days ago I might have said I regret coming here, that it was too hard going and too many roads were unpaved. With less than 24 hours to go, I don't feel that kind of regret anymore. I am glad that we pushed our selves, faced tough times and unknown circumstances. All I have to do is look at this picture on this post and I know that this trip has given the kids so much confidence that they really can handle anything life gives them. With any luck, our family travels will make them want to seek out the fartherest corners of the world and crave intense experiences. We joke that we have beat the traveler out of them, and that when they grow up the only place they will ever want to take their kids is Disney World.
On this trip the kids revealed new plans they have dreamed up for their future which gave me a little window into the people they might become. Maya said she wanted to work in a foreign country helping people recover from natural disasters. This trip is helping her to form her place in the world and how she might contribute to it. As for Jack, well, we were in a small corner store and he put a 500 peso coin, worth about 50 cents but it would buy an empanada or a little sweet treat, on top of a cereal box and exclaimed that he was going to make someones day by leaving it there for a lucky person to find. Then he said that when he becomes rich and famous, as a soccer star of course, he was going to walk into stores and tape random $100 bills onto boxes of things so that people could find them and be happy. In our day to day lives I don't often see, or stop to see, the charity and generosity that is growing in these children of mine. Just looking at this picture again I see it more and more.
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