After Italy - Hard Decisions

Setting out nine months ago, we knew a time would come when some decisions were going to be needed. We had already made a lot of hard choices. Selling the house, homeschooling the girls, moving to another country, but the hardest one of all was the question of what next?

We left California with a full support network of friends and family and a faith that there was no such thing as failure as long as we were together. We have still found this to be true. Those who love us have supported us every step of the way. This “togetherness” has taught us so much about each other, and ourselves. It has also cemented our priorities.The “slow movement” in Italy is a cultural revolution against the notion that faster is always better. Not to hurry through, but be in the moment. To be patient. To take care with one another. It’s about seeking to do everything at the right speed. Savoring the hours and minutes rather than just counting them. This concept has helped me to really “see” my husband and kids. My vision is clearer without all the distractions and rush of life.

The most precious gift we can offer others is our presence. When mindfulness 

embraces those we love, they will bloom like flowers.

Thich Nhat Hanh

Dave is and always will be a gifted teacher. No matter what he teaches. I feel so blessed to be his wife and to watch him father our two girls. He’s smart. Really smart. He picks things up so quickly and is able to break down what he knows into bite size portions for the rest of us to understand. He is fun when I am serious. He plays “silly” with the girls and gives them room to spread their wings. He moves forward when I am often stagnate. He makes decisions when I can’t. But most of all he really loves me well.

Ashley is my creative home body. She loves to craft. And draw. And bake. And sew. And anything that involves her hands. She loves to be at home. She loves to cuddle: with me, with Dave, and with her sister who a lot of the time is “over” cuddling with her big sister. She cares deeply about young kids and those who are disadvantaged. She always wants to help and would give away her last doll to the kid on the street. She struggles with spelling but loves to read fantasy stories and rehash every last detail to anyone who will listen.

Arya is my organized planner. She loves to think about what she will wear the next day, where we will go, what train we will take, what time it will leave, and once we arrive how we will get to our next destination. She clings to mommy and her pandas - all eleven of them, which are uniquely named, trained, and scheduled as well. She is great at math and is a voracious reader. She loves to play outside and explore nature.

We are traveling a lot. Since June we have been to the Eastern United States, Japan, Australia, Tasmania, Italy, Germany, Austria, England, Switzerland, France, Monaco, and Spain. Between now and July we are scheduled to see Greece, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, & Finland. Sometimes traveling doesn’t bring out our best qualities. We get tired. Hungry. Cranky. Annoyed. We are with each other 24/7. And yet we still want to be together. Hooray! The more we see of this big world, the smaller we feel and the more we want to learn. There is so much we don’t know or understand. But it has clarified our next steps.

We have gotten to have a lot of conversations in the quiet times in Lucca. Those times when we’re not traveling. Honest conversations that at the end of a day of work, commitments, and activities, are rare to come by. We have ultimately decided not to return to California. This is beyond a hard decision. But it is one that we feel confident of. In February, I took a secret scouting trip to the Pacific Northwest and found home. This came after months of research, prayers, meetings with realtors, pastors, and phone calls with family and friends. I was incredibly emotional to find a town, neighborhood, and community that I felt would well suit our strengths and desires. One where we could plug in and become more of who we want to be, find opportunities to serve the greater world without feeling strapped to our mortgage and commitments, and where we could hold onto lessons learned over the past year. 

We bought a home in Lake Oswego, Oregon - a suburb just south of Portland. The house was built in 1981, and needs some renovation before we move in. We are currently working with a designer/contractor to make those improvements before we relocate at the end of July. We have a big yard to explore and bloom in. Bedrooms all on the same floor, a change we wanted. An open kitchen where we can cook all that yummy Italian food, and an central living space where we can enjoy family time and host a myriad of family, friends, meetings, sleepovers and games. 

It will be an adjustment. More rain. New friends. Hop on a plane to see family instead of in a car. No Sharks Hockey. Mud and snails and spiders. New schools. New jobs. New commitments. New passions. Green grass and moss. Oh and I must not forget a puppy on its way in August!

How do you navigate the same places, the same people, the same God 

you’ve always talked to when everything is different? 

Shelly Miller

For us - we ultimately decided to navigate somewhere new. To put into practice our new way of living. The rest will work itself out. We’re excited for the next chapter in our family adventure. We hope you will be too! For our friends in California, we’ll be headed your way in July! We would love to catch up.

Beautiful Barcelona and Magical Madrid

A few days ago we visited Barcelona. Barcelona is in Spain on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. They speak Spanish there. When we arrived we met up with Deh, our AirBNB host, then headed out to see the city. We first took a look at the Christopher Columbus statue pointing to the New World.

Then we got some tickets for the hop-on hop-off bus tour that we would take the next day. Next we walked around Las Ramblas and found a market that was very busy. It was inside but outside. You enter a structure with a roof, but it’s open air. We saw fruits, a bunch of different kinds of fish in all shapes and sizes, brains, hearts, livers, nuts, candy, and Dada let us share a cup of watermelon. We spent the rest of the evening walking around shops and having dinner at Hard Rock Cafe. We had a little mini lesson on old singers and artists like the Beatles, Elvis, NKOTB, Madonna, and the Rolling Stones. That night trying to sleep was a big pain! Our apartment was crazy loud and the beds weren’t very comfortable.

The next day we walked to the main plaza in town and got on our hop-on hop-off bus tour and zipped around the city a little bit, eventually coming to a very, very, very, very, very cool church that looked like Ariel’s Grotto. It was really cool. Different than any church you’ve ever seen. It was called Sagrada Familia and was designed by the famous Spanish architect and artist Antoni Goudi.

It was very crowded so we had to wait an hour and a half to get in. When you enter, its colors are really bright and cool. It also has the feeling of Disney Magic. It wasn’t really like a normal church. (Dad note: Arya says it pretty well, but this place is outrageous. The pictures don't do it any sort of justice at all. The biggest tell was how much the girls were in awe. We've seen a lot of churches this year as you can imagine. They're kind of over them. When we walked into Sagrada Familia though, they were both smiling and openmouthed the whole time. I've already made an appointment with myself to return to Barcelona just to go here again when it's complete which they anticipate to be around 2030. It is in the top 3 if not my top pick of amazing sites for the year.)

Some other stops on our bus that day were to the Olympic Stadium, Plaça Espanyol, and MNAC (Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya). Ash and I did a fun jumping picture here. 

The next day we took a train to Madrid, but at the Barcelona train station there was a slide park that was a dragon with slides coming off of it. Ashley and I practiced climbing up the slides and sliding down. My favorite was a curvy fat slide that Ashley and I licked our hands to help us climb up!

Once we arrived in Madrid, we saw these baby heads at the train station. One was awake with weird eyes, and one was asleep very calmly.

After a bit of confusion getting to our apartment and no access to phone or internet, we finally made it! We decided to go to a big park with a bunch of playgrounds. It took only a couple minutes to walk there, and on the way, we had the BEST orange juice in the world. At the park the first playground was a wooden playground with beams and nets to climb around on. (Dad note: All of the playgrounds here are part of a very large open space, riverside park area called Rio Madrid. If you happen to travel to Madrid with children, be sure to spend a few hours there. They have figured out what parks are supposed to be. It's not on a lot of the touristy lists because it's "only" a park. This is the sort of place every city needs for families.)

The next playground wasn’t as fun, but still entertaining.

Another playground was hustling and bustling with kids of all ages at an area filled with 7 slides on a hill. The slides were really fast and you sloshed back and forth down to the bottom. One of my favorite slides was one with an open roof and went very curvy.

At yet another playground, there was an interesting pirate ship, but it was closed for renovation.

Finally we arrived at one of the last play areas. It had a bunch of tires you could bounce on, circle swings, and long chain swings hanging from a bridge that were crazy. We spent some time there and moved on.

Walking along the sidewalk there were also balance beams and play areas. One had wooden blocks connected on a wire that was super tough to balance on. 

Day 2 in Madrid we spent walking and taking the Metro all over town. We visited the Royal Palace of Madrid and Cathedral next door that were over a thousand years old. I helped Dad guide us.

We had a snack at a famous churro restaurant. We got fresh churros with a cup of very rich chocolate for dipping. Mom and Dad got fresh squeezed OJ.

After a Spanish lunch of Paella, Pizza, and Sangria (for the grown-ups), Mom made us go to an art Museum. They had children’s audio guides with pictures of famous art. We took turns finding the art piece, and then listening to a story about it. Some of the famous artists there were Picasso, Velazquez, Poussin, and Goya. It was kind of boring but the audio guide helped a lot. To make up for the two hour art stop, we went to another huge park. Dad said it was six times bigger than Central Park in New York. 

After a pleasant time in Barcelona and Madrid we flew home. It was so good to be back be back to my bed and pandas!

9-Year Old Dave's Dream Trip

For the long time followers of this blog, you may remember we took a trip to Germany back in December. At the time, I commented about Bamberg and Neuschwanstein being fairytale-like, and they were. If visiting those places was like stepping into Cinderella, visiting Avignon and Carcassonne, two medieval French villages, was going to Camelot…except in France.

Avignon, like Lucca, has decided to keep its historic wall. However, while Lucca’s is from the Renaissance (you tell because it’s thick enough to repel canon fire, a new invention at the time), Avignon’s is Medieval (only needed to withstand arrows and worst a catapult or two). The town within the walls is a typical French town with winding streets and older style buildings. Definitely charming to see, but far from the main feature of this particular hamlet.

The star of the show is the Palais de Papes, or Papal Palace. For most of the 1200’s and into the 1300’s, this was the home of nine pontiffs. At the time, there was quite a bit of political unrest in Europe and it was decided that the holy residence would be built in Avignon. And let me tell you, this is most certainly a castle fit for a pope.

Standing in the plaza in front of the palace (sidebar: I will use palace and castle synonymously here though they are slightly different. A palace is a grand residence for royalty. A castle is a fortified structure meant for protection. Palais de Papes is definitely both.) one feels small. Imagine standing in front of the gates of Hogwarts. It was kind of like that, but real. In the picture, if you look very carefully, you can see Stacey and the girls standing at the entrance to give you a bit of a perspective of scale.

Touring the building, as you’d expect, you learn about its history and see the spaces inside, most of which are now home to exhibits of information and don’t much resemble their original look. It’s always a crap-shoot if the girls will find a place we visit interesting or not. I was amazed that their initial reaction to the palace was seemingly blasé. Perhaps they’ve just seen too much cool stuff this year that it was “just another castle”. As we walked through it though, they seemed to get a bit more interested and Arya even took the audioguide from Stacey and wanted to hear everything there was to say about the place. By the time we reached the chapel at the end of the tour, they were excited to be there and *gasp*, enjoying themselves!

Not far from the castle is the Pont Saint-Bénézet, or as you may recognize it (especially if you teach beginning band) the bridge at Avignon of the song “On the Bridge at Avignon” fame. Sadly it was a bit of a let down. Only half the bridge remains and part of it is undergoing restoration right now so it wasn’t much more than a walk out part of an old bridge and back. But at least we can say we were there!

Our last stop in France (for this trip anyway) was a bit of an unknown to me. Stacey did most of the research for this outing and I intentionally didn’t look too much into what to expect at the destinations she’d chosen so I could be surprised. About the only thing I knew about Carcassonne was that there is a geeky tabletop game of the same name that was Medieval in theme.

Upon arrival, I discovered why that name was chosen.

That’s Carcassonne there behind us. This town/castle/fortress/awesomeness makes the Palais de Papes look like a cute backyard playground. Carcassonne was in Medieval centuries a stronghold border town between France and Spain (the border is now quite a ways further south). It was of such importance that they built a fortified wall around the town…and then a fortress within the fortified town for nobility…and then another wall around the wall they already had. Around the 1600’s, the town had outlived it’s usefulness and had become so fortified that nobody wanted to bother to come in, at all. So a new town built up outside the wall and became modern day Carcassonne. The walled city fell into disrepair and much of it’s architectural history was lost. However, in the late 1800’s a resident of the city who was fascinated with its history took it upon himself to begin to unravel the layers of the old city and to restore it to it’s original, Medieval state. By the early 20th century, it had been reestablished as a historic site and looks as you see it in these pictures. (by the way, compare the last one in this group with the cover of the game Carcassonne...we almost took a picture of the box without realizing it!)

When I was a boy (not just at heart), Carcassonne is what a castle was supposed to look like. In fact, there is a room on the tour of the fortress that has many different toy lines from Lego, Disney, Playmobile, and the like that were clearly designed with the Carcassonne look to them. All the cool castle things you learn about as a kid, murder holes, merlins, crinolines, portcullises, arrow slits, it’s all there. And it wasn’t built for you to come and see and think “Wow, cool,” or to kind of look like it’s supposed to be real like Medieval Times. It was put there for real, as a real castle.

I hope I’m conveying my sense of childlike excitement here. That’s really how I felt. The streets of the town are old stone streets and many of the shops have traditional picture only signs hanging by their doors. Our hotel was literally built into the wall between the fortress and the grand cathedral (pictured above) also contained within the old city. I stayed over night in a castle…now you know why my inner 9 year-old can’t calm down!

Needless to say, if you ever find yourself traveling the south of France, perhaps on your way to Spain (as we were…stay tuned for Barcelona and Madrid!), do yourself, and the you-of-the-past who still remembers Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and wished you could see what those places were really like, a favor and spend some time in these amazing portals into history.

Nice is Nice and Monaco is Majestic

I had a lot of fun in Nice, especially since there are a bunch of things for kids that Arya and I did that we liked. For starters the beach. There was a big beach that we found a lot of sea glass on. We got to walk along it over and over again.

We also found the coolest playground on earth. And I’m not just talking about your everyday ladder and slide, people. I’m talking about the biggest structures you could possibly imagine.The biggest structure was a huge whale made out of wooden whale bones with ropes to climb on and a slide coming out as a tongue on the end. There are also big swings that look like bowls made of rope hanging from strings. One of the coolest playgrounds was a little hut in the air with ropes coming of of it with logs below them, you sat on the logs grabbed the ropes and pulled yourself across the log to the next one. We also met this nice boy at the park that pushed us on the swing. We found out that he was from California, then moved to Oregon, and now he’s lived in France for three years. I liked talking to another kid in english.

Near the park there was a small fair set up with a ropes course, a jumpy house, a fun house, and most importantly, super jumping. You get strapped into a harness connected to thick elastic bands and jump on a trampoline. It goes very high, and since we had done it before, we knew how to do flips. The guy kept us on there for a long time. We got really worn out. One time I even stopped jumping and got stuck mid air, so the man had to pull me down to start jumping again. 

We also took a day trip to Monaco, one of the smallest countries in the world. We walked across the whole country in a couple hours, taking stops along the way. While we there we saw the Grand Casino, probably the biggest casino I’ve ever seen. Then again I haven’t seen that many casinos in my life. I haven’t even been to Las Vegas.

We walked uphill to the palace where we saw the changing of the guards.

After that we wandered around the streets surrounding the palace. For lunch we stopped at a crêperie, I had a ham and cheese crêpe. In the restaurant there was also a tiny dog that Arya was afraid of.

Down along the dock in Monte Carlo, there were a million yachts. A lot of the yachts were being cleaned up. My favorite yacht was called Zeus. It had big sliding glass doors in the front. 

That same day we also visited Villefranche, more specifically Cap Ferret. We were there for one reason, to see Marie Rothschild’s estate that had nine gardens. To get there, it was a very long walk. First we walked along the beach for a long way, then we had to walk up a hill a long way. When we got there and bought our tickets, we got a children’s activity guide. It had things like decoding a pattern painted in the room, counting the number of telephones, and finding a special flower’s name. It was one of the most fun children’s activity guides that I’ve ever done and I’ve done a lot of activity guides because we’ve visited a lot of places!

The gardens were beautiful. The first one was the Spanish Garden. Our guide’s clue was, “All the fountains in this garden have something alike, what is it?” Well it turned out all the fountains were fish. Which is very strange because I’ve never seen a fish fountain… until now. My favorite garden was the exotic garden. It was filled with succulents and exotic flowers (thus the name). Arya’s favorite garden was the Japanese Garden, of course, because she loves pandas and there was a lot of bamboo. A whole bamboo forest. I saw a very strange plant while I was there. It was kind of like a vine, but not really. It went up up and up and I wondered why it didn’t fall down. I’d never seen anything like it.

We stopped at the tea parlor at the estate and ordered ice cream that turned out to be huge ice cream sundaes.

I’m glad we went to the Côte d’Azur. Now I can use the sea glass we found to make arts and crafts along with many other things I’m collecting like bottlecaps, wooden sticks, and wine corks.