travel
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the quiet week and camp pick-up.
David and I arrived home from Mexico at midnight Monday (well, technically Tuesday). The three boys didn’t come home from camp until Saturday. Which meant the three of us had a very quiet five days at home without them. It’s the first time I went two weeks without my three boys since Gabe and Noah’s adoption, eight years ago, and it felt so strange to me that it prompted some reflection. The most surprising thing of all is that I wrote a blog post every single day. Oh my goodness, I had so much mental space! Amie and I finally finished painting my hall built-in bookcase. Do you…
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holbox: day 4-6.
This will be my last post of the trip, since our final 2.5 days were very similar in rhythm: early morning coffee on the balcony and pastry at Le Jardin. Then we walked the 1 1/2 miles to Punta Coco, a gorgeous, quiet beach on the western tip of the island. That’s a fun walk, because part of it is in the sea. The walks were hot, but worth it for the near-empty beaches and crystal-clear water. David brought his snorkel and looked for fish and rays. I tried to read my book but in the end just sat in the water. It was really the only thing to do…
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holbox: day three (fishing and snorkeling trip).
Before I tell you about our third day on the island, I’ll explain our food situation. For budget and health purposes, we made the decision to eat out two meals a day and eat one in the casa (this was one reason we wanted something with a kitchen). Yes, it is possibly to eat cheaply on Holbox … the tacos you saw from yesterday were $10 for the two of us; you can find a $1 cup of coffee, and the tortillas we bought were incredibly inexpensive. But the $1 coffee does not taste good, and if you want to veer from those couple of things to more unique dishes…
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holbox: day two (3-island tour).
One of the activities Holbox is famous for is swimming with whale sharks. Before we left home, David and I knew that was something we wanted to do. However, we got a reality check when speaking with Marco the evening we arrived. While we were there, the sharks were about three-hour boat right straight out into the ocean. So that made a 7-8 hour day in a tiny, cramped boat with no sun covering. And then there wasn’t a guarantee we’d see the sharks or get near enough to actually swim with them. We were also told, “Many people get seasick on these tours; it’s not unusual for them to…
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holbox: day one.
David and I call our first day on Holbox the “trial and error day.” Mostly error, it seemed, since it just takes time to figure everything out. As we’d discovered the evening before, far fewer people spoke English than we expected, so that also made things . . . interesting. We set out around 8:00 to find some breakfast, and were pretty much the only people on the island to do so. We’ve learned that nothing much gets going until 11:00 am there, although breakfast cafes and coffee shops do open at 8:30. Before we embarked on our trip we’d divided the research; David looked up options of activities for…
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holbox: the casa.
I’ll be honest, one of the big reasons we chose to travel to Holbox (pronounced “Holbosh”) island is this incredible Airbnb, which was also very affordable. The pictures we saw online were stunning, the reviews glowing, and the reality even better than we hoped. Let me show you around! This view is from the door to the compound, where Marco lives with his mom. The small building to the left is a tiny art studio; Marco’s home is on the right with our Airbnb studio apartment on the second floor. The house you see beyond the pool is a vacation home their friends had built. Here’s our side staircase…
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holbox: arrival.
David and I have been day-dreaming about our 20th anniversary trip for years now, wondering what we might want to do, getting input from friends. We actually had a trip to Costa Rica planned for our 10-year anniversary — when all the plumbing broke in our house and had to be replaced for about $2,500. So we pivoted and instead we went to Flat Rock, NC. It wasn’t at all what we’d planned, but God gave us a lovely trip. However, toward the end of this decade of marriage we promised ourselves that, Lord willing, no matter what went wrong with the house or the cars or whatever, we were…
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camp drop-off, 2023.
Well, I discovered Sunday that if there’s anything more bittersweet than dropping a beloved child off at summer camp for two weeks, it’s dropping three of them off. After an extremely long, busy week — a week that threatened to make my brain explode — of preparing myself and our four kids to travel in different directions, we loaded the van and drove up to the mountains on Sunday. David and Amie stayed home for church and for Amie to leave for her own trip to North Carolina with some friends. Our packing week was so full that I actually found the three-hour drive to Cashiers, NC, restful. I’d chosen…
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march 2023.
Happily, March was book-ended by trips. The first weekend, David and I spent a night at Lake Keowee (near Clemson) so he could help perform a wedding. He’d returned from Israel two days before, so the two of us were delighted for a little road trip to catch up from 10 days apart. It apparently takes a community to get me dressed up for any event, especially a black tie wedding. I borrowed a dress from my friend Maxine, and McKensie came over the night before I left to give me a make-up tutorial (she was horrified to learn that I never use toner or overnight facial moisturizer, so I…
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pawleys island 2022.
As I alluded to in my last post, August was a challenging month. So was the beginning of September. The end of summer, start of school and soccer and beginning high school for Judah (still homeschooled but attending a new co-op and adjusting to a bigger work load). I’m teaching four classes for our co-op this year, one is a high school class and has doubled my weekly prep time. Kira was spayed at the beginning of September, a surgery that was delayed two times because the first time she went into heat and the second she had an infection at the site of her original leg surgery she was…
