Change In Plans

Greetings from New York, New York.

The rest of my scheduled time in Destin, Florida (i.e., Sunday) was fun but uneventful.  We spent a lot of time on the beach, went on the water on stand-up paddle boards, had a classic fish-shack dinner.  The kids went from swimming in the pool to swimming in the ocean to swimming in the pool to going back in the ocean.  It was fun for me to see so many Southerners at play: wearing lots of gear with SEC football team logos, drinking Lite beer on the beach, driving huge pickup trucks.

India and I went for a late-morning run, keeping up my long-standing birthday tradition of pushing some type of workout to the point of great discomfort.  It was brutally hot and humid by 9am, truly mad dogs and Englishman weather.  It was a wonderful birthday, and a blessing to be with my family.

Everyone else was staying for the whole week, but I had to go back to work.  On Sunday night, Zola got very upset with me, saying, “Uncle JJ and Uncle D are staying all week and missing work.  I hate your job, I wish we could have traveled forever.  I hope you miss your flight.”  He was tired and sunburnt, and that probably made his reaction more extreme.  Still, it is hard to say goodbye to your kid when he is crying.

On Monday morning, I left the house long before sunrise, to catch a 6:05 flight back to New York.  The “Fort Walton - Destin Airport” was only about ten minutes from our rented house, so I arrived there in plenty of time to check in and board.  The only problem was that I had gone to the wrong airport.  The “Fort Walton Airport” was about 25 miles further west and inland.  Who knew?

Driving our rented convertible fast in the pre-dawn darkness, I thought I had a shot at making the flight.  When I arrived at the second airport, I ran through the terminal.  The Hertz desk was not staffed so early in the morning, so I clipped the car keys to the rental contract, and tossed them behind the counter and out of sight.  Then I ran to the USAir check in.

I had missed the check-in deadline by only a few minutes, but there was no one behind the counter any longer.  They were probably down at the gate.  Delta had three flights that morning, but all were sold out, and they couldn’t help me.  Defeated, I decided to stay an extra day in Florida, and take the same USAir flight on Tuesday morning.  The next problem became how to get back to the beach house in Destin.

At this hour, the airport had very few staff (no one at Hertz, Avis, USAir, the help desk, etc.) but it did have a lot of armed police officers walking around.  I thought about asking one of them for help in retrieving the car keys from behind the counter at Hertz, but realized that was probably a bad idea.

Instead, I stood at the Hertz counter, and watched one of the officers walk down the hall towards me from about 50 meters away.  He turned around to walk the other way.  Hoping that there was no video surveillance, I leaped over the counter, and dropped to the floor behind the desk.  I picked up the keys and the rental contract, and peeked down the hallway again.  The officer was facing me again, so I waited.  When he turned away, I stepped on the desk (thank goodness it did not break), and leaped back over the counter and into the terminal.

Five minutes later I was back in the convertible (which I had technically never returned), and driving back toward Destin with the top down.  I called Hertz and explained that I would be returning the car a day later than planned. 

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I got back to the house at about 7am, and surprised everyone in the living room.  Zola said, “I can’t believe it!  We all prayed that you would miss your flight, and it happened.  Our prayers were answered.” 

In the end, of course, it was fine to miss another day.  We did the same things we had done on Sunday: played on the beach, swam, went for a run, went out on the stand-up paddle boards.  It was like a snow day, but with sunscreen and lots of Southern accents.  I somehow got sunburn on top of my sunburn.

On Tuesday morning I got up much earlier.  When he heard me get up, Zola sneaked downstairs and sat in the car.  He refused to move until it got so late that I missed my flight again.  It was very sweet of him, and made me feel terrible. Eventually, I got him back to bed, and left for the (correct) airport.

About two miles from my destination, a police car pulled me over.  I was very scared that somehow my key-retrieval antics of the previous day would lead to an arrest for grand theft auto.  The officer started with the classic leading question, “Sir, do you know why I pulled you over?”

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Thankfully I did not say, “Because Hertz reported this rental car stolen?”  He told me that I was driving 48 in a 30 zone.  I explained that I was late for a flight, I didn’t know the area, hadn’t seen the sign.  After he ran my license, and assured himself that I was sober, he let me go with a friendly warning.

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Too much drama for a simple trip.  Still, I made the flight, got stuck for several hours in Charlotte, and got back to New York by mid-afternoon.

Greetings from Destin, the beautiful, white-sand heart of Florida’s Gulf Coast!

Our plan was pretty simple: fly from New York to Atlanta on Saturday morning, drive to Destin, meet up with India’s family on Saturday afternoon, enjoy my birthday on the beach together on Sunday. I would fly back early on Monday morning.

After a year of traveling the world, this should have been straightforward. Instead it became a comedy of small errors. No harm done, a lot of cultural learnings for me, and some quality family time for us all.

There are mixed opinions, by the way, about whether the term ‘redneck’ is acceptable. Every person I’ve asked in the South has said its OK, so I will go with that. I don’t mean it in any pejorative sense, and if anyone posts a comment suggesting a different word, I will change the title of this post. The ‘Redneck Riviera’ alliteration is irresistible, though. Given how sunburnt we all are, it is factually accurate as well.

India had assured me that the drive from Atlanta to Destin was three hours. When I got around to checking on Google maps, while waiting in line at Hertz in the Atlanta airport, it turned out to be 320 miles. Estimated drive time: 6-7 hours. Ouch!

At India’s suggestion, we upgraded our rental to a convertible, and got everyone excited about a proper roadtrip to the beach.

When Tallulah and Zola saw the dark-blue Mustang, they both got wildly excited. Zola started saying “Yeah, baby!” over and over again in his Austin Powers accent. Wisely, Tallulah also dug her hairbrush out of her backpack.

Pretty quickly, we realized that the cobertible was an impractical choice. Our luggage overflowed the tiny trunk, and we had to stack it in the back seat between the kids. Each of them was wedged in tightly by bags. The top-down cruising was also a lot windier than I think they expected. As stylin’ as Zola felt (”Yeah, baby!”), ten minutes south of the airport he and Tallulah were pleading for us to put the roof up.

With the roof up, however, the crowding from the luggage was claustrophobically unbearable. We had to put the roof back down. Tallulah hid under a blanket for the first couple of hours, and Zola huddled low and out of the wind. A good time was had by all, or at least by India and me.

As we drove, I heard lots of stories from India about college and law-school road trips to Destin, and about family vacations on the beach. I heard about her friend picking up the rocker, Tommy Two Tone, and bringing him back to India’s motel room. I hadn’t really appreciated how important this place was to her in the years before we knew each other.

The trip south had many highlights. I saw a billboard that read “God, Guns and Guts Made America Great!” The New York equivalent would probably read “Money, Chutzpah, and Take-Out Chinese Food”. We saw another billboard advertising “Concealed Weapons Permit Classes.” I’m not sure what exactly they teach in that one.

Somewhere near Dothan, Alabama, we passed a commercial yeast factory. The smell was overwhelming and bad. Having been silent for over an hour, Tallulah popped up from under her wind shelter and yelled, “Someone pooped!”

Stranger still, after a similar period of silence, Zola informed us gravely that he “hadn’t picked a booger in over a year.” Maybe the sun was cooking his head.

Far to the north, the three-vehicle Nashville convoy with the rest of India’s family had somehow missed their planned departure time of 7 am. They actually rolled out at 12:30 pm, which put them on track for a 9 pm arrival. Somehow this made us feel a little better about our own travel challenges.

After a wind-swept eternity, we pulled into Destin at 6:30 pm, picked up the keys to the rental house, and found the place, across the street from the beach. Excitedly, we hauled our bags inside, and found … a disgusting mess.

Somehow the house had not been cleaned after its last occupants had checked out. The previous occupants had not been a college fraternity, or a traveling rock band, but the place was pretty gross.

The challenge was to get the house cleaned before my cleanliness-valuing (some night say germphobic) mother-in-law arrived a few hours later.

To the rental agency’s great credit, they got on it right away. Within two minutes of calling to report the problem, Todd, the manager had called back, apologized profusely, and dispatched his best cleaner, Esmeralda, and a large team. He even offered to pay for dinner so we could get out of the cleaning team’s way.

We went to the beach for a while, and swam in the warm Gulf water. The sand is white, so the water looks beautiful and blue. The kids dug and built castles until sunset, and then we went off to “Captain Dave’s” for a fish dinner (thanks, Todd).
Eventually, the Nashville convoy rolled in, Zola and Tallulah were reunited joyously with their cousins, and all was well.

It was a long, funny, interesting and complicated last day before turning 43. This was a fitting ending to our long, funny, interesting and complicated year.

Lyme, New Hampshire

Greetings from New York!

The days and weeks are flying by.  India and the kids returned from Nashville just before Memorial Day, and we have been sort of jammed into this small one-bedroom in SoHo together.  

On Memorial Day weekend we were up in the Catskills, which was great.  The kids spent hours catching (and releasing) frogs at our pond, and at the little pond by the Inn.  They had camp on Saturday and Sunday, and Zola had a sleepover with his friends Wyatt and Charlie.  We saw lots of our summer friends, and regaled them with stories from our trip around the world.  The average enquirer probably got a lot more detail than he or she wanted.  Summer will be fun.

Last Thursday, India and the kids drove up to my Mom’s and stepfather’s house in New Hampshire.  I flew and drove up on Friday evening, and we had a very nice weekend together.  Mom and Steve organized a family reunion on Saturday evening.  We had had a similar gathering in New Hampshire just before we left, so the events seemed sort of like bookends on the trip.  India and I had a chance to talk to Mom and Steve for a long time on Sunday, and they asked a lot of second-order and third-order questions about the trip that we had never really thought about before.  The trip was a rich experience, and it was fun for us to think about it and discuss it.

While they are in New York, India is trying hard to organize one major event each day.  If she didn’t do this, I think all of them would really feel aimless and out of sorts.

On Monday, they went to the war museum on the aircraft carrier Intrepid.  None of us had been since the boat/museum was totally renovated a few years ago.  Zola came back with stories of kamikaze attacks, flight simulators, and radar invisibility.  He continues to be enthralled by war and all of its trappings.  He and Tallulah bought a small collection of metal fighter planes, which have been underfoot constantly since they brought them home.

On Tuesday they all went to the Statue of Liberty.  Tallulah thought this was just fantastic.  Tuesday night she told me in  detail about the statue’s flip-flops, about the boat ride, and about the museum.  She insisted on calling the statue “Lady Liberty.”  Zola was mostly interested in the amount of security they had on the island, including a bomb sniffing machine.

This evening we went to see the play Mary Poppins on Broadway.  As you would expect, the singing and dancing and the sets were spectacular.  It is a thoroughly professional production, and fun for all of us.  India and I appreciated intellectually how difficult it is to sing and dance so well.  For Zola and Tallulah (particularly), it was all just magic.  At the very end, when Mary Poppins flies out over the audience and into the balcony, I thought Lu might jump out of my lap and try to catch the actress’s skirt as she went by.  Lu was bursting with joy and wonder.

I had forgotten that the core plot line is the story of a repressed, workaholic father, who rediscovers his inner child through the interventions of Mary Poppins.  Sounds also like the plot of Pretty Woman, actually.  At one point, as the father was acting gruff and telling the children he was too busy to say goodnight to them, Zola leaned over and said, “That was like you before we went on the trip, Dad.”  

We have talked a lot about this theme of how I used to be, and how I changed during our year away.  It was interesting to see Zola make that connection and tell me about it.  I’m not sure whether I am slipping back into that way of being.  The fact that I made it to dinner and a play with the family at 7pm on a Wednesday night is a positive leading indicator.

Mostly what we need at the moment is clarity and stability.  This is a difficult time, frankly, but we are doing our best to work through it.

Happy Birthday, Mom!

Greetings from New York!

This afternoon I was desperate to get a haircut.  The last time I got a trim was in Cape Town in January.  The last proper hair cut was from the traditional Turkish barber, outdoors on a ledge at the Cave Hotel, high above the rock formations of Cappadoccia.  That must have been September.

I went to a place across the street from the McKinsey office, where I have gone probably 25 times before.  It has faded from its former near glamour, and is now a little sad and run down.  They even took out the televisions that used to run continuous loops of fashion-show videos.

The woman who cut my hair was Eastern European.  She grimaced and pursed her lips as she did a slow examination of my head. 

She ran her fingers through my hair and said, “So you want  more highlights?  Highlights again?”

I explained, “Actually, I don’t have highlights.  My hair got a little blond on top because I was outside in the sun a lot for the last year.”

She didn’t say anything, but in any language, her expression said, “Yeah, right!  ‘Fess up, bottle boy!”

Regardless, she cut off most of the blond.  I felt a little nostalgic as I watched the hair fall to the floor.  I thought of sunny days in Australia, and in South Africa, and in Namibia.  I thought about skiing hatless in Switzerland, and surfing in New Zealand.  Blondes really do have more fun, I guess.

There will be more sunny days, more surfing, more skiing hatless.  In the meantime, back to brown, and back to work.

Greetings from New York!

India and I are experiencing a semblance of what our lives would be like if we had not chosen to have children.

Both kids are in Nashville, having a wonderful time with Gramae and Pop. The parade of chocolate cake, Bionicles, Cartoon Network, and cousin love continues.

India and I have been living in New York, sort of as if we were childless. We have been going out to dinner, seeing friends, living the high life. We saw the Black-Eyed Peas in concert last night.

This morning I left before 5 to go to Washington for the day (another shock to the system). India said she woke up completely alone for the first time in over a year. She went off for a 15-mile run with her friend, Sarah. i know you want me by pitbull

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We miss Zola and Tallulah, but I’m not 100% sure they miss us yet. Soon enough, we will be together again.

Greetings from Nashville, and happy Mother’s Day!

We have had a fun, normal weekend as a family, together in Nashville. India and the kids had already been here for 10 days without me, before I arrived on Friday morning.

Friday was packed with activity.

As I walked up the concourse in the Nashville airport (while postponing a call scheduled to begin the moment I landed), I was very happy to see little Tallulah sprinting down toward me. Her blond hair was flying as she ran, and she leaped into my arms.

Zola followed a moment later, and nearly knocked me over. He has bulked up to 89 pounds during his time in Nashville, eating lots of cake and fried food.

India was slightly more restrained in greeting me, but we were all very happy to be embracing there in the corridor. Our team reunited.

We spent a couple of hours with our friend, Kim, who continues to recover from a kidney-pancreas transplant. She has been going through intensive daily treatment with a gamma-globulin derivative and corticosteroids. It appear to be working: her fevers have broken, and her pancreas is producing insulin again. She looks great, and seems to feel OK (ish).

It’s hard to imagine the medical odyssey that Kim has been on, while we have been on our geographic odyssey out in the world. It’s also hard to imagine that Zola, our baby boy, probably outweighs Kim by a little.

After lunch, we raced across Nashville, dropped the kids with Gramae and Pop, and went up to our local Department of Motor Vehicles. Somehow India and I had both let our driver’s licenses expire while we were traveling. This creates lots of problems.

Fortunately, it only took about 45 minutes to get new licenses on a Friday afternoon. As they say on the south island of New Zealand: “Bob’s your uncle.”

The next 36 hours was a blur of ice skating, Benihana-like Japanese dinner (the kids loved it), a torrential thunderstorm with hail, a long run, a kids’ scavenger hunt, a big roadside fun fair, a barbeque, another long run, church, a Mother’s Day picnic in a flooded park, and skateboard lessons for Zola.

I also spent several hours at the Verizon Wireless store, swapping out another dead BlackBerry. No tearful eulogy for that “hardly knew ye” one. zetia side effects

We have had fun, but mostly it has just been very normal and natural to be with India and with the kids.

Tonight, Zola cried for a while before he fell asleep. This is the first time he has cried in my presence in many months. He is sad because India and I are leaving early in the morning. She is coming up to New York for four days, as we try to make plans. He is bone tired too.

More broadly, though, I think Zola is feeling rootless, and slightly aimless, and definitely unstable. This seems reasonable, given our situation.

It made India and me sad to see him so upset. To a certain extent, we are accounting for the ragged reentry as part of the (psychic) cost of our adventure. It puts the onus on us to create a stable situation as soon as we can, which involves all four of us living together.

Being in Nashville, our home town now, after our travels, I was struck by the simplicity of two big questions that seem to get a lot of press coverage and punditry.

1- Why is GM losing so much share that it will file for bankrutcy? Because GM cars are almost all terrible: ugly, unreliable, and jammed with unwanted and annoying features. The pickups and SUVs are better, but the cars are just terrible.

2- Why are American health outcomes so terrible when we spend so much money on healthcare. The high cost comes from poorly aligned incentives: basically no one makes money keeping Americans healthy. The poor health comes from eating bad food, smoking, and not exercising.

It is good to be back with my family, and to have a shred of normalcy for a short while. Tomorrow morning we start with the abnormal again. /p>

Greetings from Soho, in New York City.

Last week, my BlackBerry cell phone basically stopped working all together. First, after many months of not rolling upward, the trackball in the center refused to roll downward as well. Then the device froze entirely, and apart from the sad side-to-side motion of the trackball, none of the keys or controls worked.

Like the owner of an incontinent pet, I knew it was time to say goodbye.

With heavy heart, I walked up to the Verizon store on West 57th Street. Raoul, in the service department, told me that the BlackBerry was still under warranty, and that he would replace it immediately, free of charge. This BlackBerry had come into my life on the day that we departed for Madrid; the beginning of the second leg of our world-round trip.

That day seemed like decades ago. How could a warranty last so long?

Raoul got a shiny new BlackBerry from a box, and hooked it to the right side of a desk-top terminal. He hooked my old, beaten BlackBerry to the left side of the terminal, and hit a switch. Raoul explained that the terminal would transfer all of my data from the old device to the new one, and that it would only take a few minutes.

As I watched my friend have its brains sucked out, I thought of everything we had been through together:

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• Being damp, frozen, crushed, and thoroughly sweat upon during the Haute Route ski trip (when half of the buttons stopped working, and then miraculously healed themselves) azulfidine
• Listening to Zola speak to his friend Matthew, who was all the way back in New Jersey, as I swatted mosquitoes in a dusty tent in Rajasthan
Cleaning South African sand from the keys after it fell from a beach bag in Cape Town (and Namibian sand after dropping it in the dunes near Swakopmund)
• Cracking the screen by dropping it on the tile floor of the Hotel Agave in Positano

I thought of the countless mornings when I read the New York Times on-line, and the terrible days in October and November that I watched the financial world implode through the little screen.   I thought of the dozens of blog posts that I had tapped out with my hypertrophic thumbs in Morocco, and in Turkey, and in India, and in Australia.

I thought of the night in Namibia, 300 kilometers west of the South African border, where I walked up a huge hill in the moonlight, because I suspected (correctly) that I would get reception from the top.

This all seems a little pathetic. But while we traveled, I was clinging tenuously to my feelings of relevance, and connectedness, and of my very existence outside the small bubble of my untethered family. When I was in Switzerland, away from my India and the kids for the first time in months, I clung to them through garbled phone calls at the edges of frozen cliffs, standing on tiptoe in the cold wind to get a signal.

I clung to all of those important things through my cracked, worn out, barely functional, constant-companion BlackBerry.

As I took the new device, and thanked Raoul, he packed the old one away. Maybe it will be sent to a lab, where the RIM engineers will try to figure out why it stopped working after only 10 months. If they only knew.

Goodbye, old friend.

It is nice, though, to have a trackball that rolls upward again.

This short post is about my first week living alone in New York.  Please pardon the terrible pun in the title.

India and the kids spent Monday running around in the city. Tallulah’s friend, Clara, came in from New Jersey with her mom, and the little girls had a joyful reunion amidst princess dresses and crayons.   Zola remained aloof, reading a book and working on math.

On Monday afternoon, we all met in the East Village to visit a pre-school for Tallulah called “Blue Man Creativity Center.”   While we were traveling, we had read about the school, founded by members of Blue Man Group for their own children. Like everything in New York, admission has become very competitive, with artsy parents sending their kids from all over the city. Even though it is a school, the “Creativity Center” tag is symbolic of how they teach.

Somehow India crashed the admissions process, and got Tallulah an interview on the last day before admissions decisions were made. At BMCC we found ourselves in a kids’ paradise of paints, and electronics, and lights, and experiments. Tallulah and Zola both jumped into activities, while India and I met the director and staff, and tried our best to present ourselves well.

I’m not very cool under the best of circumstances. At the BMCC I felt conspicuously square and conventional. Fortunately, the people were all very welcoming and gracious, and pretended not to notice how unhip I am. More important, Tallulah and Zola were in top form, happy and sweet and playing well together.

On Monday evening, Zola and I went for a walk. He let me put my arm around him while we walked, even when we passed a group of girls his age. I think he was sad that we would be spending time apart.

Early on Tuesday morning, India and the kids were up early, and gone to Nashville. The “living alone” part of living alone had started. It was difficult to say goodbye.

The rest of the week passed quickly and strangely. I got a glimpse of what my life would be like without India and without kids. I would not like it.

I had fun seeing friends, and going out for dinner. But I missed the noise and the activity and the closeness of having all three of them near me. I can barely recall the many, many weeknights I spent away from them in the months and years prior to our trip.

On Friday night I drove up to the Catskills alone, and spent the night in our cabin in the Beaverkill.  This is the only place which is truly ours. All day Saturday I did normal Beaverkill family activities: riding bikes, clearing fallen trees, swimming, getting ice cream. The strange part was … no family.

On Saturday night I drove back down to the city and went to a friend’s engagement party. Aside from phone calls with my family, I had more conversation in 10 minutes at the party than I had had in the previous 24 hours. The solitary life would not exactly suit me.

This time will pass, in fragments and chunks. I will go to Nashville, and India will come back with me. We will all be together for the long Memorial Day weekend, and then they will be with me for some time after that. Still, this is not what we are used to, and not fun for any of us.

A final note: on Friday afternoon the Blue Man Creativity Center e-mailed us, accepting Tallulah to the half-day program for four year olds, starting in August.  We are delighted and excited.

Greetings from Bonita Beach, on Florida’s Gulf Coast.

We have spent a very fun weekend at my step-mother’s new home, halfway between Ft. Myers and Naples. As I hoped, all four of us quickly slipped back into the rhythms and routines (as they are) of family travel. It was easy to forget that the world-round trip is over, and that we have started the next chapter of our life as a family.

India and the kids flew down early on Thursday morning, and had pretty much two full days with Grandma Judi before I arrived late on Friday night. They went to the beach, swam in the pool, cooked semi-elaborate outdoor meals, had picnics, and just enjoyes being together.

Grandma Judi is girly (for a grandmother), and she and Tallulah are bonded at the hip whenever we visit. They gardened, took care of the kitty, admired each other’s clothes and shoes, and prepared small, pretty dishes. Tallulah literally dances around the kitchen as they talk.

Zola greatly enjoyed his time talking with Judi’s friend Larry: telling stories from our trip, and being the big man in an adult conversation. Larry indulged him with thoughtful questions, and rapt attention.

India relished the short break from her continuous, world-round responsibilities for keeping us all together and moving forward. She wrote me an e-mail on Friday afternoon, as she sat next to the pool, reading in the sunshine: “I can’t stop falling asleep. What do you think is wrong with me?” I’m not a doctor, but my guess was that she was tired. She still managed four long runs in four days, including one on Saturday where she dragged my sorry, out-of-shape self along. By Sunday morning, of course, she had reverted to form, and had gotten us all packed, cleaned, fed, and out the door in time for the plane. She had even printed our boarding passes.

Judi is a very accomplished sailor and sailing instructor. It was one of the great passions she shared with my father.

Late on Saturday morning, we rigged two Sunfish at her sailing club, and headed out into Estero Bay. We had planned to go in the afternoon, but the weather forecast indicated that the wind was going to strengthen to 20 knots; too strong for us to really sail safely.

Judi started by giving Zola a lesson in one boat, while India, Lu and I just cruised around in the other.

I am a barely competent sailor (sorry, Dad), but as we set out, the winds were mild and the water was pretty flat. India and Tallulah were good sports as we bashed around the shallow water of the bay. After about 20 minutes of sailing downwind (ie, away from shore), we spent the next 40 minutes tacking back. I think they enjoyed the first 20 minutes.

Judi had to come to my rescue with some expert advice, as I pinned my boat against the leaves and branches of a mangrove island. I ended up jumping in the water, and pulling the boat away from the island and pointing it into the (suddenly much stronger) wind. I opened a long cut on my right foot, stepping on the sharp mangrove roots.

When we finally got back to the dock (I dropped sail and paddled the last 30 meters), India and Lu decided to pursue shore-based activities.

Judi sailed off on her own, flying across the water like a sea-borne sprite. Zola and I went out together, enjoying some totally quality father-son time.

Unwisely, I let Zola take the helm as we sped downwind. After about three minutes of smooth sailing, Zola turned the boat and his body weight to starboard, the same side that the sail and I were already on. Zola and I were both hurled through the air and into the water, and the boat immediately capsized.

Realizing that the water was warm, that his life jacket was keeping him afloat, and that I was already wrapping my arms around him, Zola shouted, “That was awesome!”

To tell the truth, I wasn’t too sure it was awesome, until I realized I could stand in the chest-deep water, and I had double-checked my pocket to be sure that my BlackBerry was, in fact, still safely on shore.

Then we laughed. Judi once again sailed to our rescue with expert instruction on righting the boat and getting back in. If there is a heaven, I hope my father was watching us, and laughing so hard that he fell on the floor, or on a cloud, or whatever.

Zola and I dried in the wind and sun, only to get redrenched by sea spray as we tacked, and tacked, and tacked our way back to shore. Our promised 45 minutes had somehow become two hours, but India just laughed at us, and took pictures of our bedraggled return.

We were sad to leave Judi’s this morning. She and Larry had only heard about 5% of our travel stories. Larry graciously, but firmly, encouraged us to write a book, and to travel for as long as we can. As always, they were both terrific, fun, interesting company.

Zola and Tallulah are looking forward to weeks of similar pampering with their other two grandmothers, as part of their triumphant return-home tour.

India and I are looking forward to settling down for a couple of days in New York, before she and the kids go to Nashville.

India, with help from super-broker Linda Maloney, found us a terific NY apartment. I signed a lease and moved our bags in on Friday morning.

It feels as though the most ragged part of our re-entry is coming to an end. Now we are gearing up for the difficult and unwelcome period of not being together all of the time.

India already has the calendar and the latest Travel and Leisure magazine out again, plotting socially responsible trips to exotic destinations. The adventure continues.

Greetings from Gramercy Park, New York!

It has been an intense few days since we returned.  After being at work for three days, the shock to the system has receded a bit.  It has been fun to feel the frontal lobe of my brain coming back to life.  I can practically hear the machinery creaking as I try to multiply 7 x 5, or remember the details of some pharmaceutical product.

The kids have had a great time, hooking up with friends, playing in the playgrounds, shopping.  Both of them became feral during our time away.  Maybe these are the consequences of too little peer interaction.  

Tallulah is frequently taking off her shoes, and walking barefoot on the sidewalks of New York.  India says that passing mothers see our shoeless child, and give a look of horror, followed by a look of “I am calling social services.”  

Zola has gone to the other extreme, maybe compensating for his Antipodean wildness.  He got a haircut, and has been acting very polite and mature.  ”Can I get the door for you?”  ”That dress looks very nice on you, ma’am.”  ”I love you Mom.  You too, Dad.”  Very sweet, but not clear what he is up to yet.

India found me a suitable apartment today, way downtown.  Apparently it is big enough that all four of us can stay there in comfort when they are in New York.  It is strange to contemplate not having my family in my life every day for a while.  I am going from 24/7 family time to something considerably less than that.

Each night, India and I have talked for a few hours after the kids have fallen asleep.  We wonder what the next period will be like, and how we will get through it.  My guess is that the time will fly by.  Before we know it, we will be together again.  

The reentry has definitely been ragged.  By starting work immediately, I have inconvenienced my wife greatly (again).  

Tomorrow morning India and the kids are flying to Florida to see my step-mother.  We spent the evening packing our bags, which somehow exploded in our hotel room.

I will follow them to Florida on Friday evening.  If we squint, I think the weekend will feel like the world-round trip again.  On Sunday we come back, and on Tuesday morning they all go to Nashville for a few weeks.  The adventure continues.