hawaii

So last month Leif and I went on vacation to Hawaii.  While we in Kauai there was an unseasonable storm and we were literally stuck in our rental unit for three full days due to flooding.  At the time it was really shitty but we can laugh about it now.  Who can say that their vacation was literally declared a disaster by the government?  Seriously, there were Red Cross tents set up and emergency evacuation warnings and all kinds of other very un-fun vacationy things going on.

Oh well.  We still ended up having a good time, especially when we finally made it off Kauai and to Maui.


I've been meaning to share some photos for the last four weeks but just haven't gotten around to it until now.  Clio has recently decided that when she is awake, and that is most of the time now (naps?  not for her), she only wants to play with me.  She is currently napping -a rare moment- and so I am taking the time to slap these up here.

Kauai 

The 200sq ft studio guest house we were stuck in for three days.  There are worse places to be stuck, right?

The valley where we stayed.  That river there in the corner was what flooded, drowning the entire valley.

The only day that the weather was nice enough to go to the beach while in Kauai.  Makeshift tent for baby.  Creepy stalker poultry.

River flooding.

Last day in Kauai.

Maui

Probably the most beautiful view I'll ever have while breastfeeding.

Clio couldn't get enough of the water.  We gave up trying to get her to stop licking the water in the pool and in the ocean.  

My dear friend Jennie met us in Maui for the conference I went to.  

Rawrrrrrrr!!!!!

amsterdam

Last week Leif and I went to Amsterdam to visit friends, N and M.  It was kind of a last hurrah before I start work on Monday and before our friend delivers her son in another week or so.  We probably won't seem them for another year so we really felt the push to make the trip while we still were able to do so.  Our friends were troopers to have visitors there so close to the impending birth of their first child.  Even at 38 weeks pregnant, N was pretty adept at keeping up with the rest of us.

The trip was very easy and incredibly difficult at the same time, as I am sure most of my "readers" can imagine.  Easy to be with our best friends (including another couple who flew in from Hawaii for a 48 hour period just to hang out with the four of us since they get free flights) but difficult to be around an atmosphere of baby-ness for such long stretches of time.  Hours and hours would go by and I would be having a great time, the way I always used to when together with old friends, only to be struck by some random thing and be immediately yanked back to my reality.  I would recover from the jolt and the cycle would begin anew.

On the 31st of this month it will be ten months since George was born and then died.  During this time I've done a fairly good job of creating for myself an insular world where the idea that other people frequently have healthy pregnancies and living babies does not often penetrate.  I can't say for sure if that has been an entirely healthy way of living but I can say that for a long time it was a necessity for me.  Yet living in such an insular world cannot last forever and I think it was important for me, in more ways than one, to make this trip. 

Many times during our trip I felt completely separated from what was going on around me.  I watched and listened to our friends have lively discussions about birth plans, birthing experiences, and parenthood but I don't think I was ever really engaged in any of these conversations beyond the superficial.*  The pregnancy and birth experience that Leif and I had simply does not bear any resemblance to those of most people.  I can't really relate in any meaningful way to their experiences and so while most times I was comfortable and at ease with these topics I never felt like a participant in them.  An observer from across the great grief divide.   Many times I just listened because what I could/would add may not have been appropriate to the discussion at hand.

An example...

I had a brief discussion with N about the American custom of baby showers versus the Dutch custom of sending out announcements only after the arrival of the baby.  I immediately thought about how much I preferred the Dutch custom to the American custom because it circumvents the problem of what to do with all the gifts if the baby dies.  Normally I keep such thoughts to myself, especially when it comes to sharing them with a very pregnant woman, but I blurted out what I was thinking and effectively killed the conversation.  As much as N and M try to temper what they talk about in relation to the birth of their child, I also try to do the same.  Usually I'm more successful than that.

But I learned through this experience -and here I am referring to both George's death and this particular trip- that I am never going to be able to look at things like pregnancy, birth and parenthood in the same light again.  The pure joy and excitement associated with these things has been rinsed away and what is left is what I think of as a patina.  I've weathered.  

Leif finally sorted through all of our photographs from the trip.  As I was looking at them again I was struck by how impressive it is that photographs are able to sum up experiences and emotions.  

 It never ceases to amaze me how many versions of myself exist inside.

Some, I'm sure, that are still left to discover.

*Important to note here is that our friends are all very cognizant of our feelings and make their best effort to always consider them.  I can imagine how uncomfortable it must also be for them since they are probably never certain where our limits are.  They do a great job and I try also to do the best I can for them.  I am genuinely happy for them and wish them a very easy birth and nothing but joyful days ahead.

.islas de las bahias, the one about the caye.

These last photographs from our trip to Honduras are mainly of the time we spent across the channel on Pigeon Caye.  There are about five hundred people who live on that mile-long island and almost all of them have one of five very British surnames.  Jackson, Bush, Diamond, Powell, and Cooper.  Those were the five families who originally settled there nearly one hundred and sixty years ago and, for the most part, the people who live there presently are still members of those five families.

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Our first trip to Pigeon Caye was made with the intent to find ourselves some fish for that night's dinner.  What we found was a kindly woman named Esther who had five freezers filled with freshly caught fish and one large tame brown pelican in her "yard."  The pelican, as Esther assured us, was American.  From Miami, in fact, although aside from the fact that he was a lazy pelican she could not come up with a reason as to why she was convinced he was American.  But, really, the fact that he was a lazy pelican was probably reason enough.

That night we had yellowtail for dinner.  I'm guessing so did the Floridian pelican.

In Honduras they celebrate their independence from Spain on September 15th and we happened to be there to witness the festivities.  Aside from seeing the ruins at Copan for the first time this was perhaps the best moment of the entire trip.  

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Almost immediately after their independence performance ended and all the children had finished their cupcakes and sodas, an unseasonably strong storm passed through and rained everyone out.  We ended up taking shelter in a little store and talking for almost two hours to the guy working there because the lightening and rain made it impossible to kayak our way back to our house.  We eventually had to find shelter elsewhere when he had to close shop because his little brother was struck by lightening (he ended up being perfectly ok) while out playing in the rain.

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Eventually made it back across the channel but not before we were both entirely drenched by the rain.

Utila Town had their own festivities the next day and we went for that as well.  But the only highlights of that excursion worth mentioning was that I tripped and fell getting onto the dock and then I got heat stroke by the time we left.  Ha!

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(Nothing says "good time" like liquor bottles and plastic doll parts.)

We spent our last night on Utila on the dock because the power had gone out and it was far too hot to stay in the house.  So we laid out watching the distant lightening strikes and attempting to capture them on camera.  This is as close as we got.

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The next morning we left Utila for Roatan and the sand fleas everywhere mourned.  A very sad day to be a sand flea, indeed.

We had a few hours to kill before our plane left Roatan so we spent it in the water, enjoying a last bit of warm Caribbean ocean.  I befriended a bunch of kids who were there with their mother by giving the girls piggy back rides through the water.  They asked me how old I was -as old as their mother- and did I have any kids -no, not yet- and how old was my mother -in her 60s- and so on and so forth.  They thought Leif had the funniest name they had ever heard of.  

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They were great.  

It was a fabulous way to end our trip.

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.islas bahia, the one about the beach.

I won't bore you with tales of our day of traveling from Copan Ruinas to the Bay Islands, except to say one thing.  The only part of our trip when we felt physically unsafe was during our layover night in La Ceiba (a port town that most people pass through on their way to the islands).  To make it brief we ended up in La Ceiba after dark, in the taxi of a very unhappy and uncommunicative man, driving for what seemed like way too long to an area outside of the city.  There were dark alleys involved in very industrial parts of the city and one particular moment of driving through a back street next to a facility of some sort where Leif and I both thought we would be robbed and left stranded.  It turned out that our highly rated hotel in La Ceiba -don't believe all the ratings on trip advisor- was in a sketchy part of town.  The hotel itself was actually more like a compound complete with high walls and a guard tower.  Seriously.  We didn't sleep well that night.  

But things always look worse at night and in the morning, while in the cab of a very nice and very chatty man, we realized that although the area was clearly not one of La Ceiba's nicer parts, it wasn't as bad as we had imagined in the dark.

One ferry ride and one cab ride later we were in our hotel in Roatan.  We only spent one night here before we left for the smaller of the more populated islands, Utila.

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The lights of West End, Roatan.  

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Juan, the "watchie," as watchmen are referred to as on the island.

Utila is only twenty five miles from Roatan but there is no cheap, fast, convenient way to make the trip over.  You could make the ten minute flight for a couple hundred dollars, take a ferry back to the mainland and then another ferry back to Utila, or you could pay 55 dollars and take a four hour catamaran ride with Vern.

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We chose the catamaran. 

When you tell the ex-pats who live on or the people who are vacationing on Roatan that you are going to Utila for a week they automatically assume that you are a diver.  It is one of the cheapest places in the world to get certified and has, what many professionals consider, diving which is ranked in the top three around the world.  When you tell these same people that you aren't diving they then automatically assume you are a drunken part-goer or an idiot or both.  People just don't go there unless they fit into one of those three categories, I guess.

We had quite a few people trying to convince us that we had made a bad choice and we should try to cancel our plans and stay on Roatan.  Utila, they would say, is kind of a shit hole.  One in particular would said this -having us trapped in a shared taxi- sporting a blond ponytail and relaying his wicked gnarly diving trip and telling us how he lives in Santa Cruz and he just loves to surf and listen to Jimmy Buffet, man.  

There seems to be some sort of rivalry between (many but not all) ex-pats and vacationers on the two islands.  Roatan vs. Utila in the ultimate Parrot Head face off.  Winner takes all the weed and all the oxygen tanks.

Our place on Utila was only accessible via boat and was as far away from the hard partying of Utila Town as was possible on such a tiny island.  Other than the security guard and his family we were the only occupants on a strip of sand called Treasure Beach.  

No phone.  No television.  No internet.  If we needed anything we either had to use a CB radio or kayak across the channel to one of the cayes.

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Our house on the beach.

It was perfect.

Except for the sand fleas.  Or No See 'Ums as they are often called.  A little word to the wise, just because they are sand fleas doesn't mean they are relegated to the sand.  They love living rooms and bedrooms and laugh in the face of Deet and mosquito netting.  There is no escaping them.  They bite and they hurt and they itch much worse than any mosquito bite.  By the time we left I had close to two hundred bites.  Leif had maybe ten.  

So even though the house was really nice the sand fleas made just hanging out in the house or on the beach nearly impossible.  Which was why we spent much our days swimming and snorkeling in the ocean off of the deck in front of the house.

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View from the deck.

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It was spectacular.  There was life everywhere and a constant sound that was reminiscent of Rice Krispies in milk.  We saw baracuda, yellowtail (delicious, delicious yellowtail), massive amounts of various other fish, shrimp, moon jellies, lobster, an octopus, conchs, rays, and cuttlefish.  

One day we also saw hundreds of little inch long jellyfish floating along with the current.  Stupidly we decided to continue snorkeling.  I must have been stung at least a dozen times.  Luckily they didn't hurt that badly -like little shocks- but they could have been really poisonous for all we knew.  It was stupid but pretty amazing at the same time.

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A large school of thousands of silvery fish, maybe two inches long, was always hanging out by the dock and if I jumped in and stayed still for long enough they would get curious and surround me in a funnel of silver arrows.  

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I can see now how people fall in love with diving.  

Evenings, if I could tolerate the swarms of biting bugs, we would spend time on the dock watching the sunset and waiting for the stars to come out.  

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That tiny island in the back is available for rent.  The entire island, and the little house that sits on it, can be yours for 120 dollars a night.

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Pigeon Caye, as seen from the deck top observation tower.

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Next up:  What do five British families from the 1850s, a one mile long island off of the coast of Honduras, and the Mayan culture all have in common?  Pigeon Caye.