LLF - Family Motto

Our last day in San Miguel de Allende. It’s been two months since we crossed the border into Mexico and today is a day of cleaning, gathering and reflecting. I have scrubbed the floors, washed the laundry, gathered staples like lentils, oats, rice and vegetables. We have re-packed and organized the toy closet and secured a new stroller for Casey. It feels time to go.
Our last two months have been very surprising for Steve and I but then our whole life has been unexpected in many ways. I never thought twenty years after my first trip out into the world alone, I would still be flying by the seat of my pants living day to day as we choose. Somehow we have managed to buy a house, have a career, birth three kids in between and still live life to the fullest.
Seventeen months ago, Steve left his job in Portland to follow a more adventurous path in his career and life. At the time, the stock market was crashing and people around us were fearing for their futures. I remember very clearly having a conversation with Steve about the fact that somehow there was a way to take full advantage of this scene. He flew off to Louisiana for Hurricane Ike and I rented out our house to a nice couple remodeling their own home down the street. Having no job to return to after Ike, we took off for Mexico and Guatemala knowing the cost of living would be much cheaper.
Here we are now, a year after that trip, living in Mexico, flying by the seat of our pants, still. It’s not always easy as we have a very limited budget. Fortunately for us, we also have three kids that would keep our lives limited in destination and adventure to a minimum anyway. I cook almost all of our food and cheaply. We don’t buy packaged food from big markets and we don’t eat out too often. This requires constant cooking. Most of the time I don’t mind as I enjoy shopping in the markets and learning new foods like cactus with nuts and chiles but on the days that I do, we hit a BBQ chicken stand and drop eight bucks on a huge dinner. Still our food budget per day is twice what a construction worker makes. It’s an interesting thing to think about.
The best thing about our life is our kids, for sure. They are the most resilient, resourceful, easy going and adventurous kids I have ever met. They do not complain unless they’re hungry and they continue to surprise me in their ability to find fun around every corner and learn new cultures and practices as if it is their own. They truly are the reason we can do this – that and the gift of resourcefulness our own parents instilled in us. So when people write me and ask how we can do this, it is not an easy answer. The only thing I can say is you must think outside the box.
This concept is probably the hardest for people. I have heard many a friends over the years say they cannot get by on their middle incomes. They say that it simply isn’t possible. I say it is possible and then some. We all make choices everyday on how to spend our money. We choose how we dress, what car we drive and think entirely too much about how the world perceives us. We worry endlessly about our health, our future and the personalities of our children. We spend accordingly. It isn’t luck that gets my family here, it’s our ability to let go and live with less fear. If you didn’t fear losing your house because of your health, you wouldn’t spend so much on health care. If you didn’t fear the scowls you’d receive for shopping at the wrong store, you could probably save thousands of dollars each year at a different grocery store. These are all choices and you have them daily to make. So for those of you wanting to spend time in Mexico with your family, I say only this… think outside of the box you have put yourself into. It’s not bad to put yourself in a box if you are completely happy and satisified with that box. If you’re not and as we all are approaching middle age, I believe many around me are not as happy in their boxes, then re-invent yourself. Try a new career, live in a smaller house (or school bus), spend no money for a year, go car free, buy a rental house, buy and sell on e-bay, get lost in Mexico for a year, read the book Your Money or Your Life, live a life of trade commerce. It’s possible. It’s all possible.
My mother taught me that experiences are always better than ownership. Everyone of us can remember moments we have loved about our lives. Camping on an island, hunting trips with fathers and uncles, summer days planning tree houses with friends and picnics with fresh strawberry pie. This is what life is. Living Life Free. Free yourselves and your mind and see what happens. We might just pull up next to you in a forty foot school bus!

*Specific shout outs to South Tabor Work Crew and the D-day club for all of their love and support as well as showing us the good, bad and ugly of Living Life Free.

My Lunchtime Walk from School

I get out of school at 1:00 everyday and spend the next hour eating lunch and shopping for dinner.

This guy is selling ears of corn that you choose to lather with chili, mayo or other condiments. These are not my favorite as I'm used to the Americanized sweet corn and this stuff is stodgy - then cover it with mayo and chili, no thanks!






This woman is selling cactus, peppers and spicy chickpeas served on thick tortillas as a lunch snack for bus riders. I had it once and it was fantastic but a little dry.





This is the entrance to the main indoor market in San Miguel. You can buy six mangos for three dollars, a giant as big as your head jicama for a little over a buck and avocadoes for a nickle. In this picture you can also see honey and flowers for sale.





My favorite restaurant in San Miguel located in the center of the centro mercado. They serve chicken fried steak sandwiches, chicken mole, bistek, soups and every kind of fresh fruit juice you can imagine. My favorite juice is lime with a little sugar water or guava with milk.





Finally, my lunch. This is chicken stew made with zucchini, carrots, herbs and a piece of chicken. You also get rice and tortillas and the very common bowl of condiments - onions, cilantro, jalapeno and limes. This meal with a coke is 35 pesos or $2.75 and it's good! I will miss this particular lunch when we move on next week.

My favorite Blog

I've been following this family for the past year as they've lived and traveled in a school bus for the last ten years. They recently moved to Hawaii and her pictures are pretty great.

http://fuhkauifamily.blogspot.com/

No time to Write

Jesus Christo!

Have you been to Latin America and traveled on a bus? Yep, that's why we got one! And the answer is no Mom, I'm not going to church now! He simply a piece of art.

Little Fay Fay

My little boy is becoming a little guy. Phelan is changing the most on this trip both physically and emotionally. He's losing teeth all over the place and cries less about every little thing (Casey has now taken over that role in the family). Oh yeah, he's also sporting a fro these days.

A photo journey of my walk to school

Aguantame or please have patience...

I apologize for not having time to write here but I'm really busy in school. Here is a story I wrote last month while traveling south.

I have a life list although now I think it is called a Bucket List. A lot on my list has been crossed off over the years such as seeing the Taj Mahal at sunset and the White Mountains in their fall glory. The list changes all the time as I get older too. I no longer care if I learn French but occasionally still work at trying to learn the piano. Some things on my list are small and don’t really deserve to be on anyone’s bucket list like my desire to make a good pot roast once, just once.
I’ve been to a lot of countries. Twenty-seven to be exact. I’ve also been to thirty-eight states including Maine, Florida, Hawaii and Alaska, the four corners which I think is kind of cool. Two more continents and I’ll have all seven before I die. These are all just numbers though, tasks, checkmarks. The important stuff is in the middle.
I saw the Taj Mahal. I touched it, watched the sunset on it. More interesting though and what is stained in my memory is that I watched an old woman sitting on the grass in front of me take a tiny naked baby, hold it up in the air, make a hissing sound and the baby peed right there on the grass in front of me, in front of the Taj Mahal. It was the coolest thing. When I look at my mental snapshot of that day, that old wrinkled woman with her hair covered up is wearing a red sari holding up a baby in the right hand corner of my Taj Mahal memory snapshot.
Although I love photography and tend to flock towards it at museums, it is not something I love about traveling. So many people spend their trips looking through a lens to capture a moment they want to remember forever. On safari in Africa we found a cheetah sitting near a tree stump with five little babies playing around her. My safari mates all grabbed their cameras to help them remember this moment later in their lives, a reminder of their free youths. My memory of that moment was the sound of cameras clicking and the twitch the Mama cheetah’s ear would do when it happened. She stood there for her photos, looking stoic and graceful and I felt uncomfortable being a part of this voyeristic scene. I wanted to leave her alone, take back the photos and apologize. My memory snapshot of seeing a cheetah in Kenya with babies has an audio attachment that sounds a lot like paparazi, and a camera lens sneaking into the bottom corner.
A few nights ago we went to a small festival of sorts in a border town near Yuma. The plaza had a playground, taco stands and families milling about listening to a man singing love songs on the stage. My kids ran around the throngs of children playing on swings and slides of questionable construction. Some of the older girls noticed Ryder but he was too busy hanging upside down on the monkey bars to notice them. It was dark outside so each one of us took a kid to be in charge of. Mine was Ryder. He headed to the slide where a zillion children were going backwards, upside down, in groups, screaming and laughing all the while landing in a dirt pile on top of eachother. All of them were at least a foot smaller than Ryder and all of them cut in front of him. He realized he would have to play with them if he wanted to go down the slide. He used the tickle method to gain entrance into their game. The littlest kids were in awe, surprised, scared and downright hilarious at their response to him. He laughed, chased, hid, tickled up and down the slide while screaming love songs played loudly and the smell of tacos wafted around us.
Then we took a picture. The flash stopped the kids in their tracks. We had ruined the moment trying to capture it. My mental photoshot of that moment is a huge grin on my son surrounded by tiny kids laughing and running from his tickling hand. The photo is of a bunch of kids standing in line behind a slide, in the dark. What was more important was that without knowing the language or rules of a game,
Ryder got these kids to include him. A proud Mama moment better served in my memory snapshot album instead of an actual photo.
About ten years ago we were in Thailand on the tail end of a long around the world journey. We had done work trade on various farms for bits of time while traveling. We found a work trade farm in a rural area of Thailand and decided to spend a few weeks there while we got used to living in Thailand. We took buses, trucks and finally a small boat to get to the farm of Loong Bob.
Bob was a retired school teacher from the States. He had traveled the world, taught school in Indian reservations in the States and abroad and finally at close to eighty years old, he had now lived on this farm for over ten years. He had just enough of a pension to keep his farm running and buy food to get by.
There was no way to get ahold of Loong Bob to ask permission to come to the farm so you merely had to show up and hope it all worked out. In the village upon our arrival some small children walked us to the river we would need to cross to get to Loong Bob’s farm. They guided us across the water on a crazy hole ridden boat and then led us through cane field until we arrived at a kind of odd looking lean to under giant eucalyptus trees.
Bob was a very healthy older man with long white hair he kept in a braid down his back. He never wore shirts or shoes, did Yoga all day and loved his land like a person. He was proud to show us the trees he had planted and called his land an island as he was surrounded by cane fields.
Our accomodations on the farm consisted of a wooden platform with a tin roof. Our showers came from a giant clay urn with a ladle surrounded by bamboo walls on a dirt floor. It was actually kind of nice on hot days. The farm had a few dry fields for rice and several ponds covered in floating rafts for growing vegetables. Loong Bob was a big fan of trying new ways to grow everything.
One of the first projects we did was to pull up the hyacinth floating in the ponds and make large stacks of them. In the sides of the stacks we planted tomato plants. Being that we were in the tropics, those hyacinth decomposed within days and heated up the roots of the tomato plants at the same time. He had a lot of success growing tomatos this way.
One of our favorite projects from Loong Bob’s was to water his vegetable garden. It took two of us to successfully pull it off as he had a bicycled powered water pump. I or Steve would ride the bike and the other person would water the garden. It was an ingenious way to get work done by volunteers wanting to experience an alternative farm in Thailand.
I did a lot of cooking while there as I was fresh off of cooking courses in India and had arrived with spices. Loong Bob taught me how to kill and de-feather a chicken wherein I made chicken masala soon thereafter. We ate well and had many a great conversations into the night at the farm.
Loong Bob said to us at one point that he wasn’t interested in talking to anyone anymore unless they had something to teach him. He was getting too old to waste his time and he only wanted to learn and try new things. We were like every other traveler coming his way and probably didn’t have much to offer. Everyone had either just come from Australia or India probably traveling around the world in the process. He wanted new experiences as his days were numbered. He planned to have his body buried under a jacaranda tree on his land that he was giving to his Laotian girlfriend.
We spent three weeks on Loong Bob’s farm and I can still picture the layout of the land. I can only guess that Loong Bob is now under that jacaranda tree after finally learning his last thing. We have no photos of our time on that farm and I honestly don’t care. I would never forget his face or the ponds or our shower. It’s a mental snapshot that wasn’t touched by the need to preserve.
I think of Loong Bob and his own bucket list, wondering if he ever had one or even cared. My bucket list isn’t that important to me anymore because the experiences I crave now, I cannot conceive of what they are yet. I need to meet the people or have it happen to realize I always wanted to do it or that it is more precious to me than “saying I did it”. Finding a giant squid on the beach last year surely wasn’t on my list but goes down as a memory snapshot to never forget. I’m sure my today is on someone’s bucket list somewhere. I’m sitting on a beach with my family under clear skies, watching birds fly by and listening to the waves of the ocean with nothing needing to be done until dinner.

Ryder at School

Learning Spanish through art.

It's pretty too!

The Evolution of a Birder

I used to make fun of bird people, when I was a much more avid outdoors woman. I made fun of them because they carried those giant binoculars and practiced making bird calls. I thought it looked ridiculous and sometimes, I still do.
One summer I got a job in Denali National Park in Alaska. It was kind of my dream job at the time. I was a naturalist guide and I took people out into the wilds of Alaska to look at animals, plants and geologic formations. Most of my clients ended up being birders though. I quite quickly had to learn what a golden plover was and where to find ptarmignans. People were looking for them to add to their lifer lists, or a bucket list of must see birds. I was looking for tips to save for a trip to South America.
The thing about birders though is that they know much more about the natural environment than many naturalists do. They know what kind of trees or bushes their birds live in, what they eat, how they mate, where they make their nests and where they travel to in different seasons. All of this, I found fascinating that summer. I had always spent the majority of my time staring at plants and mammals y la tierra so I ignored most of the general bird population.
Since then I have searched for Quetzals in Guatemala and Toucans in India, to no avail. I have watched bright green parrots fly over a tropical river in the Amazon and listened to the wind blow on the wings of a soaring Andean Condor. I look closer now at the ground when I hike, looking for evidence of both animals and birds.
I’m obviously older now than that girl in Alaska (by about fifteen years). I haven’t slowed down but my kids make life a bit slower. They cannot backpack more than three miles and spending weeks on end with very little resources isn’t so attractive to them therefore, not attractive to me either. Now I spend far more time car camping than trekking through countries. Now we car camp but in Mexico.
The campgrounds we have spent a majority of our time in are basically grassy flat areas with trees, a water spicket and an electrical hook-up. Some of them have bathrooms with hot showers. We are usually surrounded by giant RV’s or 5th wheelers, all of which cost about what we bought our house for ten years ago.
We set up our camp when we arrive which consists of a table and chairs, bicycles, a couple of big plastic tractors, some firewood, our birds and a hummingbird feeder. Thus far, they have arrived within the day. The hummingbirds that is.
From what I can see, currently our feeder is feeding two pairs of hummingbirds. They hover near the feeder making a clicking noise before they circle it a few more times, then take a drink. The males are green feathered and both male and female have bright red beaks. They also hover near the neighbors giant red brake lights, which always makes me laugh. They are single minded these hummingbirds, red being their entire world.
Next I hang up a half an orange. We did this last year in baja and two different kinds of orioles came by for visits. One was a bright red orange fat oriole, like we see in the States and the other was a more slender and yellow one. They can devour a ½ of an orange a day. In this campground, I have seen no orioles but the woodpeckers are interested in the orange. They fly to the top of the tree and very suspiciously and slowly shimmy backwards down the tree towards the orange. They eventually get close enough to reach over and peck away.
Our campground is also filled with doves and palm birds. They aren’t called palm birds but I do not know what they are called. I call them that because last year in Baja they were always picking the palm fruits out of the trees and dropping them to the ground. Here, they are ground feeders. They are large, the size of a small crow but very slender with long tails. The males fluff up their feathers and point their beaks to the sky to impress the ladies at night. They are so black they are almost blue. They pick at things in the grass, working in groups like cattle grazing.
Lastly there is a bright red vermillion fly catcher. They are the size and color of a cardinal but with brown feathers on their chests. They sit in the trees and then occasionally dart into the sky and very quickly return to their branch. They might be the reason we have no flies in our campground. They are a beautiful burst of color in my perephial vision.
I sit with binoculars and watch now. I know the different calls of these birds. The shrill and whistle of the palm bird, the constant cooing of the doves and the click click of the hummingbirds. I watch the woodpecker shimmy and I watch the palm bird puff and I feel myself, aging. I prefer to call it evolving though. I’m not sure I’ll ever have a desire to fly to Alaska to see a bird for my list but if I saw a Toucan in the Yucatan you can bet your ass I will be talking about it on this blog and for years to come. I might need binoculars though.

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