New spring, new focus

As evidenced by a whole month passing since my last entry, life has pretty much returned to a plateau. A lack of drama has replaced the steep ups and downs of the past year.  It's time for a vacation. Spring is my favorite season in Michigan but this year I will be adventuring in some other parts of the world with some of my favorite people.

Trip 1: Southwest United States.

Abby and I will be taking 8 days to perhaps explore some of the National Parks greatest hits.  That brief amount of time does not afford the whole road trip experience so we will begin with a flight to Las Vegas to put us in the vicinity. There we will rent a car and proceed on our "bohemian adventure". The rules of a bohemian adventure are simple:

1. Eat, when you are hungry.
2. Sleep, when you are tired.
3. When you want a milkshake, you get one.
4. The kid has final word on which tourist traps, roadside historical markers, or National Parks get visited or passed over.

Planning is forbidden.  We let the road and the weather suggest our next destination.  We do think we may find ourselves in Los Angeles around the time of Alice's birthday. But to say for sure would violate the rules.

The tradition of this kind of "trip with Dad" began when Alice was little (age 5 or 6?) and we ended up in Canada visiting my sister, Ginny, who was working as a geologist for the Canadian government in Manitouwadge, Ontario, a silver mining town in Canada.  It was a great surprise for her and a blast for us (despite the fact that we were detained at the border for suspicion of kidnapping). Somewhere I have some documentary video from this trip. We shot S-VHS as I recall.

About 5 years later, I did a bohemian adventure with Abby and we ended up in the Badlands.  This documentary was shot on mini DV videotape.  But our trip was cut short when Abby got homesick at the entrance gates to Mount Rushmore.  But rules is rules.  We turned around right there and went home and to this day I have never seen the stone Presidents. However, we did visit EVERY prairie dog village between Michigan and South Dakota.

It was Abby's idea to employ the BA rules for this trip.

Trip 2: Snorkeling in the Caribbean.

Mary has had a rough year too.  Maybe rougher than me. On top of all this cancer worry and operations, she has had to continue going to work each day to keep our household functioning. It hasn't been easy.

When we first talked about an island vacation, I'm quite sure Mary was envisioning rum cocktails with umbrellas delivered to her beach hammock by cabana boys.  Fortunately for me, she was willing to compromise and we finally agreed upon a location where the snorkeling was world class: The Dutch Antilles. We will be flying to Curaçao and then hopping over to Bonaire for the bulk of the week.  Mary got hooked on the notion that on Bonaire, there are more flamingos than people.  And I have experienced some of my greatest bliss floating through reefs with a mask and snorkel and Bonaire promises some of the best easy snorkeling anywhere.  We entertained the idea of learning SCUBA for the trip but it got too complicated and expensive.

So I imagine that for the near future, this blog will become a travel blog.  I'm not taking my video camera on either trip but my iPad takes great photos and short clips of video so I will not have to rely completely on the written word.