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Sept. 3, 2002

 

Dear Friends and Family,

 

We write to you from Porto Vecchio, on the southeastern tip of Corsica.  After five weeks on the boat, we are finally settling into a rhythm and casually referring to our sailboat “Nowornot” as home, as in the phrase “let’s go home.” Of course, rarely does a day go by when home, as in Ladera home, friends, baseball, and burritos don’t get mentioned, with varying degrees of longing.

 

It has taken a while to get into the rhythm for all the reasons we had anticipated, sort of.  Every long-term “cruiser” we talked to warned us that it would take a while to get a newly purchased boat ‘cruising ready’, but Type A’s that we are, we were convinced that we could be efficient about it. NOT.  We are slowly learning to make the most of the waits, whether its for a part to come in, a storm to pass, or the other half of the family to wake-up and start moving (that’s toughest for guess who?).   But our lack of prep/”shake-down” time up-front meant that for the first several weeks, the boat kept breaking – nothing serious, just dying batteries, an overheating engine, torn headsail, broken head (toilet)… Fortunately, we had the demi-god Vieri with us for the first three weeks, an Italian veteran of the sea who guided us through most of the fixes and/or spoke all the relevant languages to find others to fix when needed.  His guidance early on emboldened us to tackle other jobs since he has left.  Turns out that not speaking the language – or not speaking it well – makes finding the correct size widget just a wee bit more difficult.   

 

We’ve been on our own now for two weeks and looks like we’re out of the shake down phase. Boat has been working and kids are now part of the operation.   Since Vieri left us two weeks ago, we’ve been able to slow down the pace (we are no longer anxious about learning everything we can from him) and take the much needed break we hadn’t taken this summer. Sure, the cruising life is slow and in many ways a big step off the crazy track we were on, but actually living on a boat day to day (and knowing you’ll be doing so for a full year) is hardly a vacation.  While frustrating at times, a different life for a year, and not just a very long vacation, is in fact what we wanted and set out to create.

 

So what did we want in this once-in-a-lifetime year?  We’ve spent the past 14 years living a very full life.  As a dual career couple, we’ve delegated to others nearly everything we can delegate, including most of the life maintenance stuff like laundry, shopping, cleaning, cooking, and a good part of the taking care of  our children.  (Fortunately for us, Denise, our caregiver for 9 years, loved our children and cared for all of us.) Our year is partly about adventures at sea and exploring new cultures together, but it is also about learning to do life stuff together and getting the kids to fully participate in this stuff.  That includes the day to day life stuff people have to do everywhere, but also the very specific responsibilities of operating and living on a boat.  The kids rotate responsibility for cooking and cleaning, they help with laundry, and they join us on our bi-weekly mega-shopping expeditions. (Yesterday we all walked a mile to a grocery store and returned on foot with two overflowing carts.)  They also each have boat specific responsibilities – thus far, Adam owns dinghy prep, Danny is prime anchor man, and Sarah has bumper duty before, during and after docking.  Both Adam and Danny have been hoisted up the mast to perform various tasks. (Adam had to retrieve a pale that he and Danny raised to the top for kicks – see Adam’s entry.)  Each day they participate in more - more of the piloting, navigating, mooring, and every other aspect of moving the boat from one place to another.  There can be no passive observers on board, and that sense of responsibility is very much what we wanted for the kids and ourselves, though sometimes we admit we wonder…

 

This means that life on board is very full, both with wonderful play time, but also with the day to day stuff and the endless tweaks and fixes required to keep us in motion.  Soon we will start formally home-schooling the kids, but already each day has been filled with learning, and, as we hoped, we’ve had several priceless “teachable moments.”  During a lightening storm in the distance we pulled out the science book and read about static electricity and lightening; on a long walk back from dinner one night, the kids were full of questions about stars, planets, and other wonders, most of which we couldn’t answer, but we had the right book to pull out a when we arrived “home.”  The similarities in the romance language, as we move back and forth from France (Corsica)  toItaly(Sardinia), are now strikingly clear.  Each day we have questions about maps, weather, wind, and sea.  Though in a few weeks we’ll start “school” in a more formal way, we’ll continue to build much of the curriculum around our experiences.  

 

Where have we been?  At some point in the not too distant future we’ll add to the site our daily log – at least several folks have said they’d like to track our progress that way.  But for now, our basic route so far has been as follows:

 

We started in Cap Ferrat on the French coast near Nice and did our first overnight crossing from Antibes, Cote d’Azur to Saint Florent, Corsica on the 31th of July.  Spent the next week traveling down the west coast of Corsica, rushing more than we’d like to beat an approaching “blow” from the southwest. (West coast of Corsica has few harbors with protection from westerlies.)  We crossed over to Sardinia, which is just 12 km from the southern tip of Corsica. Turns out that the northeastern tip of Sardinia is full of protected anchorages, beautiful islands (the Madellena chain)… and several female friends of our Italian captain, Vieri.  Spent nearly two weeks moving around the islands and the Coast Smerelda, the yachting playground for the rich and very rich. Our boat often felt like a tender to some of the yachts that wowed all of us, especially Danny.  They particularly liked the helicopters perched on top of the Aga Khan’s vessel.  From the Coast of Smerelda, we detoured for a few days to Bonifacio, a fabulous town built atop a cliff on the southern tip of Corsica. We anchored stern-to, with bow held by our anchor and the stern tied to a rock-cliff within a fjord across from the town.  From there we went back to the north of Sardinia (had to pick up a sun shade we were having made), including a few days at harbor in Santa Theresa, sitting out a “blow”, and using the fresh water and shore power to get the boat a bit cleaner.  From there it was back to Corsica – including the wonderful small island of Lavezzi, and a truly magnificent anchorage called Rondinara.  From there it was north to Porto Vecchio, our current location.

 

We hope that this first step to get our site up and running provides a bit of an update for those who were looking for one, and we hope to  do reasonably frequent updates to keep our pages current and fill out some of those currently remaining blank.  We figure that using this site, rather than sending broadcast e.mails, removes the presumption that people should want to keep updated on our progress, and gives you the option to look at as much or as little as you’d like.

 

We’d sure love to hear from you, but please do note that, given our downloading of e.mail over a cell phone – attachments, pictures and anything else that makes the files at all large can bog down our system.  

 

That’s it from Deb and Steve for now.   We hope that the transition from summer to fall is treating all of you well, and look forward to staying in touch one way or another.

 

October 15, 2002

Dear Friends and Family,

Since our last update, we've traveled many miles, literally and otherwise. Whether it's a product of our nature or the nature of this journey, our days are surprisingly full, and now more so than ever. We put off starting school as long as we thought possible on the theory that daily life on board is an education.. That at least helped us justify our Oct. 1 start date, which was of course also driven by the reality that September is probably the premier cruising month in the med - warm air, warm water, and most holiday makers gone home. This makes it possible to play football (soccer) on beaches, to secure (and afford) berths in those famous and wonderful sounding Mediterranean towns (e.g., Portofino, Portoferraio, Porto-Vechhio, Saint-Tropez, etc.), and to enjoy spectacular anchorages practically to ourselves. Though we enjoyed our "shakedown" first month, none of this was possible in August - finding sand between bodies on beaches is nearly impossible, berths go to the serious "yachts" or to those that just happen to show up the moment another leaves, and popular anchorages are, well, popular.  So we wanted to enjoy cruising in September at a semi-relaxed pace and get to some of these glorious  ports, and we did just that.  Now that we've started school, our pace is slow, but our days full. We write this now as we wait out a north-easterly gale (40 knots) at a comfortable berth in St. Tropez - not a bad place to hang out!

After leaving Sardinia, our plan for September was to head north up the eastern coast of Corsica  (we sailed down the west side the first week of August) then cross the Tyrannean Sea to Elba before heading to mainland Italy. We loved Corsica, especially the south-eastern quadrant of the island, and we particularly loved the fabulous little island of Lavezzi, which is just off the island's tip. Lavezzi is basically a pile of boulders thrown on top of each other in wild formations reminiscent of a Henry Moore sculpture. From the over-packed little bays you can snorkel between these formations. (see picture archive)

 Danny nailed a fish with a spear-gun there. We still argue about whether the fish was 4 m or 4 ft - we have a little problem in estimation.  Lavezzi was also the site of our greatest adventure thus far - a 2 a.m. wake up by a screaming crew of Italians whose anchor had slipped and who were holding onto our boat so as not to drift into other boats or, more likely, into one of those spectacular rock formations encircling our anchorage.  On the other side of us was a French boat whose anchor had held, but whose anchor chain had caught onto our keel during the 180-degree wind shift that accompanied the onset of the squall.  All this was made more exciting by the most amazing thunder storm we had ever experienced that every 20 seconds lit up the entire sky and our own little multi-cultural spectacle. The light show combined with 3 different languages being shouted over the thunder and the looming danger of the rock formations on three sides of us made for an adrenalin filled 90 minutes, so much so that once danger had passed, Steve kept watch all night. But we loved Lavezzi and hated to leave it. Only weather pushed us to leave this spectacular little bay.

From Lavezzi we headed up to a lovely little bay called  Rondinera and then to Porto Vecchio, where we last posted. This part of the trip felt like our vacation. As we had hoped, we moved slowly, played on beaches, indulged in watersports, and stayed put in places we liked. We picked up a used windsurfer in PortoVechhio and played on it in the next bay around the corner. Here, in the turquoise bay of San Ciprianu, Sarah became a water-skiier and Adam and Danny both got hooked on wakeboarding.  Good times had by all. We had planned to spend one or two days in this bay, but instead stayed four and then only left because of looming weather. All grand plans are only as good as the weather permits. 

While traveling plans are always subject to the moods of mother nature, safe cruising requires one to defer to her absolutely.  And this as[ect of cruising appealed to us. We liked the idea of being driven by the rhythms of the seasons and the whims of nature, rather than by the minute by minute demands of our own schedules and the kids' activities. Whether its to speed up to move to a protected harbor or to stay put in a good shelter, we feel completely subject to larger forces and humbled by how little control we really have.

We sailed to Elba  from Solinzara, Corsica on September 8th, landing at a little resort town called Marina de Campo. This 66 mile crossing was our longest without help so far; all went well and even the wind cooperated with a nice 15 knot northwesterly for much of the passage.

That night was the eve of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, a perfect time to look back on the past six weeks and forward to what we would like to improve on as a family. Living on board in tight quarters is itself an adventure in ways that are wonderful and sometimes, well, trying. As many have remarked in their responses to us, 24/7 togetherness is a lot of togetherness. Yes, there have been dozens of times we wanted to throw a kid or two overboard and nearly did. And needless to say the kids get pretty sick of each other and, as much as we hate to admit it, of us. Not to mention the fact that the two of us have never spent so much time together...   Added chores and responsibilities can heat things up even more. So this idyllic year does not always, in the minute, feel idyllic. There have been many a tense moments on board and the occasion of the new year gave us a chance to learn from the past and make some new commitments which continue to anchor us, especially as we periodically, and predictably, stray.

Over the next week we hung out and traveled around Elba, including a day touring the interior in a jeep-like contraption we rented. The kids loved the beach at Marina de Campo because the huge beach was mostly empty except for a small gang of Italian kids with whom they could communicate in the universal language of soccer. Elba had recently been hit by a huge storm, so the water was full of debris from the mountains, so we couldn't do much swimming here. We particularly enjoyed Portoferraio, the major port in Elba and home of Napolean during his exile from France. This gave us a chance to talk (and learn) some more recent European history while people watching from the cockpit of NOWORNOT. (see picture archive)

We headed northeast to Viarreggio on mainland Italy on Sept. 14 to meet Deb's mother, Marcia, who was flying into Florence, a short drive away. She showed up with two huge boxes for us, much of which we packed up for her to bring to us - we now have ski clothes on board - and a long list of "stuff" we needed/wanted. She did have a tough time explaining to her friends the Kraft macaroni and cheese the kids asked her to bring to Italy... 

Viarreggio is sort of the Italian version of Santa Monica with a few famous boatyards that make and repair many of the Meds mega mega yachts.  We still can't get our heads around how there can be so many of these yachts, or more precisely, how there can be enough people (outside of Silicon Valley) who can afford these 150 + foot monsters.  It continues to boggle our collective mind to see mega yacht after mega yacht.

Pisa is an easy fieldtrip from Viarreggio, and all but Steve made a quick trip to see the leaning tower and the quaint streets of the town that houses it. Kids got to eat Pizza in Pisa, which they had joked about for weeks.

That evening we celebrated Yom Kippur with a small private service.  This gave us the opportunity to apologize for past wrongs and perhaps most important, to remember those who have passed. Had it not been for Deb's father, his love of adventure generally and the sea in particular, and the spirit he passed on, we wouldn't have embarked on this trip. We think about him all the time, and this holiday gave us the chance to talk about him with the kids.

From Viarreggio we travelled north with Marcia to some of the most lovely cruising yet - Lirici and Portovenere, both in La Spezia bay, which is just south of the Cinque Terra. The pictures below are of us moving from one port to another (Steve and Marcia) and then and leaving the bay between Portovenere and a small island. Portovenere is a charming little town, complete with mussel farms, a citadel, and a sea cavern that we could explore by dinghy.  (see picture archive)

 The 5 seaside towns of the Cinque Terra are linked together by footpath. It used to be that the towns were only accessible by foot and boat, but now trains and ferries make it a mainstream tourist spot. Still, the towns were lovely.  Since none of the towns' harbours were safe for anchoring, we ferried in from Portovenere and walked from town 2 to town 4, with lunch in town 3, as Sarah has described it. (see picture archive)

Over the next few weeks we traveled northwest to squeeze in our last bit of cruising for the season on the Italian and French rivieras. First stop - Santa Margurite Ligure, where we parked the boat for several days. Marcia saw that we desperately needed a break from the kids - and them from us - so she schlepped them away for an overnight excursion to Genoa. Kids loved the soccer game they saw, the aquarium they visited, and most of all a night off the boat and in a nice hotel room. We loved the break, including a much longer hike over a mountain than we anticipated, complete with lunch at a seaside monastery.  Next stop was Portofino, the picturesque little harbor for the rich and famous. Key words - little, picturesque, and rich.  Had we stopped here two weeks earlier, we never would have been able to secure a berth, but by Sept. 22, we could find room between the many mega yachts. There's only so much window-shopping one can do, even Marcia, so we continued our journey after two days in this magnificent port. 

After sailing with us across the Bay of Genoa, Marcia and Danny jumped on a train for an excursion to Firenze. Despite what he reports on his own page, Danny's has shown a keen interest in history, retaining everything he reads, reading everything he picks up, and making connections between people, places, and periods that allude the rest of us. We loved the idea of fanning this flame and allowing him to be guided through the art by Marcia who has a more schooled eye than either of us. When Deb and Adam joined them in Florence two days later - leaving Sarah and Steve in the town of Imperia - Danny was truly turned on and was anxious to play tour guide. Seeing him thrilled by something other than baseball, and watching his enthusiasm rub off on Adam, reminded us why we chose Europe as our destination. (see picture archive)

 

Deb of course loved Florence, the time with the boys and her mom, and even the six hour train ride back to Imperia. It was during this ride that the boys decided that we should spend a month during the winter "Eurailling."

Our time in Imperia marked our last days before beginning school on October 1. And what better place to start school, than Monte Carlo? The picture shows the kids still awed by the biggies that decorate this port. (see picture archive)

The start of school marked the beginning of a very different trip. No longer do we have whole days to fill with whatever fancies us. School occupies much of the day, typically we go until 2 plus some prep time, with a heavy dose of field trips when appropriate. We stopped school at 11:30 to visit the Monaco Oceanographic Museum and extended it on a particularly grey day. We are still trying to figure out how to combine the standard curriculum materials with topics that build on our experiences and the places we are visiting. It seems silly to spend much time on American history, the focus of Danny and Adam's social science this year, but we feel we need to cover some basics in addition to our focus on European history, Ancient Rome, etc. Our divide and conquer approach to teaching is working... sort of.  So far, Sarah has Steve to herself and Danny and Adam share Deb.. This requires Danny to work fairly independently with some guidance, Steve to test the limits of his patience, and Deb to trade in her novels for the 5th and 8th literature picks. Despite the challenges, we are finding the process of schooling the kids incredibly rewarding. Working side by side with the kids is a wonderful privilege for us and, we hope, for them.  We doubt they'd say that yet, but hopefully someday they will.  In fact, a recent writing assignment for Sarah was a short essay on "starting home schooling".  Steve encouraged her to write a list of pro's and con's, and atop the Con's list was "teacher".  Not the most encouraging way to start the day.

So we write this  from the shores of Saint Tropez where we have spent the past week. After picking up Deb's brother in Cannes, where he just happened to be for a big TV business conference and came two days early for a short visit with us, we sailed to Saint Tropez to witness the last day of a 3 week long racing series for classic sailing yachts. (see picture archive)

 

 Most were built in the early 1900's, a few in the late 1800's.  They are truly works of art, works of pride for their owners, and simply magnificent. (see picture archive)

 We didn't expect to stay here this long, but once again the weather rules.  One storm blew through with 40+ knot winds from the southeast, and after a day of calmer weather, they are predicting a Mistral bringing similarly heavy winds (but hopefully sunny skies vs. the pouring rain) from the northwest.  Not atypical for the Med this time of year, but we voted to stick around and wait it out for a longer weather window before moving on.

We've seen many sides of this wonderful port - from the more than glitzy to the down to earth and friendly.  Frankly, we've liked it a lot more than we expected to.  The town is small enough to feel like you know it, but big enough to wander around enjoyably for more than a few days.  Art is very prevalent, in the local museum, many galleries, and most interesting to us, local artists lining the port with their works.  There are some good beaches for soccer nearby, and a large bay well worth exploring.  And like many of the ports we've visited, there is an old town and a citadel on the hill.  As our kids have pointed out, they share two things in common with all the others we've seen -- they're old and they're up.  Oh well, we enjoyed our jog around them ourselves.

With the weather keeping us here longer than expected, we rented a car on Saturday morning and headed off for a weekend jaunt to Provence.  Thought a few days off the boat would do us all some good.  We headed in the general direction of Aix en Provence, with a few stops along the way.  Stayed in a very quaint "Chambre Maison" (room in a house, much like our Bed and Breakfasts in the States) about 15 kilometers out of town.  On Sunday we visited the street markets in Aix, and then chased down a Horse Festival in a small town not far away.  Interesting to see, but by the time we got there, there wasn't much going on.  Probably the highlight for the kids was the big soccer field we found and played on for a while.  Lessons learned?  When we escape from the boat for more space, we need to spend less time in the car and have more specific destinations planned.  The unplanned, wandering travel that Deb and I did on our past trips to Europe doesn't work quite as well with three kids.  Our three kids at least.

We're finishing this up in San Rafael, where we sailed yesterday from Saint Tropez.  We are awaiting the imminent arrival of Steve's mother, father and sister Marcia, who landed in Nice an hour ago and are on their way here.  No, we don't plan to live with all 8 of us on the boat.  We'll be looking for a weather window to make the "delivery" of the boat to our winter port of Gaeta, just south of Rome.  Actually, we may stop at a port outside Rome for a few days before settling in there.  Marcia will join the passage, while Sarah will get some special time with Grandma and Grandpa, taking four or five days to meander along the French and Italian coasts by train on the way to Rome, where they will rejoin us.  As you can probably tell, we find that occasional changes in pairings can be beneficial for all, and we hope this lineup will work to everyone's liking. 

Well, that's it for now, albeit a bit longer than we had anticipated.  Don't know if many of our friends will read it all, but at least we'll have a nice history for ourselves when we are through!

We hope that all of you who visit our site are enjoying a healthy and happy autumn.  Our trip continues to be an adventure, full of all the ups and downs that adventures invariably bring.  But we still are thrilled and feel blessed that we were able to make it happen, and are looking forward to the changes that our "winter plans" will bring.

With all our good wishes,

Deb and Steve

P.S. In preparation for crossing the Med to the Tuscan Coast, it's important to check out the integrity of the rigging. Here's Danny straddling the spreaders...(see picture archive)

December 10, 2002 Update

Dear Friends and Family,

We hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving and are enjoying the holiday season.

So much for the more regular updates. Since our last posting we've settled into something of a routine in our winter home port of Gaeta, Italy, a seaside town  about an hour north of Napoli and an hour and a half south of Rome.  Before we tell you a bit about our life here in Gaeta, we'll back up to cover some of our adventures on the way here.  We last wrote from San Rafael, France while we were awaiting the arrival of Steve's parents and sister.  They did arrive, and we decided to move on to Cannes, as we did not find San Rafael to be the charming town we had expected. 

Our plan with our visitors was to do a bit of dividing up.  We wanted to move quickly toward our winter destination, which would involve an overnight crossing from the south coast of France over to Corsica, a 15-20 hour trip for us.  Sarah was going to take a land trip with her aunt and grandparents, while the other four of us would do the sail.  For several days the weather did not cooperate, so we played around Cannes, the highlight being an afternoon and evening in St Paul de Vence, a medieval walled city high in the hills overlooking the Riviera.  In addition to some great street walking in the town, we had a special dinner at Le Colombe D'Or.  This restaurant is famous for it's decorations -- an incredible collection of original paintings and sculptures by many of the greatest artists of the early 20th Century.  Their collection was built when these budding artists (e.g., Picasso, Matisse, Calder), yet unknown, were trying to keep food in their stomachs while they all gathered and painted along the Mediterranean.  A restauranteur's decision to trade a steady supply of food for some of the struggling artists' early works  may well represent the most successful barter in French history. 

After a few days, with the weather forecasts still looking dubious, we sent the land bound group off toward Venice, with plans to leave the following morning along a coastal route.  This would make it a longer trip to Rome, but we could dodge weather more easily and it eliminated the risk of getting stuck on an island.  But at 6 p.m. that evening, while kicking around a soccer ball at a field overlooking the harbour, we realized that the wind had subsided dramatically and we were looking out at calm seas and clear skies.  This wasn't what the forecasts had predicted, but it looked awfully inviting for a crossing.  We and the boys sprinted to the boat and checked all our regular sources for forecasts -- they all had just updated previous forecasts to reflect the accelerated progress of a stable front and 24 - 48 hours of clear conditions.  So we gobbled down some dinner, and  made our final preparations for a crossing -- a much faster prep than usual.  The boys were motivated to move quickly as they were excited about the prospect of getting to Rome ASAP in the hope of finding a place to watch their beloved Giants play in games 3 - ? of the World Series.  So we left at about 9 p.m. with a 15 knot breeze, gentle seas, and an almost full moon beginning to rise into the sky -- definitely our most spectacular departure from a port.  We had a beautiful and uneventful sail with Deb and Steve trading off watches, and the boys keeping us company from time to time in the cockpit, although much of the time they were snoozing under heavy blankets.  It was Deb and Adam who got to enjoy a spectacular sunrise as we rounded the tip of Corsica (SEE PICTURE SECTION).  So ideal were the winds and weather that we decided to skip our intended stop at Bastia, on the north-east side of Corsica, and bee-line it straight to Elba.  We pulled into Portoferraio at dusk, had a fabulous pasta dinner, and prepared to leave for mainland Italy first thing the next morning.  

Our decisions proved fortunate, as our weather window closed sooner than had been predicted.  As we left Elba the next morning, the winds and seas had a decidedly different feel.  But our longer trip the day before left us with only about 15 miles to the mainland, and we decided to pull into the first reasonable port on the mainland (Punta Ala).  The next morning we checked our weather sources and, while conflicting, most predicted brisk but reasonable winds and moderate seas.  Anxious to get closer to Rome for baseball games and reuniting with the land travelers, we decided to brave it.  We suppose everyone has to learn about weather the hard way..  Fortunately, we had no serious mishaps, with the only real casualties being the boys' stomachs.  It was ugly for a bit. And we both turned a bit green when we watched our wind meter pin its needle at 50 knots as the waves crashed consistently over our beam.  The good news is we learned just how fabulously our boat handles in big winds and seas.  While we weren't exactly happy during the trip, we never felt at all in danger.  But never before had we been so happy to see safe harbor as after this 25 miles of pounding into large and choppy seas with constant winds of 35-50 knots almost directly on our nose.  Steve did a masterful job of docking the boat against the breeze and we breathed a huge huge sigh... but only long enough to be greeted by the Italian Carbinieri (harbor police), who were not exactly a smiling Welcome Wagon. After expressing displeasure that our ship papers didn't include all they were looking for, we found ourselves being driven about 2 miles down the coast to their headquarters, where a dozen or so Italian men in uniform argued about what to do with the Americans on a Maltese flagged ship that had not yet formally registered in Italian waters. Of course this all took place before our intensive Italian lessons, so we had no idea what they were proposing to do with us. They appeared to have particular trouble comprehending that we were both listed as the captains of the yacht. In the name of getting back to our children and saving our home, Deb eventually conceded that Steve was the captain.  Whether this was really the key factor we'll never know, but the confusion did begin to evaporate, they returned our papers (with the critical new one) and passports, and drove us back to our boat.  We had heard stories of arbitrary "fines" being applied in situations like these, but despite the consistently stony countenance on everyone involved, not a Euro was charged.  We were quite relieved to get back to the boat where the only damage was at the hands of the boys, who had restocked their emptied stomachs with all the remaining cookies on the boat. 

That night we took a train into Rome from San Stefano, our harbor of refuge, where we left our boat for the next few days. We arrived just in time to collect our daughter from Steve's parents (who were now able to take their planned flight out the next morning) and to locate what is, to the best of our knowledge, the only all-night internet cafe in Italy.  The next few days are sort of a blur, particularly for Steve and the boys who spent 5 of 6 nights between 1 and 6 a.m. watching their beloved Giants blow it. We spent much of this period in Rome, but also managed a short sail on the baseball day of rest to move the boat down to Porto di Roma - a brand new marina 30 minutes from Rome.  We also saw quite a bit of Rome during this period, highlights including a great tour of the Coliseum and a visit to the Pantheon. Since our winter home is an easy day trip from Rome, we paced ourselves, taking  in only one or two sites per day.  After a day of mourning the outcome of the World Series, we spent two days sailing the boat from Rome to our current home in Gaeta, where we've been since October 30th.

Gaeta is all we had hoped for and much more. The children were immediately greeted by two other kid-boats who had been anticipating our arrival - a Dutch family with a boy of 10 and girl of 9, and a Norwegian family with a 15 year old boy and 10 year old girl. All cruising kids are comparably eager (desperate)  to make friends, so the normal gender and age based barriers to friendships tend to disappear. We were similarly greeted by the small community of cruisers from all over the world who quickly made us feel at home.  In fact, Deb had spent the last day of our journey with a patch over what we believed was a mildly scratched cornea, and we were thrilled that part of our welcome was the introduction to two doctors in our small cruising community.  While our home-grown diagnosis and treatment was on the right track, it was nice to have a professional examination and corroboration.

Since Halloween was the day after we arrived, the kids were particularly happy to have other children with whom to pound the docks and reap the benefits of overly generous cruisers who doled out to our small group of trick-or-treaters a total supply more appropriate for the total population of a small American neighborhood.  The community has continued to be, well, a community, complete with a daily morning "net" (9 a.m. check-in over the VHF radio), dockside barbeques, trivia night, and an amazing Thanksgiving potluck dinner; while Americans made up the majority, the 30 plus people in attendance represented 10 different nationalities and origins.  We managed to find a small turkey and squeeze it into our propane oven. That it turned out OK is nearly a miracle given the size of the turkey relative to the oven and the fact that this was the first turkey Deb (or Steve for that matter) had ever cooked on her own. Though we missed our extended family with whom we normally spend this holiday, we had a wonderful time. The kids were particularly impressed by the assortment of people and foods -- it was a truly international experience.  A highlight for us was Danny's 5 minute description to the assembled group of the history and meaning of the Thanksgiving holiday.  One of the organizers had asked Steve to do it, but we thought it would be a great assignment for Danny's schoolwork that day, and he did a wonderful job.

We are finding Gaeta to be just a great little town.  While we hear it swarms with tourists in the summer, since we've arrived it seems like anything but a tourist town.  The locals go about their business, and all the shops seem geared to serving them.  There's a great, narrow, cobblestone street that dates back to the 12th Century- Via Independenzia -- that is the quintessential Italian shopping street.  Over maybe half a kilometer, you find no fewer than 5 butcher shops, 4 bread shops, 3 pastry shops, 2 fresh pasta shops, 6 general markets, 5 barbers/coiffures, 10 fruit and veggie stands, etc.  And oh yes, one decent sized grocery store.  We stroll this street almost daily, if not several times a day, to pick up fresh food for one or two upcoming meals.  Highlights so far include the mozzarella di buffalo and fresh tomatoes, and Pizza Rustica, a thick crust, brick oven pizza with really fresh and interesting toppings -- sold by the kilo and we serve our family generously for about 10 bucks.  In addition to this favorite street of ours, there is a fantastic white sand beach about a kilometer from the port, complete with a sand soccer field and virtually nobody ever on it.  And the town feels very small and very safe (we've asked around a lot, and crime just doesn't seem to be an issue) and the kids have a great deal of freedom to enjoy it.

Probably our biggest challenge here has been, if you believe it, not enough time.  We are often envious of the other cruisers who, without kids, seem to have all the time in the world for all manner of diversions.  Since arriving, we've been pretty good about doing roughly 4 hours of focused school time every morning. Until the week before last, two hours of that 3-4 days a week was taken up with Italian lessons.  It was way over Sarah's head, but Adam absorbed a little and Danny's prior two years of Spanish at school put him in a great position to learn.  His memory of vocabulary eclipses ours, so when he's willing, he may be the best communicator in the family.  Our afternoons are often spent on scheduled kid activities (more on this later). Each day we wonder where the day has gone, and  after day we keep vowing that the next one we will spend on one of many we going to get to various projects on the boat gotten the kids into some scheduled small projects on the boat (let alone keeping it clean), just don't seem to be getting done at the desirable pace. Of course we are sleeping a good deal more than we ever did at home.

In many ways we feel a bit torn between multiple communities.  As we said above, the cruising community of about 15 boats is a wonderful and interesting group of people from all over the world.  With the natural connection, we have spent the most time with the other couples with kids aboard, and feel lucky to have made in them some good new friends.  We've also met some wonderful people connected to the small American Navy base here in Gaeta.  One of the reasons we decided to come here was because we heard we'd be able to get the kids involved in some after school sports programs connected to the base.  As our biggest regret about our first 3 months of cruising was the lack of companionship for the kids, we felt it important to make that a priority for the winter.  The Navy community, used to welcoming new families all the time, has really embraced us like one of their own -- we had no fewer than 4 Thanksgiving dinner invitations!  Having never spent time around military communities before we really didn't know what to expect there.  But to be honest, whatever we did expect was too little -- they are a really great group of people with whom we have already spent some very enjoyable time.  And as we're in Italy, we really want to build some meaningful bridges to the local community.  We've met a few really warm people in town (Steve plays tennis with one) and we know there could be great opportunities to do more.

The kids have a bit of the same dilemma.  They played in the last week or so of the Navy base soccer program, expect to join their basketball season beginning next week, and participated this past weekend in a flag football clinic they did.  Sarah has also joined a Brownie Troup, which she is really enjoying, and the boys have gone to a Monday afternoon "open gym" for teens and pre-teens.  In the meantime, they are all playing 2-3 days a week of basketball in the local town basketball program.  Not sure they will be able to play in games, but they are welcomed at the practices.  Adam is lucky that one kid in his age group has a British mom and speaks fairly good English.  Danny and Sarah, on the other hand, have to rely on their limited Italian (Danny) and the universal language of sports.  They also want (or sometimes feel compelled or pushed by their parents) to spend time with the other boating kids.  Danny and Adam, not wanting to loose a step in the baseball department, are also playing a fair amount of ball in the large parking lot, with Steve leading drills and workouts most of the time.  We clearly have created the kid interaction we were looking for, and only hope that we don't create so much that it prevents the kids from adequately experiencing the local community and culture.

We've been trying to create at least one "field trip" a week, and have come pretty close.  Trips so far include: a long weekend to Florence; an aborted bike ride to a nearby town called Sperlonga, followed by a bus trip there a week later; a day trip to Pompeii; and a day trip to pick olives at a nearby Abby (Deb and Sarah only).  Pompeii was wonderful, mostly because the boys acted as our tour guide. Their schoolwork the week before had them each doing a short research report on the history of Pompeii. Danny also was "asked" to create a tour through that history.  Florence was of course fabulous, though the highlight was probably a trip out of the city to visit with our captain Vieri and his family at their 300 year old home in a tiny Tuscan town of Montisi.  We sat around the kitchen fireplace trying to speak Italian with them, then visited a truffle festival at the neighboring town and sampled a glass of the famous Tuscan Brunello.  In Florence we did some of the classic sites, although all but Sarah and Steve had seen most of them a few months earlier.  Both we and the kids really enjoyed shopping in the open air market, where we got much of our Chanukah shopping done.  We spent a bit too much time with the boys chasing down things in places like Benneton (we had forgotten their duffel on the boat, so they had no clothes) and Footlocker.  It led to a great conversation on the train back about balancing their need/desire to have "tastes of home" with not letting that get in the way of experiencing Europe. 

Our bike ride to Sperlonga was a real experience.  We set out with the Dutch family along the coastal road.  With little by the way of a shoulder, and Italian drivers, it felt a bit precarious, particularly for Sarah.  It really got dicey when we hit the first of three tunnels that burrow through the coastal mountains.  After Steve walked with Sarah through the first, we were met by two polizia who tried to tell us, in Italian, that it wasn't a good idea to ride through the tunnels with the kids.  They were right!  So they solved the problem by escorting us back through the tunnel, lights flashing and a line of cars behind them! We're not absolutely sure, but we think they said they would have escorted on to Sperlonga, and back when we were through, except that they were nearing the end of their daily shift.  We hope all law enforcement folks are so nice!  Our trip back to Sperlonga by bus (again with our Dutch friends) took us to a small museum at the site of the remains of Emperor Tiberius's seaside grotto, and some very well restored statues from about 2000 years ago.  The olive-picking trip was set up by the a group of home schooling parents from both the Navy and local Gaeta community, and was a great outing for Deb and Sarah (SEE PICTURE).

While we are far less inundated by news reports than we would be at home, the precarious state of the world is painfully salient to us. Staring us in the face from our cockpit is the commanding ship of the 6th fleet, apparently the flag ship of the admiral in charge of the Med.  Our new friends in the military, some of whom work in intelligence, provide regular updates on current level of security, letting us know when, if not why, levels have been upgraded. Big things and little things - like advice that our kids not strut around Rome in Stanford t-shirts- remind us that it is no longer a safe world for Americans. This is particularly true in big cities.  Fortunately, in this local community, we rarely feel or experience directly anti-American sentiment. That was not true in other places, particularly in some of the French ports we visited.

Aside from the reality of the world and our daily ups and downs (and the occasional temptation to throw each other overboard for a very cold swim), we are very much enjoying the experience as it unfolds.  When we drove stakes in the ground to make this happen, a year felt like an incredibly long time.  Now, we are starting to say things like "We can't believe that we're more than a third of the way through!"  It truly is incredible how much there is to see and do once you start traveling with a mindset that is broader than vacationing.  If Deb didn't have a job to come back to, and the kids wouldn't fight for grandparental custody, we'd probably consider staying longer.

Enjoy the holiday season, and we'll look forward to updating this with our future adventures.

Deb and Steve

 

March 5, 2003 Update

December - January

Since our last update our lives have vacillated between the mundane and exotic. Much to our own surprise, we’ve delighted in both extremes, finding tremendous pleasure in the rituals of everyday life as well as loving the adventures of our travels.

We spent much of December preparing for an extended trip, not only the logistics for visits to the Alps and Paris, but also making the necessary arrangements to have our boat hauled out of the water for some bottom work and other minor repairs while we were gone. For a variety of reasons – language, vacation closures, different views about what work was necessary, and our inability to pin people down on work plans (welcome to Italy) – what should have been a relatively simple exercise became quite complicated. In combination, this, a whole bunch of other logistics, and a desire to work through a lot of curriculum before we started traveling, made much of December feel surprisingly crunched. As new friends down the dock observed, "you guys have definitely lost the WA."

What’s the WA, we hear you ask? As we understand it, the WA is a state of being and a stance toward time and life. It’s a feeling of composure, a slowness, and, most important for us, the ability to be completely present. According to our friends who did a year like ours in 00/01 and introduced us to the term, the cruising life helps one find this state -- but it takes a good three months to get into it and can easily be lost. We have come to agree with that view.

And yes, for those of you who knew us in our more hectic lives at home, we actually did get into the WA. We knew we were there one Sunday in early November when the entire afternoon and part of the evening had passed and we were still hanging out on our boat, sipping wine with our new Dutch friends in the marina who had just stopped in unannounced. Adam recognized it in me (Deb) when he observed that I was perfectly happy hanging out to wait for him to do something or other, with absolutely no desire to "make good use of the time." Sarah also observed how odd it was to have mom go to the weekly market without any particular objective beyond simply talking to the locals. We both delight in this state almost daily as we walk back from the marina shower (showering on board exacerbates the typical condensation problem on boats during colder weather) with the wind in our faces, taking in the spectacular surroundings, and feeling intensely alive. We also sense it during our frequent routine of hanging our laundry out and contemplating whether the clouds will cooperate and allow our underwear to dry (usually not). And, our favorite, the almost daily walk down Gaeta’s cobblestone shopping street (Via Independenzia) to buy the evenings meat, veggies, cheese, pasta bread and/or pastries (all at different shops or stalls) and returning to dinner prep, when we simply are all together in the salon making dinner and listening to the only English radio station we receive (usually we're treated to Dr Laura). The great thing about this winter, when we are in our routine, is that we can be sufficiently present to notice and relish these moments.  We know they are there for the taking at home too, but we don’t feel like we’ve accessed them very much. Needless to say, we’re starting to get pretty contemplative about the tyranny of the pace of our previous life, and talk regularly about how we can best bring some of this home.

So while being in the WA allows us to feel the joy in everyday moments – probably the most significant aspect of this year for us – we have also made time for some exciting travel and visits with family and friends.

On December 20th, with train pass and 11 duffels in hand, we left our boat on the hard for repairs and began a four week journey with an overnight train from Rome to Geneva. Actually, we really began with a taxi from our boat to Formia, then train to Rome. (This is significant if you remember the 11 duffels). From Geneva, we took two more trains and a taxi (remember the bags) to reach our destination of Courchevel, a ski area within the Trois Vallees region of the French Alps. Since we spent a few sessions of P.E. practicing getting on and off trains quickly with 11 duffels, the journey was not nearly as bad as it could have been -- actually it was pretty enjoyable. At least for us. The poor Italian woman of 70 years or so, who shared the couchette compartment with us and our luggage, might not have had so much fun; actually, she seemed to enjoy the trip.

Despite the lousy snow (we arrived during a rain shower), we had a wonderful time skiing in the Trois Vallees, which incorporates the areas of Courchevel, Mirabel, Val Thorens, and Les Menuires. The best part was meeting up and playing with our French friends, Noah, Shane, Jean Pierre, and their friend, Fabrize, most of whom had skied this area many times before. The kids decided that it was really fun to ski with these guys, which meant keeping up with them, which meant skiing really fast for a very long distance, which meant leaving mom lagging. So yes, the biggest adjustment was for me (Deb) – I had to get used to being the slowest one down and then hearing about it constantly from the kids. Actually, it was a joy. When contemplating this trip, we really hoped that the kids would all be good enough skiers by this year to enable us to ski entire mountains as a family. We are definitely there and it was a blast.

After a week of skiing on sparse coverage, we left Courchevel during a blizzard bound for Paris. (By now we had 12 duffels.) Deb’s mom, Marcia Meyerson, met us there the following day and we spent the next 12 days hanging out and exploring Paris, sort of. Touring Paris usually involves lots and lots of walking. But Paris greeted us with rain, which then turned to snow. It stopped precipitating when it turned really cold, and we’re talking really cold – to the point of shutting down the elevators of the Tour d’Eiffel. So our casual strolling was kept to a minimum.

Even so, we had a great time in Paris with Marcia. Best part was that she showed up with the knowledge, enthusiasm, and books to teach the kids -and us- about art, particularly impressionist and post-impressionist painting, and her passion was contagious. Most days began with a brief "lesson" followed by a fieldtrip. Highlight of this was watching Danny show Sarah how to look at a Monet and listening to Adam describe why he preferred Van Gogh over others of this period. We took great pleasure in coaxing Danny to move at a reasonable pace through the halls of the Louvre. That he was mesmerized by the sight of many of the great paintings and artifacts he had studied the year before (he refused to leave until he saw Hammurabi’s Code) is credit to a wonderful teacher at La Entrada (and to Danny’s capacity to absorb it). It was also a great treat for us to learn something about art and to have the luxury of time to really enjoy the museums. We both felt that unlike our previous trips to museums motivated primarily by obligation ("must sees"), we truly enjoyed these visits. A little knowledge is a wonderful thing – thanks mom. And beyond the museums, having 12 days in Paris, we felt like we could just hang out, explore neighborhoods, and get a sense of the city.

In Paris we also enjoyed playing with our French friends and meeting some of their babies. Deb and Steve joined the gang for New Years Eve. In French form, New Years Eve dinner began at 11:30 and continued for several wonderful hours. Some commented that this was an unusually mild and early evening because of the number of infants recently added to the mix. Thank goodness for that! A generous offer by our friend Sam to tour us through the Loire Valley also resulted in, well, a memorable day. Not even in the Alps did we see so much snow. We made it to Chambord and hovered over the few lit fireplaces in this spectacular chateau to stay warm, then after a quick lunch and a peak through the locked gates at Chenonceaux (took longer than expected to get there so we practiced our visualization techniques) we spent most of the day in two cars (we couldn’t fit in one) experiencing the equivalent of Friday night traffic on highway 80. Actually it was worse, but we escaped the real stall. After moving for several hours at about 5 km/hr, we detoured onto the back roads. Though we didn’t make it back to Paris until after midnight, we learned the next day just how lucky we were to make it home at all. About an hour after we exited the highway, it shut down for the night due to the road’s deadly slippery state - complete stop, done - and people shivered their way through the night while the police allocated coffee and blankets among the unmoving cars. Smiling broadly through the entire day, Sam demonstrated once again just how good humored a person he is.

Other highlights in Paris were a of course some memorable meals, including a very special adult dinner at the Tour D’Argent, compliments of Marcia, and an "authentic" regional meal with our French buddies. During the latter, Noah persuaded us all to try his interesting looking entrée and afterwards fessed up that he was dining on blood. And one of the major side benefits of meeting up with the French gang is that they introduced Deb to Boris, their official hairdresser; she's now trying to figure out how she can visit him semi-annually…

As we approached the end of our stay in Paris, we relished in the notion that we didn’t really need to be anywhere specific by any particular day. And since the repair work on the boat was behind schedule (surprise, surprise), why go back to Gaeta to stay in a hotel? So… with all of our ski junk in tow (all the clothing and gear, except skis and poles – do you think we’re nuts?) and a route home that would take us right by the Alps anyway, we decided to do one more tour d’Alps before heading home to Gaeta. It was pretty amazing to realize that we had no constraint beyond our budget and a faint sense of responsibility to get back to school eventually. Inevitably when we ask ourselves whether or not we should do something , we end up answering ourselves with "why not"? Or, more dangerous – "we have the next n years to work and for them to be in school…"

So, with train pass and 12 + duffels (including several new books) in hand, we headed back to the French Alps. Since we wanted to sample a bunch of areas, we rented a car in Chamboury at the foot of the Alps and drove up to Val D’Isre, booking lodging on the way up the valley. After a wonderful day of skiing the open expanse of Val D’Isre – though all fresh powder had been skied off – we decided to splurge the next day and head out with a guided group, hoping to find the virgin stuff. Since it had been a week + since the last snow, the guides thought that the trip would entail too much hiking for the kids. So much to their delight we signed them up for a snowboarding lesson with Jay, a way-cool guy we had previously played with on Corsica while he was in his summer incarnation as waterski and wakeboard instructor. They had a great time snowboading, and our morning in the backcountry was an absolute highlight. With crystal clear skies, we spent about 2 ½ hours traversing across and, with the help of skins and binding adapters  for walking, hiking up, some of the most beautiful mountain expanses we have ever seen. After the first half hour of hiking, our small group of five was alone with the mountains. And while the two long pitches of untracked powder were a blast, we were perhaps even more wowed by the trek up and the whole experience of being way out there. Any takers for a backcountry trip in the Sierra next year?

From Val D’Isre we drove to Chamonix, France, again booking our rooms on the fly. This time we lucked out, finding a great B and B, complete with two girls Sarah’s age. We are not sure at what age language becomes a barrier, but its not at age 7. With only a few dozen shared words, they managed to play games, torture the house cat, and communicate together just fine. And skiing there was great. Deb in particular fell in love with this narrow valley, which rises dramatically from one of the lowest valley floors of the Alps (3 thousand feet) to the top of Mt. Blanc, the highest peak (at about 14k).

Of our two days here, we spent the first at le Brevant/Flegere and at lunch got some advice about terrain from a couple two tables down who heard our clearly American English. Turned out to be Chappy and Suzanne of Sacramento, who happen to be good friends of our great friends Molly and Tony from Tahoe. Deb even discovered that she had taught skiing at Squaw at the same time as Chappy oh so many years ago. So we played together for the afternoon before they caught their shuttle back to Geneva. But our real highlight at Chamonix came the next day at les Grands Montets where we took our friends advice and hired a guide to take us up the Glacier. It was particularly exciting gearing up with harnesses and putting on our peeps while warning the kids about the danger of crevices that change daily with the moving snow. The kids were sufficiently impressed to stay directly behind our very cautious guide who warned them that he’d only lead us down if they followed exactly in his tracks, and he took us down several rehearsal runs to make sure they could (and would) do it. While the skiing on the glacier was actually very gentle, it was pretty exciting skiing by ice falls and peering down the crevices, and even Sarah followed his lead perfectly. The only casualty was our camera, which Deb dropped during one of our many scenic stops. We’d definitely go back to Chamonix, and Les Grand Montets in particular, given the chance to do so.

Next, for some insane reason, we decided it would be fun to try Courmayeur in Italy, just on the other side of the Mt. Blanc tunnel. What makes this nuts is that we had also decided we’d head that evening to Zermatt, Switzerland, which was the other way. We all thought it would be pretty cool to be in three countries in one day, our plan being breakfast in France, lunch in Italy, and dinner in Switzerland. Well, skiing for half day in Cormayeur was pretty weak, as was the pasta on the mountain, and our drive to Switzerland that evening was much longer than we anticipated, so dinner never quite happened that night. A few pieces of Swiss chocolate completed our international culinary trifecta, but the breakfast in France won the contest. We landed at the train station just outside of Zermatt at about 9 p.m. and that’s when it got really fun. Having just missed a train up the valley (no cars are allowed in Zermatt), and too tired to wait for the next one, we hired a cab to take us up. When we piled in, the guy doubled the price and refused to give us back our luggage unless we paid in full for a ride we refused to take at the inflated price. You can imagine how Deb - no longer in the WA - reacted. Well, maybe not quite. While Steve was at the back of the van arguing in a combination of languages for him to give us our luggage, Deb grabbed the keys from the ignition of his van, and showed some pretty impressive footwork as she dodged his attempts to get them back until Steve and kids had successfully unloaded all the luggage. The language got ugly (we could tell, even though we didn’t speak it) and we eventually got all our bags onto the train that we didn’t want to wait for in the first place.

After this introductory incident, the kids were completely wowed by Swiss efficiency, technology, and chocolate. They particularly loved the lift ticket scanners that read our tickets through layers of clothing, and, despite the "hard" snow, we all enjoyed our day skiing under the shadow of the Matterhorn. Since our intended return back to Gaeta was delayed a day due to another Italian rail strike (back in the WA a bit, it didn’t even phase us this time), we spent an evening in Montreau and an afternoon bathing with the Swiss in spring fed pools. This was something like a vacation from our vacation from our year away (which our friends invariably call a vacation!)

We came home to Gaeta on January 20th, a full month after our departure, to find Nowornot, our boat and home, within hours of being ready for its return to the water. After spending a very rocky night in the boatyard’s slip, we came back to our winter slip at Base Nautica Flavio Gioia, which really felt like coming home.

While it felt great to be back in Gaeta, and in many ways were ready to just hang out for a while, we still had two trips remaining on our limited Eurail passes so we decided to take a quick trip up to Venice that next weekend. Venice was, of course, beautiful, and we had a great time just hanging out. Given how many museums we visited in Paris, we were sort of museumed out, so we spent a lot of time just walking around and watching Sarah play with the pigeons (yuck) in Piazza St. Marco. Besides the train trips, the highlight was clearly our visit to a glass making factory on the Isle of Murano, where we managed to sneak in the back door of a small working factory, instead of the exhibitions geared to tourists.

February

Since the first of February we’ve been in Gaeta, sort of. Early that month we had a nice visit from Steve’s parents and sister. In addition to enjoying our winter home with us, at our request they rented a big ole van (room for 9) so we could take some short trips to see a lot of stuff nearby that’s tough to get to on public transportation. So about every other day we ventured out to see some of the incredible things within a few hour drive of Gaeta – the Abbey at Monte Cassino, the old town of Sperlonga and the remains of Tiberius’ vacation grotto, the ancient city of Herculeneum (less well known, but better preserved than Pompeii), the Casserta Palace (the "Verseille of Italy"), and even some heavy duty shopping at the nearby Panorama mall, complete with really big grocery store. But the two most memorable trips of those two weeks were to Naples and the Amalfi coast.

As for Naples, it was one of those days that shouldn’t have been. We made the cardinal sin of taking our car into the city. All the fun started when we were pulling to the curb to drop people off at the National Museum, and a woman on a scooter (with daughter on back) crashed on the curb behind us because she had just begun to accelerate by us on the right when we headed for the curb. Fortunately they never made contact with our van and the daughter was unhurt, but the mom was taken to the hospital by ambulance. As the Italians who were first on the scene spoke with the police (two different branches) and the daughter in rapid Italian, Steve had visions of Midnight Express and getting thrown in the slammer. After about three hours all ended well when word came back from the hospital (another law, neither the police nor witnesses can leave the scene of an injury accident until word comes back from the hospital that it’s not a really serious injury – not sure what would happen if it was!) that mom wasn’t badly hurt and all could go home.

But that wasn’t all. While we were sitting in the van waiting for that call from the hospital, a car pulled to the curb in front of us to park, and backed into our front bumper! Fortunately no damage. So when the word came that we could leave, Steve (with Deb for moral support and spotting) began to navigate our way back to the museum entrance to pick up the rest of the crew. After a few turns we found ourselves on streets so narrow that we thought the van literally wouldn’t fit through, some of which had hundreds of people out for their evening walks, with little or no demonstrated desire to avoid being run over! Tough to stay in the WA on that evening. Finally got to the pickup point, and headed straight out of town. Well, not quite straight, as we got lost. But we finally found a main drag that was heading out of town to the north (the desired direction) and didn’t plan to stop until we safely left the city. Wrong again. Out of nowhere, a car went speeding by us (again on the right) and side-swiped us. So stop again we did, and talked with the young driver who we think was saying, "no problem, no damage" or something like that. There was no damage, so we all went on our way, though Steve and Deb never left the car in Naples. So much for our visit.

Not without its driving excitement, our other "most memorable"  was a lot more pleasant. We took a two day excursion to the Amalfi coast, an unbelievably gorgeous piece of coastline a bit south of Naples. My parents had been there before, and my Mom said it was the one place we just had to go. She was afraid that with all her hype, we might be disappointed. Anything but! The only way we can describe it in comparison to our past experiences is: all the beauty of Big Sur and the 17 mile drive in northern California, and then some; ridiculous mountain engineering like the Going to the Sun Highway through Glacier National Park; sheer drop offs into the ocean like the coastal highways in Maine or the road that rings Cape Bretton Island in Nova Scotia; and all this being enjoyed by the best (or should we say worst) of the drivers from Naples! Fortunately, we were very off season, so the road wasn’t too crowded. Our only real driving excitement came when we faced off with a tour bus who, coming around a turn, simply couldn’t fit past our van. We backed up a bit, he inched forward, back some more, and he finally squeezed by with our right hand side view mirror (folded in) missing the rock wall by millimeters and his bus missing the left side of our van by the thickness of the paint.

But it was all worth it, as the sights were simply magnificent. We won’t detail all the stops along the way, but we enjoyed some truly spectacular little towns and found our best hotel bargain of the trip -- a great and very reasonable little place outside Amalfi where sitting in the dining room for breakfast left you looking at nothing but open sea and the town of Amalfi perched into it a bit down the coast.

Just before Steve’s family departed, Deb and Danny left for a 10 day trip back to the U.S. We gave in to Danny’s request to return for the annual trip his school’s 8th grade class makes to Washington D.C. So he flew home to SF, spent one day there, then flew with his group to D.C. for 6 days of historically-oriented sight seeing. Then back to SF with the group, one night there, and back on a plane to Europe. Can you spell jet lag? Actually it was more than that. After a week with his friends in snow bound D.C., he had had a blast, slept very little, and caught the same flu that everyone on the trip seemed to get. So by the time he got back to Gaeta he was ready for nothing but sleep, which he did for almost three straight days. It’s been a bit hard for him to get back into life here, though his attitude has been better than we feared. Deb too was a bit jet lagged, but nothing like Danny. She enjoyed a productive trip organized around helping to make some decisions that needed making with colleagues at her new post at the Stanford School of Education to which she will be returning. She also was able to visit with quite a few friends and was moved by how wonderful they are. She also really enjoyed the ability to do some "mid stream reflection" on our year.

I (hard to do this in third person)  was particularly struck by how I heard myself describing our year to friends.  What I kept coming back to was the joy of the everyday moments and the importance of time (having enough of it). Sounds cliché, but I kept describing my walk back from the showers and the family ritual of listening to the radio during dinner prep as scenes that capture the essence of this year for me. Yes of course the travel has been fabulous, but the significance of the year seems to be much more about being able to notice the good stuff, getting to know our kids well, home-schooling ups and downs (another topic), giving the kids as much responsibility and independence as they can handle, and, as silly as it sounds, getting enough sleep. For the first time in years and years, I am not sleep deprived or stressed, and I think the implications of this go far beyond just being a bit tired and jumpy. It  has implications for how old I feel, how open to new people and experiences I am, how hassles and disappointments affect me, and of course how (and if) I appreciate my friends and family or other sources of joy in my life. Not sure what this means for the future, given the job I’ve signed up for (and am excited about), but it’s the source of some soul searching and my trip back home sure fueled it.

Since Danny and Deb returned, we’ve been settling back into life at "home" in Gaeta. It feels like spring is nearly upon us, as the rain is less frequent and the air less nippy. The kids have gotten back into more of a routine, which helps us get school back on a more consistent footing. Sarah is enjoying her participation in a local American Brownie troop, and consistent romping and playing with her new best friend, 9 year old Charlotte off the Dutch boat in the harbor. All three have just finished with the Navy school’s winter basketball program, and Danny and Adam are playing in an Italian tennis and basketball program, respectively. They would rather do without that, but we thought it important that they have some connection with the local Italian community and held our ground over their objections. Danny and Adam, both eager to keep up with their baseball, have also been stepping up their workouts in the parking lot, and dragging dad out of bed for some early morning stints before school.

With one of the wintering cruisers having just left (unfortunately the third boat with kids), and others, like us, getting more serious about preparing their boats for April departures, we’re starting to contemplate the end of our stay here in Gaeta. While we’re excited about getting back on the seas, we also are feeling sad about the idea of leaving such a great little town. We’re trying to spend more time connecting with the rest of the cruising community here, which is a really wonderful collection of international perspectives and personalities. We hope to cement several relationships that we will carry with us and maintain after our return from the seas. When planning our trip we saw the inability to sail through the winter here in Europe (as opposed to the Caribbean) as a negative. The fact is we have really enjoyed our time here and the travel we’ve done, and think we’ll look back on this period as a particularly rewarding part of the whole year.

Well, not sure many will read this far, but if you have, thanks for listening and hope you enjoyed it. We’ll sign off for now, and we promise to try very hard to make the rest of our updates much more frequent and far less lengthy.

Please join us in keeping our collective fingers crossed for a solution to the Iraqi situation that doesn’t involve our troops moving in. That particular situation, and other related and unrelated time bombs around the world, represent our biggest sources of stress during this otherwise incredible year. We continue to count our blessing for the ability to have this time with our family, and we hope things are treating you well wherever you are.

 

March 27 Update  

Well, three weeks is our quickest update ever, so we’ll try to keep this one brief.  As we write, we are in the midst of active preparations to depart our winter port of Gaeta, Italy. We are doing so with very mixed feelings.  On the one hand, we are eager to once again hit the seas, actively cruise around the Med, and explore new places.  At the same time, we have really enjoyed both our time in Gaeta and the traveling we have done from here.  (You can probably expect a bit of a Gaeta retrospective after we’ve actually left.)  A year felt so long when we left the U.S., and now it feels incredibly short. 

 

Two weeks ago we enjoyed our last land trip of the “winter”, renting a car and heading north to Austria.  Our good friend Tony Hardy has been telling us for years how special St. Anton is, and we are now inclined to agree with him.  While the use of German made it a more difficult place for us to operate, we were awed by the grand scale, the physical beauty, and the quality of the skiing.  We enjoyed three great days as a family, then a fourth without Adam who was coming down with the flu.  But on the fifth day he was feeling better, and showed his true stripes as he rallied for an awesome day in 10 inches of fresh winter powder. It was one of those glorious sunny powder days that skiers live for.  A great finish to our stay at St. Anton.

 

From there we went to Innsbruck for a day, where Adam paid the price for his hard day of skiing while not quite recovered, and Sarah got to visit the AlpenZoo with her dad – a real highlight for her.  We once again got to watch her come alive (even more so than usual ) in the presence of animals, as she sprinted from area to area to take in as much as she could. 

 

We did our last skiing of the season on our way south, when we stopped for two days in the Italian Dolomites, in a region called the Alta Badie?????.  The main draw was a day long trip called the Sellaronda (Around the Sella), on which you could ski a 360-degree circle around a group of spectacular peaks.  We probably rode about 25 lifts.  The skiing was mostly intermediate and unremarkable, but the mountainscape was spectacular.  Sheer granite cliffs reminding us of the Yosemite Valley were the centerpiece of a truly awesome area.  Part of our pleasure here was undoubtedly the surprise factor, as we didn’t expect this much.   And while they may not be quite as grand in scale, this area ranked among the most spectacular we saw.

 

Upon our return a week and a half ago, we dove back into our life here in Gaeta, including our home schooling routine.  We haven’t written much about schooling in the past, so a few comments here. (We are writing a separate entry on the joys and challenges of school this year.)  While at port, we generally do about 4-5 hours in the morning.  Home schooling the three kids continues to have its challenges and its rewards.  Sometimes we wish we had enrolled them in school, so we could have the free time to enjoy more of the area and relax more.  But we are also finding it incredibly rewarding to work so closely with all three of them – we’re learning so much more about there strengths and weaknesses, and who they are as people.    It really is a gift to be spending so much time with them, and watching them first hand as they absorb their material. It’s also a treat to be able to tailor the curriculum to their needs and to the opportunities before us.  We couldn’t imagine making home schooling a way of life, but are really enjoying it for the year.

 

As we’ve mentioned before, we’ve become particularly close with a Dutch family (the Shoemakers) that is enjoying a one year odyssey much like our own.  Their 9 year old daughter, Charlotte, has become incredibly close with Sarah and their son, Martyne (10), enjoys being able to rough it up a little with Danny and Adam.  Steve, Adam and Danny tagged along with Martyne and his dad last week to go to a football (American soccer) playoff game between Rome and Ajax, “their” team from the Netherlands.  A good time was had by all, despite the offer from their Italian neighbors at the game to escort them out in case they were attacked by unruly Roma fans angry about being eliminated from the tourney!  Definitely a spirited crowd, but no sign of violence or danger.  The Zuckerman boys enjoyed the following day at the Vatican, mostly exploring the incredible museums and the Sistine Chapel.

 

We mentioned above our reluctance to leave Gaeta, and one of the toughest parts of the departure will be to leave our new found friends, the Shoemakers.  Unfortunately they must head north and west, in order to sail back through the French canals and on to the Netherlands, while we will be heading south and east, around the boot of Italy and over to Greece.  We’ve decided to delay that a week or so by cruising some of the nearby islands with them and, weather permitting, will take off to do so next Monday.  After a week or so we’ll return here to Gaeta for a few final preparations, then head south toward Sicily.  Frankly, other than heading that way, then around to Greece, we’re pretty fluid on our plans for the next four months.  We’ve made contact with several other “kid boats” cruising the Med, some of which appear to be heading toward Greece as well.  So we hope to remain fluid and connect with one or more of them, as we have found that some companionship for the kids really makes all of us happier.

 

With that, we’ll sign off for now.  We listen intently to the activities in the middle east, wishing desperately that it had not had to come to this.  Fortunately we’ve seen nothing here that is impacting us personally, but we can’t help but fear for the impact this war will ultimately have in Iraq, the U.S. and around the world.  We keep our fingers crossed that the ultimate benefits will far outweigh the inescapable costs.

 

As we hear frequently in the cruising world, fair winds and following seas to all who read our pages.

 

 

April 14, 2003

 

As we prepare to leave our winter home of Gaeta, Italy, we are filled both with intense excitement and sadness.  Of course, we look forward to our second cruising season with a great deal of anticipation – after all, cruising is why we have been living on a boat through the winter. True to form, of course, only 36 hours before we plan to leave, we do not yet know where we will spend most of our last 15 weeks.  We know that we are heading south from here to Sicily, but don’t yet know whether from there we will turn right toward Sardinia and then Spain, or left to Greece and possibly Turkey or Croatia.  Those of you who know us well are probably not surprised by our last minute decision-making.

 

But we also feel lots of sadness about leaving our winter port.  Though we hoped to have a pleasant winter between the two cruising seasons, we never anticipated that these six months would themselves be so rewarding.  In addition to enjoying our several opportunities for wonderful trips, and our proximity to Rome, Naples, and other nearby sites, we’ve come to love our daily life in this little beach town -- it has really come to feel like home. We’ve finally nailed down where to get the freshest Mozzarella di Buffalo and the best inexpensive “vino rosso” in town. The man at our favorite pizzeria knows us all and usually feeds the kids before they bring home what they’ve purchased for our dinner.  The guys at the local fruit stand humor our minimal language skills, no longer answering our awkward Italian queries in English.  Spring is in the air, so merchants are readying for the summer crowd, but the crowd isn’t yet here. And with the better weather, our fellow cruisers are just out and about more, and we have really enjoyed getting to know more of them.  Life here is pretty simple and pretty great. We will miss it.

 

But what we will most miss are our new friends, both cruisers and a few families from the Navy community.  Both these groups are used to saying goodbye frequently, but we are not.  We have become particularly close with Connie Miller and her family, who really welcomed us into the Navy community like we were one of theirs.  And within the wonderful cruising community, we had the most difficult time saying goodbye to the Schoenmachers, our new and wonderful friends from the Netherlands.  They left yesterday after a very difficult and prolonged goodbye. We had hoped that spending a week sailing together – nine of us on Nowornot for 8 days - would make us sufficiently tired of each other that it would be easier to go our separate ways. (They went North; we’re heading South.) But our trip to the neighboring islands (Ventotene, Ischia, Procida, and Capri) was fabulous, and made our separation all the more teary.  Sarah and Charlotte (their 9 year old daughter) became even more inseparable than they already were – spending hours hunting for the perfect sea shell, carving bamboo twigs into whistles, and turning our boat into a floating disco. Charlotte even spent enough time with us to learn to love peanut butter and banana sandwiches. The boys enjoyed playing beach football (soccer) with their 10 year old Martijn, though their last game together ended with Danny breaking his toe (a splint and two weeks of hobbling should do the trick). And we became very close to the parents.   Steve and Maarten really bonded over long hours of boat repairs, most notably the virtual re-build of the back end of our dingy.  Deb and Annette spent hours walking and talking, and even managed to sneak in a final and wonderful trip to Rome together after our return from the islands.  What made our separation so hard is knowing that future time with them will never be the same. We will undoubtedly visit each other and/or vacation together at some point, but our kids and their chemistry together will certainly change, and the hours of relaxed, unaccounted-for time to just hang out – well, that is surely unique to this time and place and we all knew it.

 

What is also very different for us now as we plan to leave Gaeta is the salience of the impending conclusion to this wonderful adventure.  The endpoint of this fantasy year lingers in every decision we are now making – so very different from how we felt throughout our preparations last spring and summer, when our entire dream year stretched before us.  And it differs dramatically from the experience of our cruising neighbors, most of whom have years remaining on their clocks or who have no defined endpoints.  Not only does the reality of a fixed ending affect the length, but we’ve come to see how the presence of an endpoint in the future changes how we experience the present. Of course, we don’t expect a lot of sympathy here. But it feels really different now as we approach the final segment of our journey.  We see more evidence of our old knee jerk response to make every minute matter, and we try hard to fight this instinct with what we’ve learned this year – that our time and efforts ultimately yield more true gifts when they don’t have to “count.”  But still, our normal desires -- to do more, see more, cover more ground – are staring us in the face as we chart our itinerary for this final leg of our year-long adventure.  Old patterns do die hard.

 

As we want to get this posted on our last day here, while we still have easy access to a high speed internet connection, we’ll sign off now.  As we read over this and our previous updates, we realize that we’ve focused recently a great deal on our travels, and  haven’t provided much about our the day to day life here in Gaeta that we came to appreciate so much.  We also haven’t written much about our home schooling activities, which has very much helped to shape our life these last 6 months.  So look for these, as well as an update on our itinerary decisions, when we next post to the web.

 

We hope this finds all our interested friends doing well, and wish you all “fair winds and following seas”.

 

 

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