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Anne’s Preface: Last weekend, McKane, Dax and I took a three-day trip to Seattle. Tom, Kieran, and Asher stayed home and lived it up by visiting Waffle House, IHOP, and Chuck E. Cheese in a 48-hour pancake and pizza binge. Here’s what McKane had to say about our quick trip…his first post-RTW travel experience.

It felt strange to travel with only Dax and Mom, but it felt downright wrong to travel with suitcases. After a whole year of backpacking, I couldn’t stand the thought of going back to rollerbags. What’s more, I don’t know if Mom added this somewhere before, but if it were up to me, I would only stay in hostels. I would never stay in a Sheraton while traveling unless we won some kind of prize to a resort. We stayed at the Woodmark Hotel in Seattle and it was pretty nice, but it just made me miss backpacking in all its glory.

We did have some adventure during our weekend in Seattle though. As we were driving in the real estate agent’s car through an intersection, the wheel somehow just popped off of her Escalade. I dropped to one side of the car, and watched the wheel, tire and all, zoom through the traffic, hit a curb, fly about five feet up in the air, and roll straight into the garden of a bank. Meanwhile our car leaned over to one side, and the brake dug into the road leaving a deep line from where the wheel flew off, to where we came to a complete stop.

After about 3 1/2 to 4 hours of looking at more houses in a different car, we decided it was time to have some more fun. So we got dropped off at a park to meet up with Otis and Dace. Otis is a friend of my parents from college, and Dace is his insanely crazy, energetic 4 year old. We left the park and went over to their house. This made Dace very excited, He showed off all his toys and his bug-eyed Boston Terrier, Gee Gee, who was just as crazy as Dace, but most of all he just wanted to wrestle with me and Dax. Otis ordered some pizza, and after the pizza, jet lag worked its magic, so Otis drove us back to our hotel.

The next day we met up with some people we didn’t expect to see when we left Georgia. Charles O’Neill, formerly a missionary in our ward, and his wife, Marie, a friend of my mom’s. Together we left the hotel to eat some burgers and head to the EMP (Experience Music Project), a museum-like building , right next to the Space Needle that has old band costumes, the history of guitars, the history of emcees, and and area where you can make your own music with guitars, drums, keyboards, mixing tables, basses, and all sorts of instruments.

From there where to go? Otis and Dace’s house of course! The O’Neills dropped us off at our hotel and we waited as Otis and Dace drove over to the Woodmark. When they got there they wanted to see our room so they came up, and Dace went wild. Otis was worried that Dace would break things so we left to a mall.

The reason we were in Seattle was to see if it was a place that we could move. Anytime the word “move” comes up, I get shivers. Because of Dad’s job search, one of his jobs involved us moving to Seattle, something that I never want to do. I don’t want to move anywhere. I’m all settled in and then Mom and Dad bring up moving.

Everyone is probably wondering how I adapted to school after the trip. Nothing really changed except for I wasn’t there last year so I was new to all the students that didn’t go to–dare I say the name–Alpharetta Elementary.

Technorati Tags: Experience Music Project, Family Travel, Post Travel Adjustmenty, Round the World, Round-the-world, RTW, Seattle, Space Needle

Aquariums, zoos, and wildlife parks were some of our favorite attractions on the trip and we were privileged to experience them on every continent. It seemed strange then the other day to visit our own Georgia Aquarium, the world’s largest, which is right in our backyard. We had been before after its 2005 opening and after 2 years had saved up enough dough to make a return visit (let’s just say it ain’t cheap). Our incentive was not a sudden desire to see fish or to reconnect with our time on the road, but to share the wonders of the marine world with Tom’s sister Kat, her husband, Jon, and their two little boys, Luke and Harrison, who came for a visit from Utah.

The little guys were enthralled and Kieran and Asher were happy to retrace our steps of a few years back. We saw whale sharks, beluga whales, sea dragons, and puffer fish. We touched skates, rays, shrimp, and sea stars. Our few hours at the aquarium were fun, mainly because of the company, but they highlighted just how spoiled we have become over the past year. We swam with dolphins in the ocean, chased penguins and sea lions on beaches, shared a campground with a warthog, got up close and personal with the Big Five, and witnessed the virtual aquarium that is a Vietnamese street market. We liked encountering animals in the wild best, but our favorite artificial wildlife venues were small, quirky places like the neighborhood zoo in San Antonio de Areco, Argentina, run by a family of four and featuring a feisty armadillo, and the Panda Conservation Center in Chengdu, China where we were subjected to a bizarre educational video and wandered through mazes of lazy bears. With memories like this, it’s hard for a big, glitzy, sterile aquarium to compete.

Harder even than the memories are the awareness that outside our domestic comfort zone, many of the exotic creatures we pay so much to see in captivity are disappearing in the wild. We knew this before we took our trip and heard many times over the pleas of conservationists, but they never rang so true or seemed so immediate as they do now that we’ve visited these vanishing habitats. The issue has become not just saving critters but saving people whose livelihoods depend on the environment.

As if he could read my mind, Abudulla Saheem sent an email last night describing his personal efforts to shake the world out of its environmental slumber. A native of the vanishing coral reef nation of Maldives and current resident of the Indonesian island of Bali (one of our favorites), he has watched in horror over the past decade as 20% of Bali’s coastline has disappeared and miles upon miles of coral reef have been destroyed. Last year he decided he had to do something to stop the madness and embarked on a 480 km snorkel around Bali with his 9 year old son.

Saheem understands the criticism we and other family travelers take from those who think we are endangering our kids; he took similar heat from the media for including his son in his swim. But the truth for parents like Saheem and Tom and I is that the greater danger for our kids is growing up oblivious or insensitive to the world’s problems and their role in them. Our children have met and served beside individuals who refuse to accept the world’s injustices and do their own small part in reversing them: Laurie Mackenzie in China, Ponheary Ly in Cambodia, Becky Douglas and Padma Venkataraman in India, and Simona Stewart in Romania. Now Saheem has invited Dax and McKane to join him on his 4-month, 2500 km swim from Malaysia to Bali, during which he will document the deteriorating condition of the ocean’s reefs, educate locals as to how they can help preserve them, and “let the world know many people are suffering because of the environmental challenges we are facing.” What a truly amazing opportunity that would be for our boys. Maybe we’ll have to get the passports out and dust off our wetsuits.

If you’d like to check out what Saheem is doing, visit his website at www.boilingearth.org. And if like us you’ve been thinking of visiting Maldives, he urges you to hurry. He predicts it will be gone in a decade.

Technorati Tags: conservation, Coral reefs, Environmental Awareness, Family Travel, georgia aquarium, Maldives, Bali, Round the world, Round-the-world, RTW

When Tom and I got married, we had about 32 cents to our names and our worldly possessions were limited to the clothes on our backs, a trunkload of wedding gifts, and a few boxes of memorabilia stored in our parents’ basements. Using my meager, just-out-of-college income, we began slowly acquiring the things we needed–a used futon (after ours was stolen) so we could sleep, fold-out foam chairs so we could sit, a TV so we could keep up with world events, and a bookcase from IKEA so we could display our beloved books (the only things besides our diplomas to show what we had been doing for the past four years). We dreamed of the day when we could buy the things we needed without making a such a deep dent in our checking account and started frequenting garage sales while we bided our time.

As the years passed our income rose and we bought more stuff. We felt good about our status as wage earners, but the thought that we might one day be penniless again always loomed in the back of our minds, and as a result, we were unwilling to get rid of anything. Gradually we accumulated mountains of clothing, stockpiles of kitchen gadgets, and enough toys to start our own Toys ‘R’ Us.

Our attachment to stuff was only exacerbated by our housing situation. For the first 12 years of our marriage we inhabited small apartments, a room in Tom’s parents’ basement, and two houses, each smaller than our biggest apartment. You’d think with such a limit on space, we’d have to limit our possessions as well, but our small abodes simply encouraged me to become a master of storage. I bought dozens of plastic storage bins, packed them carefully, and kept them meticulously organized in garages and storage units, depending upon where we were living at the time.

When the moving truck pulled up to our miniature house, circa 1948, in Santa Monica, the crew figured the job would be quick and the load light. Both crew and neighbors watched in awe, however, as the crates, bins, boxes, and containers I had stuffed into every possible crevice of the house emerged to fill the entire truck. Tom oversaw the unloading in Georgia and directed all the long-term storage items to be deposited in the basement of our new 5,000-square foot house. There they sat, unused, for a few more years as the upper levels filled with more and more stuff.

Finally in 2004, my friend Paula (of Buenos Aires fame) came on the scene and helped me begin tackling what had become “my dirty little secret.” Two years and about 50 trips to Goodwill later, I finally felt I had cleared my life of the mental clutter and physical burden all our stuff had come to represent. I left a well-organized, streamlined basement and attic of which I was so proud I thought I should charge admission and give tours. I was excited to return home to all this order and organizational perfection in July, but when I arrived I found our housesitters had moved the contents of one half of the basement into the other and within days the little kids had dumped and scattered every toy I had saved.

Once again Paula raced to the rescue and over the past few weeks we have reclaimed the basement and made yet another pass at purging stuff from my life. I sent her away last night with a car full of toys headed to children who will appreciate them and mothers who probably won’t begrudge them. My trash can sits full of bags of broken playthings and consumer detritus that somehow escaped my first 2-yearlong pass.

If you ever wondered why I LOVE being on the road so much and why I never wanted to come home, “stuff” is one of main reasons. Getting out of my house and my country allowed me to live with only the possessions I could carry on my back. Since Tom and the kids were held to the same rule, I didn’t have to deal with the whirlwind of their stuff either. As we traveled, I didn’t have to waste time organizing stuff, picking up stuff, fixing stuff, buying stuff, or worrying about stuff. At home “stuff” weighs me down, while on the road, I was free to enjoy my family and the amazing places I was visiting unencumbered.

I dream every day of leaving all the “stuff” that remains behind and living a simpler, more experience-based existence like the one we had on the road. For now, we’ve devoted ourselves to acquiring less, getting rid of more, and finding ways to travel for longer and more often. One return RTW traveler we talked to returned over a decade ago and to this day shuns stuff to the extent that he rides a skateboard to work and operates only in cash, no credit cards. With four kids, we can’t go that far just yet, but it sure does sound tempting.

Technorati Tags: Clutter, Family travel, Round the world, Round-the-world, RTW, Simplifying, Stuff