Full days at sea - long way from anywhere!

For Boulder Country Day


Ryan and Luke say "hi" to all of their classmates back home and wish everyone good luck in their first day back at school. We started school yesterday, even though it was Sunday. One good thing about being at sea is that the school day is shorter, one bad thing is that Mom and Dad are teaching us.

There is no jungle gym here so we can't climb and play like at home. But there is a pool - it is very small - maybe 20 feet by 10 feet and only five feet deep. There are two little pools on the sides. Here is a picture. We thought the little pools were kiddie pools until the ship started to go through big waves today. Then we saw that the mini-pools catch all the water that comes out of the pool when the ships rolls. When the ship rolls a lot, they catch some of the water and rest spills out! The pool is full of salt water from the ocean and right now it is very cold. We also have a sport court with a net all around it and even a net roof. It keeps the balls from going over the side of the ship.

We saw dolphins today when we were eating lunch but we didn't get any pictures. We also have a small bird following the ship. We are hundreds of miles from land so we are not sure where it came from. Since we are so far away from anywhere, we can't see any land anywhere. But we did see another ship today.  It was a container ship going from Europe to North America.
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Day 2 comes to a close. We've had two full days on the ship and two days away from port. It feels like we have been on here for longer than that but we are chalking that up to all the time we have to do things on board - as opposed to the scarier concept that we are starting to get cabin fever already!!!

If anything, the days should be feeling short since we are now about to lose our second hour to time change in two nights. It makes for interesting times getting the boys to bed.....or awake after a short night's sleep. And we have hit some rougher seas - nothing horrible but much more apparent than our first day at sea. Having the first day be so gentle was a good thing as we managed to adjust more slowly to the motion of the ocean. Today we did have more people bouncing off the walls!

We settled into a few courses. We all take the core Global Studies course, which is based on Thomas Friedman's book, "Hot, Flat and Crowded" and will feature lectures from several different professors. It promises to be an interesting look into globalization and revolutionary technology, and how we are all affected by it. There is an underlying theme of sustainability in many discussions and part of the focus here will be on how the rest of the world can reach Western standards of living without decimating the planet. Beyond that, we are all auditing various electives - in a few days we will have a quiz posted about who is taking which courses.

The kids actually got into the pool yesterday, despite the water and the air being in the 60's at the most. The water and air temps here in the North Atlantic are suprisingly similar to one another. Since the pool water is straight from the ocean and was recently pumped in, it hasn't had a chance to warm up much. The pool is in the middle of the "social deck" and the weight "room", so the boys were splashing around with a whole bunch of college students.

Today's observation number one came as Christy and I tried to get in our weight workouts: working out on a moving floor is not easy. It is really hard to describe how difficult it is to do any exercise involving balance when the floor is moving. And most exercises seem to involve keeping your balance. I can imagine this is what it's like trying to work out at the tail end of a very successful New Year's Eve party. It is pure entertainment to watch people doing lunges and core stability exercises while the ship is rolling back and forth. Even more entertaining is watching people play basketball when the hoop is swaying back and forth to the motion of sea. There is some interesting physics going on there.

Observation number 2 is that we must snack a lot at home. Breakfast is cleared at 8:30 sharp. (In a side note, apparently the 8:30 sharp part is now crystal clear as there were lots of students talking about how hungry they were after missing breakfast. We can now commiserate since we also managed to miss breakfast this morning.) Lunch is at noon and dinner around 6:30. By the time we get to any of these meals, our stomachs are growling, despite eating full meals (with dessert!) and being confined to a ship. Either a) we snack a lot at home or; b) we have already picked up tapeworms or; c) maybe Chinese food rules apply to shipboard meals too - the natural law that is evident when you walk out of the Chinese restaurant 7 pounds heavier, having removed your belt, and yet less than three hours later you feel like going back in for round two at the buffet. We'll keep you up to date as to whether it's a tapeworm, the natural law of Chinese food or whether we are constantly eating at home.

In Halifax - leaving in two hours!

We have now arrived in Halifax, and are about to embark in about two hours. We made it out of Boulder and found we kept finding more things we need to bring. Finally we had to stop since the car was full!  We finally loaded up the car, and with the help of Tracy, made it to the Denver Airport.

The boys got a whirlwind tour of Toronto, spending a lot of time with family (including the boys' great grandfather!) and visiting all the important stops, including the zoo and the Canadian National Exhibition (CNE - think state fair).  We managed to consume not one, not two but three bags of mini-donuts, among other things. 

We also helped Jay's Dad move out of his place.  It's been a multi-month process and he is now the proud owner of a lot of boxes - and we do mean a lot.  And several booksellers, libraries and foundations have been the proud recipients of parts of his book collection.

Thanks, Mom and Spencer for the hospitality.  We hope the next visit can be less chaotic and longer.  Cam, Matthew and John, it was nice to see you all, however briefly. 

We had the very early wake up call for the airport trip (4:30 Mountain time) and the trip began in earnest.  We arrived on ship this time yesterday and have now explored it fairly extensively, with Ryan's energy (and our desire to expend it!) leading the way.  We've had some of our orientation - mostly just enough to find out that our internet time is much more restricted than expected.  As a result, we will likely be posting pictures in port and therefore will be updating a little less regularly than we had hoped.  However, we will do our best to make at least text posts regularly. 

As for the ship, our rooms are small but comfortable and we have already met a number of our fellow lifelong learners and even some other kids.  We'll have more in a few days.  Au revoir from Canada!

Approaching departure day!!!!

The calm before the storm has descended upon our house. We have renewed our passports, received the critical visas, been punctured multiple times to prevent disease, filled prescriptions for huge quantities of malaria medication, sent boxes ahead to the ship, discussed the boys' curriculum with their teachers, arranged for house and pet sitting, put most of our bills on auto-pay, upgraded our electronics, said goodbye to many friends, packed three bags (two more to go), selected DVD's for the trip, bought gifts, picked our seats on the plane and planned our carry-ons - what more is there to do? For now the boys are in bed, and I am beginning the critical task of chronicling our adventures. Tomorrow should be a relaxed day finalizing the packing (hard to believe that this will cover the kids for 108 days!), downloading e-books and loading up the car for our morning departure to the airport.

The storm before the calm - Hurricane Bill - appears to be wandering his merry way into the North Atlantic and shouldn't have any impact on our trip. For those new to our plans, Christy, Luke, Ryan and I are leaving Boulder on Monday (August 24th) for Toronto to visit family and friends - and pick up Grandpa Milton - on our way to Halifax. In Halifax, we will board the MV Explorer and travel around the world as part of the Fall 2009 Semester at Sea voyage. We depart Halifax on August 28th and visit Spain, Morocco, Ghana, South Africa, Mauritius, India, Vietnam, China, Japan and Hawaii before returning to the US Mainland at San Diego on December 14th. For more information on Semester at Sea go to http://www.semesteratsea.org/.

Part of the fun of this endeavor so far are the conversations we have had in the last few months. First, people wonder why we are going; then they find out more and wonder why we are going with two 5 and 6 year old boys; then they find out more and wonder why we are going on a ship with 700 college students....and finally they ask how they can go along! Well, we fall into the lifelong learner (LL) category (despite Christy not quite meeting the age requirement of 40). While there are LL's on every voyage, we are among the first to be bringing along young kids.

As for why we are going, there are too many good reasons to list them all but here are five....1) we really do believe in lifelong learning and a semester in an academic environment is a good way to foster that; 2) while the boys are pretty young, they are never too young to see the world and begin to understand how privileged a life we live in North America - life is not all about LEGOs; 3) having a floating hotel as a home base for an around the world trip seems much more manageable than moving everything from country to country; 4) Christy did this as an undergrad and it literally changed her life and perspective; 5) most importantly, for 108 days we will connect as a family and focus on one another in ways that are tough to do in day-to-day life.

So, we will be using this platform to communicate our experiences back to our friends, family and classmates. You can expect to see relatively frequent updates, depending on how interesting our days are and how good the internet connection is where we happen to find ourselves. Photos and maybe the occasional video will be part of the package. Keep in mind a pre-school and a 1st grade class will be tuning in part of the time, as I am sure some of you out there will have comments (you know who you are!). We look forward to sharing our adventures with you!!!