Travel Journals

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

Mark Twain

Travel Adventures

During the middle 1960’s, my family’s annual Christmas vacations were always the foremost in busman’s holidays. My father drove a truck for a living, back and forth across the full length of California. Our vacations entailed packing up the family and an assortment of friends and driving 2000 miles to San Blas, a small fishing village on the western coast of Mexico.

One of the greatest joys of international travel is observing the cultures of the places you visit and comparing them with our own. In a story called El Diablo (The Devil), my father discovers a delightful cultural difference between ourselves and natives of west-central Mexico in the observance of the Christmas holiday.

San Andres, Peten, Guatemala, December 2001 to January 2002

I think that international travel can a better learning experience than spending the same amount of time spent in regular school. For example, over the 2001-2002 New Year’s week, I took my son to Guatemala for ten days as an educational vacation. During that ten days:

	He learned about living conditions in a poor rural, essentially third world country. We lived with a local middle-class family during our stay. While they were very generous, living conditions were very primitive. Water pressure was present only about half the time in the house. But the tap water was unsafe to drink so drinking water was purchased in 5-gallon containers from a local supplier. The electricity went out for several hours every other evening. And most amazing of all was that the people thought nothing of these problems and went on about their lives like nothing unusual was happening.
	We both learned some Spanish. In the mornings we attended the Eco-Escuela de Español (Eco-School of Spanish) where we received 1:1 Spanish lessons. But more importantly, our host family didn’t speak any English. So in our day-to-day activities around the house – getting meals, trying to share our experiences with the family, etc.- all happened in Spanish. We’d sit around the table, with our translation dictionaries handy, cobbling together sentences as best we could.
	We learned some about history and science as well. We met Dan Irwin, an American who works for NASA doing remote imaging of the Guatemalan jungles looking for undiscovered Mayan ruins. He talked to us about his group’s relatively recent discovery that the Mayan city of Tikal used a complex system of reservoirs and canals over tens of thousands of square kilometers to collect enough water and produce enough food to support the capital city (see Pioneers of the Bajo in the January/February 2002 Archaeology magazine).

When I looked at the homework my son missed in the extra week he was out of school, I know that he learned much more spending the 10 days in Guatemala than he ever would have gotten out of school. Here's more about it.

Dodecanese Islands, Greece, June 2002

Ok, I can't get away from the topic of sailing for very long. I've dreamt for years of taking a sailing cruise in the Greek Islands. This year I took that chance and spent a glorious week aboard Angelina, a 50-foot sailing yacht cruising the Dodecanese Islands with Seascape cruises. Here's more about it.

Hong Kong and Tokyo, February 2002

Most this was a business trip for my employer, but I did get to do a little touring and picture taking. Here are a few of the best photos.