Posted on by Rebecca Barnes · 1 Comment

Bicycling with Manatees

Thank goodness Florida is flat, but so is a frying pan. Bicycling around these island places means most days we have sandy tires, hot seats, and sweat dripping down like we’re melting crayons. Feeling saddle sore and pedaling like crazy to get over an occasional bridge hump, makes me recall the bike ride I did in college that left me riding in the sag wagon and never finishing the miles I had pledged to cycle for multiple sclerosis. That time it was heat stroke. The high temperatures radiating off the blacktop in the late summer in Kansas left me too spent to pedal on. And I was only in my early 20s. Now I think I’m too old to be that hot. Also, we have ocean breezes that ruffle through our sweaty shirts and cool us down a little as we adventure on two wheels here. And we have the adrenaline of exploration. In Kansas I may have glimpsed a few cows chewing their cud in a field beside the road. Here, there are manatees!

The cruisers we rented in Ft. Myers Beach took us along the main road, past friendly construction flaggers, onto bike lanes that came and went like the sun behind a cloud and then out again, onto pedestrian walkways, and then back into traffic, pickup trucks speeding around us, cars blasting music. A few times we rode along the beach. When we could find the right consistency of sand for our tires, beach rides were perfect. The cool sea air blasted us the whole way and we avoided traffic altogether, only having to lookout for bucket-toting tots digging holes, beached humans wearing earbuds, or the odd fishing pole line.

One sunny day we rode south from our condo to a park on Lover’s Key where we could ride all over trails that held a multitude of birds and plants that were new to us. Then we rented a kayak and paddled our way through the estuaries of mangrove forests searching for manatees. We had been assured by the woman at the rental place that we would see these fantastical creatures. So when we paddled the two miles up to the end of the snaking watery trail and still hadn’t spotted the hulking mermaids I began to lose hope. My knees were turning bright red from sitting in the hot sun and if it hadn’t been for the dripping water off the oar that cooled my legs with each stroke and the broad-rimmed sun hat that kept more freckles from popping up on my face, it would have been too hot to go on. But once we turned back to retrace our way we didn’t have to go too far before the manatees appeared!

First, one bobbed his head up out of the water, snout first, a few yards ahead of our boat. We paddled like crazy toward it and then glided silently to where we thought it might pop up again. We saw it closer then, and could make out it’s rotund brown and speckled body beneath the water. We could see the dark shadows of his nostrils and eyes.

We paddled on and then spotted another manatee and sat silently waiting, hoping to see it closer. It did not disappoint. This time the sea cow swam right over to our plastic yellow craft and tipped her body around as though saying hello. She swam right next to us, close enough to see the texture of her scarred hide and the algae growing on her belly. She swam around the bow and along the other side of the boat and beneath it showing us her amazing hulking size. Sea cow is an apt term for landlubbers like me to understand the heft of these beasts. 

Not sure how sailors would ever think this creature was a mermaid.

We exchanged open-mouth gapes with the young couple in the kayak across the way from us who also saw this manatee so close. After what seemed to be enough time in reverent pause we paddled on. We saw a small manatee munching on plants that hung over the water, and another amazing more people in kayaks.

Eventually we pulled our watercraft back up the bank and walked our soggy bottoms and squeaking shoes to the beach, where we welcomed a cool dive into the Gulf water. We ate sandwiches and listened to the surf. We let our shorts flap in the breeze and dry out a little before riding back. We saw the fins of a dolphin several yards out in the waves, and the usual sea birds: egrets, herons, sand pipers, and gulls. But none of them were as close, or impressively large and docile as that manatee. We’ll be thinking about her for a long time.

Posted on by Rebecca Barnes · 1 Comment

Piña Coladas and Rain

Ron and I took a long walk on the beach our first day in Florida. The sand is like sugar and the water is a perfect temperature.

A pure white egret greets us whenever we are sitting out on the screened porch. He has an impossibly long and snaking neck, and thin, white tail feathers that flutter in the breeze. Boats float by on their way out to Ostego Bay. They are stocked with fishing poles, or coolers, tourists looking for dolphins. Sunday morning was brunch, a long beach walk, and then a trip to the supermarket. Walking back from there it began to drizzle. We ignored that for a few minutes until the sky burst open like a water balloon and it poured. It rained so hard it washed off all of our sunscreen and drove it into our eyes like blinding hot sauce. In under five minutes we were completely drenched, soaked, and dripping. The grocery bags filled with water. The argument we were having was forced to an end as we could only exclaim about the rain and avoid ponds on sidewalks and waterfall-size splashes from oncoming cars. The parking lots turned to lakes, cars stranded like islands.

Once we got back to the condo we changed and put away our groceries and then Ron went out again for piña colada stuff. Because pineapple, coconut and rum, and if you like getting caught in the rain, maybe you like piña coladas? He got a second soaking on his way back from that errand. Day one and wet clothes hanging everywhere.

We were soaked in seconds.

“Yes, I like piña coladas,

And gettin’ caught in the rain …”

Rupert Holmes, 1979

The sun eventually returned.

We sipped our drinks, then near dusk headed to the beach again to see the sunset over the water. A few other people were awaiting the orange sun’s dip into the ocean as well. But still a quarter of an hour before the final drop, yet another rain storm began. The drops quickly turned serious and sent everyone scurrying across the wide sands to nearby hotels and condos. Our place was across the main road, and down beyond several complexes. So it was a third soaking for us.

Maybe we had been baptized into our new nomadic life; a fitting activity for a Sunday. And I had removed my shoes on the beach as both an act of worship for such as amazing creation and an attempt to keep my feet from being rubbed raw by gritty sand. Just like he shows off in the Rocky Mountains, God has a bit of fun down here at the Gulf of Mexico. The egret, ibis, and heron; the tropical flowers, the wild coffee bush, the fig trees and palms, and the changing blue and green colors of the salty gulf waters lapping the pale sands of the shores.

Sunset at Ft. Myers Beach

These are God’s rather exasperated reminders that he is powerful. Maybe they aren’t exasperated if you are on good terms with him. But I perceive him as being sort of fed up with showing me the obvious–that he is an Almighty Creator and I should trust him … at least as much as the sandy shore trusts that whatever tracks, piles and holes mar its smooth surface during a day of visitors both human and animal, the tides will smooth them all away again.

Posted on by Rebecca Barnes · 3 Comments

6 Reasons We Want to Travel

“Few seconds in life are more releasing than those in which a plane ascends to the sky.” 

Alain de Botton

An alive philosopher named Alain de Botton wrote a book called, The Art of Travel, and it has fascinated me this last month with its exploration of the reasons people long to leave. Why do we want to travel?

  1. We long for novelty and change.

Arguably, this longing has never been more obvious and more universally desired than now, recovering from the worldwide pandemic that quarantined us into our own mundane four walls for months on end. Our first travel stop in Florida is all about novelty and change. We will change mountains for beaches; cool, dry nights for warm, humid ocean breezes; yarrow and sagebrush for palm trees and frangipane.

Perhaps we will see more flamingoes in Florida, like the ones we saw in the Yucatan in 2018. Novel to us.

And we look forward to discovering new things. Botton begins his travel book with a chapter about anticipation–which is not only the first piece of any sort of travel, but also the first stage of happiness (as defined by Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project). Looking forward to something is a part of happiness. 

2. We look for ourselves.

Botton uncovers the longings we all feel to find the pieces of ourselves that don’t quite fit into our own surroundings and must be ferreted out from other, more exotic cultures. Not that we’re exotic, just out of place in some ways, wherever we are. For example, my sense of order and fairness fits better in an orderly bus queue in England, than in the mob of chaos retrieving bags from small grey donkeys in the newly reopened airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, circa 2004. Our sense of family, our favorite flavors, our likes and dislikes on small and large scales may be found more abundantly in one place over another.

3. We also seek to lose ourselves.

However, Botton reminds travelers that wherever we go we will be bringing ourselves. That’s easy to forget. But if we search for happiness in travel, we will soon notice even against a different backdrop, that whatever happiness we have or don’t have packs up with us and drags a pool lounge chair across the concrete to sit next to us, perhaps a little too close, and with an annoying smell of lotion and a constant chatter.

Still, the longing to go elsewhere persists. 

This Red Feather Lakes, Colorado, camping spot fed our need for novelty in 2020.

4. We look for an escape from our troubles.

Botton quotes Baudelaire, a French poet and traveler with whom I am not overly familiar, but love for these words:

“Take me far, far away. Here the mud is made of our tears!”

I have taken those trips. I have felt those longings to ascend out of deep mires of problems. But travel isn’t always about escape, especially for us now. Now it feels more like launching a rocket than ejecting the escape pod.

5. We want to belong.

Botton turns to Nietzsche, who raises the import of travel to a source for finding belonging in the human culture. This traveler can have “the happiness of knowing that he is not wholly accidental and arbitrary but grown out of a past.” 

Though we are traveling to places considered “old Florida” I’m not banking on finding much hint of time before the end of World War II. More likely the bright lights of a Kwik Trip and yellow-lined blacktop will remind us, like most places in the United States, that life moves fast and shakes history off like annoying dandruff– and also that spelling is weird.

6. We need answers.

Having some query for the world we travel is essential. Teachers will recognize this as a classic piece of pedagogy: the essential question. Without it we are not unlike apathetic high school students forced to sit through an hour of English class, though they have no interest in poetry and can’t understand how it will impact their real life.

We’ll trade pine and aspen trees for palms and ask Florida some of our questions.

So, what is the question we shall ask of Florida? Likely it isn’t much more than an amalgamation of all the traveling yearnings. Can we see something new, while also recognizing ourselves in a new place? Can we escape our troubles? Can we find the past, and in it a way to understand how we belong to constantly moving humanity? That’s a doozy of a question for Florida. More likely we will find answers to questions we never dreamed of. And that’s okay, too.

Ron and I are naturally curious. Already we’ve discovered the answer to our question of what to do if we encounter an alligator. Research shows the best course of action is to back away slowly.

Posted on by Rebecca Barnes

A Cruel April

We may have put the skis away a little too soon. Cold and snow in April is not unusual for Colorado, but since I did see “the Midwest’s largest display” of tulips blooming last weekend in Wichita, the snow has been hard to take. 

T.S. Eliot began The Wasteland by proclaiming: “April is the cruellest month,” and he wasn’t even in Colorado. 

Luckily our last ski day a few weeks ago was glorious, even if the snow wasn’t the best. After a morning of runs that were icy, then slushy, we headed to Glenwood Springs for a soak in the hot springs pool there. 

Glenwood is a special spot for us. After the cruise line we had booked for our honeymoon went bankrupt, we ended up in this little mountain town for as many days as we could afford. That was nearly 30 years ago now. We ate bounteous breakfasts at the café next to our budget motel, we soaked in the hot springs pool, and we relished our relative privacy in the plumes of steam that floated all around us in late December and early January of 1991. 

As bad luck would have it, we ended up in Glenwood again for our 10-year anniversary. We had planned to go to Paris, but then 9-11 happened and no one was traveling anywhere. We took the California Zephyr train line through the mountains that time. I actually saw an eagle swoop down to snatch a trout from a stream cutting through a snowy mountain meadow. Unbelievably pristine wilderness. 

The train to Glenwood Springs is an amazing way to see a unique piece of Colorado.

By contrast, the town of Glenwood is a cross between quaint and ugly. But I’ve noticed that ugly doesn’t matter as much when I feel nostalgic about it.

The Indian Curio shop is still there—where I bought my real rattlesnake tail earrings. I wore those on test days when I was teaching, to convince cheaters (and maybe myself) I was serious about Fs.

The Italian Underground restaurant is still there: unassuming iceberg lettuce salads with creamy dressing, and spaghetti with one giant meatball.

And the Village Inn still stands, or VI as they are now trying to rebrand themselves, who knows why. Ron actually proposed to me one time in the parking lot there—hopeless romantic.

All that to say, that even if Glenwood Springs isn’t much of a place, it is for us. We have so much history there. 

Looking forward, though, I’d like to find a more natural and private soaking spot late this summer. I want to check out a few more springs around Colorado and New Mexico, maybe hike down the hill to the natural pools in the river outside Taos. We’ve been to Ojo Caliente, Ouray, Strawberry Park by Steamboat, Pagosa Springs, and Mt. Princeton, but have never checked out Idaho Springs pools (I’m doubtful) or warm springs around Redstone. I’ll keep you posted on the plunges we manage. Thought I may not divulge their exact location. 😉

For now, we’re counting down to Florida, where watery dips promise a cool down rather than a heat up. We’ll see how we make the transition. But on cruel April days like today, I’m ready to sweat either way.

Posted on by Rebecca Barnes

Looking Forward to the Other Sunshine State

The record-breaking storm that ripped through Colorado this March was impressive, even to us natives. (We’re the people walking around in it btw.)

Ron and I have both lived in Colorado long enough to have seen approximately 2,614 inches of snow. This winter alone we’ve had thousands of pounds of snowfall just on our yard. We know about snow. Ron grew up in Antarctica, (Como, Colorado) and together, even in more habitable places we’ve shoveled, trudged, skied, piled, snow-shoed, and snow-manned in more snow than you could ever imagine if you’re from someplace like southern California, or Hyderabad. One year when we lived in Telluride, we even bowled in the stuff with a bowling ball specially studded and pins made of firewood. More snow there than anywhere I’ve ever seen. 

The record-breaking storm that ripped through Colorado this March was impressive, even to us natives. Also, snow in March and April is a cruelty for those weary of winter and longing for spring. Still, I’m telling myself to fix the images of mounds of snow at every door and window in my mind since I may be surrounded by sultry heat instead at some point in our traveling future. Something about not knowing what you got ‘til it’s gone. 

Thanks to all the friends and family who so hospitably and kindly offered up visits at their own places after my post last time. I truly appreciate it. We feel loved. And we will likely take some of you up on those offers over the coming months and years. So, thank you. For now, we’re counting down the days until Ron retires and figuring out creative ways to head out on the cheap. 

Two Cheap Travel Ideas:

  1. Home Exchange – We have undertaken to exchange our house through the Home Exchange website/app and are earning points that we trade for days elsewhere. Finding exchanges that work for both parties is a little tricky, particularly after all the shutdowns. Even thinking about months in the future is difficult for planning. Still, I persist, and hope, and think maybe these swaps will work out in a few months. I’m yearning for sultry days by a pool, or hot sand, since for the last several weeks I’ve just been watching icicles drip from the top of the planter box. Somewhere under all that snow small daffodils had sprouted and may yet brave the cruel Colorado spring to bud and blossom. We’ll see. 
  2. Housesitting has become a real option for cheap travel accommodations as well. We will venture into that as soon as we can in Florida. And that state holds nothing but good memories for us, even though the last time we were there was during Florida’s own version of a blizzard—a hurricane.

It was the fall of 2019 and we were scheduled to be in Ft. Lauderdale at the same time as Hurricane Dorian, so we shifted our own path, continued monitoring all the models, alternated between terror and joy, and headed instead to Key West. 

It was a dream spot for me to see where Ernest Hemingway had lived and written, fished, and drank. We saw “Papa’s” house there (well-worth the tour if you like Hemingway, old houses, or six-toed cats), a lighthouse, the Southern Most Point of the Continental U.S., Mallory Square sunsets and more. We ate fried conch at Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville chain. And even though that’s not our usual sort of place, and the service was apathetic in the off-season, we enjoyed it because we were with good friends who also like Jimmy Buffet. We reminisced and adventured together in equal parts. We set sail from the harbor one day and floated out into the bay to snorkel and see lobsters and starfish. We kayaked through mangroves. We rode bicycles through town, sweating profusely in the close heat of the place. We toured the Papa’s Pilar rum factory and toasted Hemingway. The air was hot with the kind of heat that is nearly inescapable, yet also magical.

The mangroves spring from the ocean in an impressive and seemingly defiant attempt to reclaim some of the vast salty waters. As we kayaked below them we also noticed that these mangroves also had golf-ball-size spiders crawling all over them.

And heat doesn’t sound too bad just now, in the early spring that promises even more snow for us. Our only traveling now is up into the mountains to ski. And I have turned to books as another escape from the four walls of nothing much happening. 
 
A few weeks ago, I picked up a travel book at Lafayette’s best, and only, new bookstore because it was written by an acquaintance of Hemingway’s, Martha Gellhorn. And Gellhorn, to my unexpected delight had a fantastic voice—in the vein of Eeyore, or my glass-half-empty friend Kelly H. She describes her travels without glowing reviews of sights and adventures. She doesn’t recommend places. She loathes most of the people she meets. And she writes of hardships; the fevers and chills of her trip through war torn China in 1941, the biting flies of East Africa, the hurricane winds and the worse torture of a still ocean in a sailboat where her only comfort was a small kitten vomiting in her lap. She refers to all her travels as “horror journeys”. She describes sparingly the moments of peaceful swims in the Caribbean Sea, or breathtaking vistas of the Rift Valley in Kenya. Yet she insists that she could never be content in one place for long and that the leaving is the happiest moment of all. I couldn’t agree more.

“ … beaten, exhausted, sick of the whole thing. Then the flight is called, we make the interminable trek to the departure gate, we clamber and crush into a bus or if lucky walk straight on to the aircraft. Inside the plane, our faces change, we toss jokes about, laugh, chat to strangers. Our hearts are light and gay because now it’s happening, we’re starting, we’re travelling again.”

Posted on by Rebecca Barnes

World’s End Close

I was in Edinburgh, Scotland in the late 1980s when I happened upon this particular street. Nestled in the oldest part of the city, it seemed ancient, yet its name still relevant as a message to passersby like myself at the time. The Berlin Wall had yet to come down and I had come of age under the threat of total nuclear annihilation that was the Cold War. So, although it had been a place that was aptly named a few hundred years ago as wanderers who left this old city gate were at the end of anything they’d ever known, when I saw it, it was, and even today, it remains a testament to the fact that perhaps every era feels some sense of the same thing.

“It’s the end of the world, and we know it,” R.E.M. musically chimed in during 1987, and  even now, the World’s End Close is metaphorically where we continue to stand. Life on hold for more than a year because of a virus that put thousands in the hospital, killed thousands more, and left others feeling sick with a head cold for a few days. 

For me it’s the end of the world and I feel fine (also, R.E.M.’s conclusion). But having weathered more than a year of quarantine and closures I never felt more itch to get out and about. Fellow travelers I’m sure feel the same. And even people who are not travelers may at this point be yearning to see something other than their job-mates on the computer screen, or the four walls of their own home. 

There’s nothing else quite like the end of the world to propel a person to decisive inaction. In  the ’80s that was big hair, vintage wares, and heavy eyeliner. Now my decisive inaction is planning, planning, planning. I have had complete and detailed itineraries for multiple spots on the globe, never knowing what will happen and where we will be able to go. ​


The ’80s were greaties for my big hair and even bigger attitude.

“There’s nothing else quite like the end of the world to propel a person to decisive inaction.”

But until we have an actual trip plan, I have been planning the ethos of this new season of journeys. Our working careers have come to an end and we find ourselves wondering the usual things: What was the point of all that? and What do we do now?

We spent a couple of decades parenting as well, and now have an empty house, a decades-long habit of living frugally, and the old longings of a bohemian lifestyle. So, we have opted to retire early and travel slowly. 

Gone are the two-week jaunts here or there. Now, we want to go slow. We want to see old friends, and meet new ones. Lord willing and the virus don’t rise we’ll also be true to our initials (Ron & Rebecca=R&R) and get some Rest and Rejuvenation. Here are the new guidelines:

Rules for Travels with R&R

One-Way Tickets:

It isn’t that we don’t want to return to our lovely Colorado digs, but we don’t want to be locked in to times and schedules. We want to take advantage of our freedom to spend inordinate amounts of time strolling new neighborhoods and meeting the cats, cooking new foods, talking with people who won’t get to the point (possibly they may not have one), learning new places with their signs and roads and protocols, cultures with their nuances and faux pas, languages with tricky verb tenses and weird idioms, histories both written and oral, and not ever being “afraid of our wrists.” That’s how an old Ecuadorian Indian man I once travelled with explained what he saw as a North American obsession with time. In his observation these people were looking at their wrists (watches) and becoming terrified of what they saw there when they did. Time passes. But with one-way tickets, we hope we won’t be so scared of it. We won’t be late. We won’t be early. We’ll just be.

We won’t be late. We won’t be early. We’ll just be.

And one-way tickets will also allow us to be more true to our inner-hippy selves. Without return tickets we are open to the next adventure that comes our way. This new philosophy has already worked to bring more adventure our way. (More on that later.)

Focus on the Sacred Ordinary:

It’s oxymoronic I realize, but this is the exact piece of life we are now seeking: ordinary days in new places, with different foods for breakfast, hot sun or rain, ordinary walks and sits, people and buildings to meet and explore, travel and stopping as it comes along. Ron has known this for awhile I think, but now that I have dipped into the decade of my 50s, I am also realizing more than I ever have that, ironically, the basics of life are also the most holy. Everything has worth. From major cataclysmic events like a worldwide virus, to minor, even minuscule happenings; like a dog yawning, everything has worth. That means that our most important work now, (and really even when we were working) is simply what we do every moment we’re alive. (More on this later, too, likely much more.) For now we will strive to be unabashedly fascinated with the mundane, observing it, soaking it in, perhaps thanking God for it, and, since we’ll be in another place, likely being inordinately entertained by nothing.

People First:

This is an idea that we both feel strongly about, not just for our travels, but for any travels, and for any kind of living, since we’re all traveling around the sun all the time anyway. It helps me to focus on God in order to love people. Because some people, well, they’re unpleasant. Practically, however, putting people first means not losing my temper with a gate agent. People are more important than time, or money, or aching feet. Putting people first means basing our plans on getting together with friends and family. It also means intentionally meeting new people. We also will strive to cohabit with the people who have already been living in the places we’ll go. We’d love to meet them. Hopefully, we’ll form friendships, stay connected and love well. That’s the “people first” rule. And while this is a sure challenge, it is also a certain guarantee for happy days spent together with those around us.

We sincerely hope you’ll be around us sometimes, too, either by reading the blog, sending comments or emails our way, or by making your own travel plans to join up with us wherever we are in the world. You know we’re quite serious about that.

###