Beach Day

Kira and I had what she has dubbed the "best day of the summer" today.  It has been so blazingly hot lately that we decided to see if Lake Superior is swimmable.  Usually it is so cold that you can't even stand to wade up to your ankles, but sometimes, for some reason, it feels relatively warm and it is super fun to swim in it.  Today was a warm-water day.  It was glorious.  It was really windy so there was surf.  I didn't take my camera along but I looked for some comparable pictures online of the kind of surf we were in today.  

It wasn't this big.  This isn't even Lake Superior.  I'm pretty sure it's the ocean.
That's a big wave.  I would never go in that.  

This actually is Duluth, and it is not far from where we were swimming, but the waves weren't this big either.  

This is more like what we were dealing with.  

The bottom picture is the same Park Point beach we were at today, but there were lots of people there, and I want to say that the waves were even a little bigger.  They were big enough to be exhilarating, with a few waves big enough so smack you hard on the back of the head and rip your feet out from under you, but not big enough to be terrifying.  My life-long recurring nightmare is to be swimming and suddenly be faced with a wave like the one in the top picture, but also one of my favorite activities is swimming in surf.  I can see how surfers get addicted to waiting for the next great wave.

When I was a kid and we lived in Australia, we decided to go to the beach one day because it was punishingly hot.  We lived about an hour or so from the coast so we got in the van, complete with barf-bucket/sand castle bucket for me/my sister Beth, and headed to the beach.  We drove around and saw beaches so packed with people there wasn't even room to put your towel down.  We kept driving.  Finally we came across a beautiful beach with white sand and big surf and it was practically empty.  We stopped and spent the day swimming and playing in the sand.  Later we learned that that beach is notorious for it's deadly riptides and sharks.  Oh well.  It wasn't crowded and we survivied.  Win win.

Australia!

Me, Amy and Beth on a beach in Australia in 1982. The words on the back of the picture say "Cape Patterson Liptrap" but I'm not sure Liptrap is a word, Mom.

My friend and fellow blogger, Kady, is on a world tour right now. She sold all her stuff, quit her job and put all of her worldly belongings in a backpack (apparently a HUGE backpack that she never actually carries on her back), and took off to see the world. She just finished visiting Australia. You can read about her adventures here.

She recently wrote a post all about koalas. After reading it I am officially putting koalas on my "I wish they were extinct" list. Anything that has an upside down pouch where its baby can just fall out is a contender for the list. Add to that the fact that they feed their babies poop for several weeks in order to get them accustomed to eating poisonous eucalyptus leaves for the rest of their lives has firmly put them on the list. Watch out koalas.

When I lived in Australia when I was twelve, we were constantly straining our necks to look up into the eucalyptus trees to try to spot a koala, and we saw them sometimes. They are pretty cute, but I remember once Queen Elizabeth was visiting either the Sydney Zoo or the Melbourne Zoo, and she wanted to see a koala up close, so a zoo keeper was going to get a cute adolescent one for her to gush over. The mother of the adolescent didn't like the zoo keeper touching her baby so she slashed him with her gigantic claws and he was gushing blood. Fun times for the queen. I wasn't there, I just heard about it. It's probably not even true, but ever since then I've not been the biggest fan of koalas.

Watch out, Kady, that koala has murder in its eyes.

I just looked through our Australia photo album to see if I had any koala pictures of my own, and I didn't find any koala pictures, but I did find some doosies. We spent the year there because my dad went on a teacher exchange so he did an Australian teacher's job and that teacher did his job for a year and we lived in each other's houses. Like I said, I was twelve. It's an awkward age. This is the picture that my sisters still pee their pants laughing about and threatening to make public. Well Amy, Beth, I'm taking your power away and I'm publishing this picture on the internet for the whole world to see because I'M PROUD OF IT. Here it is:

It's me, in a hoody tied tightly around my head, with my gigantic photo-gray glasses, in a graveyard, holding Barbie. In my defense, we were touring Port Campbell and it was a cold and rainy day and, no offense Mom and Dad, it was kind of boring. That's why Barbie is so prominently featured. She was keeping me entertained.

Just so Amy and Beth have no other gems that they're saving for future Christmas cards, I'm also publishing this one:

and this one:


The upper one is me panning for gold, which is kind of cute, so I don't know why they think it's so funny. Maybe it's the white-man's-overbite I seemed to have in almost every picture from that era. The lower one is me learning the hula in Hawaii. I really liked that dress, but I was so afraid it would slip down my stick straight torso and someone would see my brand new boobs.


This picture was taken the same day as the Barbie/hood picture. I remember we were sitting in the van playing with Barbies and Beth, the little one who was 5 at the time told us to "Shut the damn door!" when we were coming in from outside. It was hilarious.

This post has veered off of Kady and her trip. She has some interesting and hilarious stories to tell. Check out her blog!

Travel Much?

I'm sitting at home today being totally lazy. The most productive thing I've done (so far) aside from reading blogs, is clean out between the keys on my computer with a corn holder. There was a shocking amount of hair stuffed down there. And food.

One of the blogs I read is Kady Hexum's. She is on a trip to Norway right now and I am so jealous!

She has been all over the world. I fancy myself a traveler, although I haven't been anywhere abroad in 12 years. (stupid kids)(just kidding kids! Love you to pieces!) That was a trip to Oxford, England to take a Shakespeare class at Worcestershire College. Fancy huh! I also lived in Australia for a year when I was 12. I told my parents, "I'm out! Gotta see the world!" Just kidding. They came with me.

The thing about traveling is that actual traveling is so much different than the idea of traveling. I watch travel shows and the people are trying new food, and they are bragging about their accommodations, whether it is a hostel or a fancy hotel. The travel shows never talk much about jet lag or how traveling totally screws up your poop schedule, or how the foreign food that at the beginning of your trip was novel and interesting, makes you want to cry at the end of your trip. And they never tell you about the things that most Americans would think are totally fun. Like taking your picture in front of a sign like this:

I'd be willing to bet all the money in my wallet that Rudy Maxa and Rick Steves both have pictures of themselves in front of signs like this. This is Kady on her trip in Norway.

When I went to England I stayed in a beautiful room on the college campus in what they called the "new" building, which was built in the 1700s. The "old" building was built in the 1000s. I always feel like such an ungrateful baby when I travel because I tend to focus on the problems and get homesick for stupid stuff. For instance, although my room at Oxford was beautiful, the bathroom was down one floor. I have to pee during the night every night, so I would have to get up, put on a robe, march down a flight of stairs, pee and then march back up. By the time I got back I was wide awake. That made me very tired and cranky so to solve my problem, I found an empty peanut butter jar (don't ask) and when I'd have to pee in the middle of the night I'd pee in that, and then in the morning I would have to scout out the hallway to make sure nobody was around so I could bring my full-to-the-brim pee-jar down to the bathroom to empty it. Not very glamorous, and at the time, highly stressful. Thankfully, I never got caught.

We took our meals at Oxford in a dining hall that looked just like the dining hall in the Harry Potter movies. So nice, right? But about half way through the second week I was so sick of lamb that every time I saw lamb with gagorific mint sauce I wanted to stab someone's eyeballs out. How many lambs can the English eat? Judging from those three weeks you'd think there should be an international lamb shortage.

See, I'm a total crybaby. I shouldn't be allowed to travel. Now, when I think about that trip, I wish I would have quit being such a baby and just relaxed and enjoyed it more.

But, thanks to Kady, I have the travel bug and I think now, with 12 more years of life experience and 12 years of eating truly disgusting things off my children's plates, or that I've cooked myself, I would be a much more appreciative and mature traveler. I'll just plan ahead and bring a laxative and an empty peanut butter jar, and a bag of candy bars and then I'll be happy, and comfortable. Right?

These are the top five places I want to go:

1. Italy - because I would love to see the Vatican, and the Colosseum, and Venice.

2. Jerusalem - I want to see The Old City: The Dome of the Rock, the Temple Mount; all that jazz.

3. Istanbul - because it's half in Europe and half in Asia! Super cool! I want to see Hagia Sofia, the Hippodrome and take a boat tour of the Bosporus.

4. Oman - I'd like to see huge sand dunes and travel on camels and stay in a real Arabian tent. Think I'd find something to complain about? Oh yeah! But I'd still like to do it. Unless there are scorpions. Then tent-living is OUT.

5. Australia - I'd like to see it now that I'm an adult and I'd like to have a couple of months and tons of money to do it. I want to go to Darwin, Ayers Rock and Sydney.

So, my friends, are you a traveler? Where are the top five places you'd like to go?

Happy Mother's Day!

It's mother's day so I've obviously been thinking of my mother. Thank you, Mom, for being my mom and doing such a terrific job raising me. (I forgot to buy a card in time for you to get it today, so expect it this week! Sorry. [I guess you didn't do THAT great a job of raising me after all.])

I was remembering the time that we were living in Australia when I was eleven years old. We were visiting the Apostles Islands National Park, which is a series of beautiful cliffs on the coast.


My mom wouldn't let us go within fifty feet of the cliff edge, obviously, but my dad went up to the very edge, and when he looked down he noticed that there was another ledge about three feet below the main cliff and he thought it would be really funny to jump down to the lower cliff because we, being fifty feet back, would think he jumped the whole way down. I think the joke was supposed to be on my mom because Dad told us what he was up to. He went to the edge, looked down, jumped and disappeared. I remember my mom gasped and put her hands to her mouth and then said, "Oh my god! He has the car keys!"

So Happy Mother's Day to my very practical-minded Mother. I love you!

Australia, the movie

I rented the movie Australia, and although it was a tad corny in places (Mitch made gagging noises throughout) I LOVED it! The kid in the movie, Brandon Walters, is the most beautiful child on the planet. (No offense, Sam and Kira) Also, Hugh Jackman is gorgeous.

Mitch thinks he's gay. I don't know why, he's probably jealous. They guy has been married for a long time (to the same woman) and has kids, so Mitch's gay theory is pretty much shot out the window. Oh, wait a minute...

Gold pants, leopard print shirt.... No self respecting gay man with any kind of style would be caught dead wearing that. He was playing Peter Allen, who WAS gay, so just shut up, Mitch.