Blue Mushrooms and Blue Classrooms

Dana's class visited the neighboring town of Santa Rosa, and Tom went along as a parent volunteer, to hike with a botanist and learn about local plants to finish the 4th grade's botany unit.  From Dana's point of view the technicolor fungi and the blue mushrooms were the highlights.  The kids even cooked and ate those indigo mushrooms.

At Colegio Yeccan Waldorf, Dana is in a class of eight students with a super friendly and caring teacher.  Dana's friend Danae is bilingual in English, and helps Dana understand some of the teacher's instructions.  The math works well when Maestra Elisabet writes it on the board, and Dana writes her essays in English.

Noah is one of seven students with a bilingual teacher originally from the US, and uses Spanish with his classmates, although they also speak some English as it is taught twice a week at the school.   Both kids are in classic Waldorf surroundings - pastel blue  classroom walls, wooden desks, tile entryways.  And they do movement class on the roof terrace.

After their morning block with their teacher (Noah just started perspective drawing and Dana's will be a math focus after they finish up botany), both kids have a variety of classes.  Twice a week in addition to movement class they have: woodworking, handwork (knitting for Dana - they started with making the knitting needles out of wood and just chose their yarn, sewing for Noah), English, music (singing and playing the recorder), and German.  The two German teachers are young college-age volunteers who are here for the year.  Apparently it has been a long-standing program exchange program.  For our kids it is quite a puzzle to learn German through Spanish, although both German teachers speak English well.

Tom and Laural attend Escuela Mexicana classes three hours a day (grammar, vocabulary, and conversation) plus two hours a week of salsa dancing.  We're also doing an hour of homework a day.  The school is located in el centro, so we walk the kids to school along the panoramic ridge where we live, then head down to our school.  It is yellows and oranges and has three levels, with the middle level having an open patio and the upper level a rooftop terrace where yesterday I had all my classes and got a little sunburned (it is also where the last photo on this blog was taken).

Most of the Waldorf students are Mexican, and we make small talk in Spanish with their families in the morning and afternoon.  We talk longer in English with a family from Switzerland and others from Colorado and New Hampshire.  After the social time, we say buenos tardes to the University of Guanajuato student who sells cheese on the corner, and head home to make smoothies and hear stories of blue mushrooms and blue classrooms.

Bienvenidos

Living at 6700 feet, the elevation of Guanajuato, or 7000 feet, where our apartment is on a street aptly named Panoramica, makes me breathe a little harder than I would like as I hike up from el centro.  If we stop for a moment along the way though, the amazing view is of multicolored buildings, interspersed with the domes of churches, layering out in every direction and topped with the rock and green mountains that ring the valley.

Our neighborhood includes many dogs.  We have a beagle next door, two pugs on the other side, and uncountable others who live on people's terraces or rooftops.  We are learning to tune out barking dogs, although when Tom go

t up and checked one noisy night he watched cows passing by in the street below us.  The soundtrack here also includes lots of fireworks going off (warming up for Independence Day mid-September), grumbly-geared buses and frequent music.  Last night it was a New Orleans-like street band, often salsa wafts from bars below us and once we walked by a guy working on his car and blasting Michael Jackson.

We are learning something new every day, and that's not even including our formal school time.  Tom and Noah ventured to the tienda (a tiny store attached to a home) across the street for a five-gallon bottle of water.  Now we know if you return the previous bottle, the charge is 22

pesos ($2.20 US dollars), and what the shop owner's living room looks like.

A week into being here, we've followed many different callejones (little alley-pathways) down to el centro, wandered there to get our bearings, checked out a string of parks and little resevoir

lakes on the edge of town, met interesting international folks, pantomimed with our energetic landlady, and of course started our schools.

Noah and Dana are at Colegio Yeccan Waldorf, a five-minute walk from the apartment on our same ridgetop, and Tom and I have classes at Escuela Mexicana.  (If you do follow the links, the Michelle mentioned in the Waldorf article has the 7th grade now and is Noah's teacher, and both sites have some photos.)  

In the photo of Tom walking, the white building is our apartment building, and we're the second balcony up. What looks 

like a driveway closer to him is actually the start of the callejon we take up to the kids' school.  More on our schools next post.

Shifting Photos

Shift

Our week in San Diego involves shifting from bicycling trip mode to living in Mexico mode. The transition means adjusting the clothing and gear we have with us, trading bike panniers for backpacks, reviewing some basic Spanish, and adding books.

Several sources have said it is difficult to locate English language books in Mexico, so we went to secondhand bookstores to load up for 10 or 25 cents a book. (Added a few new books as well, but only one hardback - The Magician, sequel to The Alchemist, which everyone read on the bike trip.) How many books will the four of us, typically pretty voracious readers, want to read while in Mexico? Heading into a completely new adventure, that is yet another aspect we cannot exactly predict.

With my sister, we have visited the San Diego zoo, the community pool that has a huge water slides, the beach for another round of boogie boarding, the horse lady in the neighborhood so Dana and cousin Alexi could ride, and the three cousins have had plenty of play time. Meanwhile we're packing up the tandems to send home by Greyhound bus, cleaning and sorting the camping gear, wrapping up details (checking on the boy we hired to mow our lawn at home, purchasing shuttle tickets to get us to the Tijuana airport), and deciding where we will pack all those books.

While it is bittersweet to let go of the bicycling, we're excited to shift to Mexico. And if you have a teen or want a little young adult literature, I'd recommend my friend Jennifer Bradbury's novel SHIFT, a well-told tale of two boys who bicycle across the United States after they graduate from high school and a mystery when one of them doesn't return.

We fly south Sep 4, and will return to the States in January with stories to tell and (I hope!) conversational Spanish. Once I've navigated an internet connection in Guanajuato, I'll be able to report on settling in there.  Meanwhile, we wish everyone well with their September transitions as back-to-school, work, and weather changes shift us all.

The Tandemonium Concludes

At 5:27 pm Tuesday August 26, 2008, we rolled through the finish line in my sister's San Diego driveway (literally, they had a finish line streamer to break through!) with balloons and streamers waving, a welcome banner, music playing, and sister Amy, brother-in-law Karl, & neice Alexi cheering. Noah and Dana were presented with gold medals for "long distance tandem bicycling," we were handed cups of cold water (which was wonderful, it had been a hot and hilly afternoon of riding), and looked at the cycle computer: 1485 miles pedaled. Yahoo!

After a day's bicycling adventure, with something new around every bend, we have our routines. The park ranger tells us whether we'll be paying $3 or $4 per person for the hiker/biker campsite (and whether Noah and Dana count as people, sometimes there's no charge for them), and the kids alternate setting up the tent or the stove. Showers are assessed for cleanliness and minutes of hot water per quarter (the range: no quarters needed to 2 quarters for 3 minutes). We roam to the beach to check out, as Dana says, "any special features." And we're in the tent at dark most nights, reading or looking at the maps of tomorrow's route or chatting about the day. It is a bit strange to stop all of that.

We have had an amazing adventure in family fun (Noah and Dana are impressive athletes and great people, Tom was patient that I can't charge up the hills as fast as he can), wildlife experiences (male elephant seals have a loud throaty sound, hundreds of pelicans close overhead, Tom and Dana's tandem nearly running over a sleeping rattlesnake), history appreciation (Point Reyes earthquake exhibits after a day riding the San Andreas fault, El Camino Real and the missions - we went to restorations in Lompoc, Santa Barbara and San Juan Capistrano), and lately, fruit smoothies everyday.

Oh wait, it is just the pedal journey that is finished. We'll enjoy a week of transition here at my sister's and get ready for our next adventure in Mexico. We taxed our bodies these last six weeks, and next we'll stretch our minds with studying Spanish in Guanajuato. The tandemonium concludes, but the adventures continue.

The People That You Meet

When people ask about our travels, we tend to answer about place. For example today, "We're headed to Lompoc to camp, but we've pedalled over 1000 miles down the coast, starting from Eugene, Oregon and we're going to San Diego." But really, a lot of this is about the people.

We met Brit on the train and a week later spent a day on the Oregon coast with him as our guide. A free spirit Buddhist ballroom dance instructor and balloon entertainer (we realized we'd seen him making balloon sculptures at the Co-op Party in Bellingham the day before we left on our trip), in Bandon we sampled candies at the candy shop with him, and wandered art exhibits where a harpist was playing.
We met Bigfoot trailer campers who invited us to share their site, a family from northern Wisconsin who gave us all their power bars and gels, Antonio from Italy who started his bicycle trip in Alaska and is headed to south America (he gave the kids M&Ms at the top of Leggett Hill, the biggest one on the trip), Ignacio and Daniella from Tucson (who the kids may have voted most fun adults met on the trip), and other cyclists in the hiker-biker sites and on the road. Then there are the brief interactions with local folks, like Woody, the security guard for a small set of stores, who walked up to Tom and said, "Did you lock up your unit, son? Want to do that." As you might imagine, we now repeat that line each time we leave the bikes to enter a grocery store.

Today though, we parted ways with our cycling pals Mark & Jade after two fun-filled weeks riding together from San Francisco to a little past San Luis Obispo. We will miss their humor and companionship, and the kids will especially miss having someone their age to give them a break from mostly hanging out with their parents. The finale day was spent in the campground pool for the morning, in the ocean boogie boarding for the afternoon, and with ice cream and pizza (the latter carried back to the campground by the stokers while we rode) for dinner.

We'll look forward to seeing who we get to meet next, after all we met Mark & Jade while cycling in Canada six years ago, when Dana was 4 and Noah was 6. Sometimes the people that you meet not only enrich your life, they become great friends.

The Road Giveth and the Ocean Taketh Away

One game we play while bicycling is noting the items on the roadside and imagining them, found materials art-style, to be building a scarecrow. We saw a shirt and a hat to begin with, many gloves (an octopus-armed scarecrow?) and socks, and the winner for multiples - towels. Dana decided that the scarecrow would be a girl with a full skirt made of towels. We've seen shoes (including a set of hiking boots and a single orange leopard print knee-high boot) and now we picture our scarecrow to have a similarly outfitted family and be in a living room (due to all the furniture seen, including a wooden chair next to a No Dumping sign) crocheting (red yarn, looked like a potholder).

Of course some found items, like shells at the seashore, catch our fancy in that we can use them on our venture, so we decide whether their owners could possibly return for them or we should clean up the roadside a little. We stopped for a pair of cycling leg warmers and another day for a set of long-fingered gloves (usually you just see singles), and are thinking a bun

gy cord will come our way (you see lots of them, so we're picky and are waiting for one that wouldn't interrupt a screaming downhill).

The ocean, on the other hand, grabbed Noah's glasses when a big wave surprised him. The adults on the beach ran into the water to effect a search of the area, both Tom and our friend Glen (who had come over from Palo Alto with his family) forgetting they had cell phones in their pockets. The ocean then claimed both. Well, we have the phones but ours has an interesting design of water droplets and salt crystals in the display.

So today we thank Migahm/Anne, Denny, and Midori for their hospitality, and pedal on with Mark and Jade (who joined us in San Francisco) to Monteray to find the Lenscrafters that can help Noah see better. We'll be back on the road, and cycling beside the ocean, appreciating both.