The post Just You Try To Keep Up With Her: Happy 4th Birthday, Kendley!!! first appeared on OliverTheWorld.
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Mommy and I sincerely apologize that this birthday post is a little late, as we JUST only finished cleaning up after your ‘GRAN FIESTA’ last weekend. More than 75 people arrived at our little home in the campo to celebrate you on your special day. Aside from the seventeen little boys and girls from your class, it seemed as if the entire pueblo was in attendance; there were moms and dads, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, cousins, and even a scattering of grandparents. Not that we were the least bit surprised… you are loved and admired up and down the streets of El Gastor.
But really, has another year already passed us by? It feels like yesterday that we were celebrating your 3rd birthday in Madrid and your 2nd in Bordeaux. How long we’ve been on this adventure together! And while we have been able to see so many amazingly beautiful things together, what I have enjoyed the most is watching you grow.
Every night when we pray I look into your eyes and I am reminded of just how lucky I am. I cherish the time right before you fall asleep when I put your nose to mine and we say together:






Kendley’s 4th Birthday Interview

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]]>The post New…er…Developments first appeared on OliverTheWorld.
]]>Well, hello there!
It’s been a while, hasn’t it?
Despite the abundance of radio-silence over the last several months, there’s actually been LOTS to report on from our side. Namely:
1. We’ve taken a break from our the nomadic lifestyle that led us all over Europe for the last 2.5 years to settle temporarily in a remote part of mountainous Andalucía, Spain.
2. We have new neighbors! The seven or eight sheep that graze on our hillside. And their shepherd.
3. We’ve enrolled both kids at the little local school in the pueblo. Other than a previous nursery school stint for Oliver in California, this is pretty much their first foray into formal, public education. Oh, and it’s all in Spanish. More on that later.
And there’s one other bit of information we’ve been holding back for the last 22 weeks or so. Keep reading…
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]]>The post And, Just Like That, We Have a Seven Year Old first appeared on OliverTheWorld.
]]>E.E. Cummings

Oliver’s 7th Birthday Interview
The post And, Just Like That, We Have a Seven Year Old first appeared on OliverTheWorld.
]]>The post Kendley Turns 3! first appeared on OliverTheWorld.
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There’s been quite a bit of radio-silence on this blog for a while, but for good reason!!! We’ve been really, really wrapped up in our travels; visiting new places, returning to ones that we love, spending time on both coasts of the USA for an overdue friends and family tour, experiencing in-depth our first country in Africa, making lots and lots of new friends, and forming bonds with some of them that we know in our hearts will last forever. We’ve been living in every moment and savoring every second of our lives as travelers. Sure, there have been the rough spots here and there, but today certainly does not count as one of them. Today the sun was out for our first full day in Madrid, the temperature was a balmy 74˚, but most importantly, our little Kendley turned THREE!
We can still remember with great fondness the day you were born and most of the days in between. I hope you know that you and Ollie are, without question, the light of our lives. You are a constant source of joy and for that, we are eternally grateful.
I heard once that love’s greatest gift is its ability to make everything it touches sacred and you are that love in our family. Whether you are sucking your two little fingers, dragging your ‘gankie’ around, telling me I have been ‘naughty’, trying to wipe your own bottom, throwing a mini tantrum, telling Ollie to ‘be-quiet’, biting my nose, giving me long, juicy kisses, grabbing my neck and yelling ‘drop me and see what happens’, or just being you, you make everything and everyone around you feel better.
Traveling with you for the past two years has been an honor and a privilege. You and Ollie helped us make the difficult decision to leave our conventional lives and careers behind and I wanted to thank you for giving us the courage to do so as it was by far the best thing we have ever done. We have traveled pretty much full time since you were in Mommy’s belly and we want to continue to enjoy all the world has to offer with you by our side. We absolutely love our lives and we would not trade one second with you for anything.
Your Mommy and I are blessed to be able to see the world through your beautiful blue eyes as it has changed us in ways that you will never know. Sometimes I tell you that you are lucky to have your parents around all the time, but in reality, your Mom and I are truly the lucky ones. We could not imagine a life without you in it. We thank God everyday for the opportunity to be around you and to learn from you.
You have healed us when we were arguing and our marriage was in peril; you have calmed us when we were living in fear; you have made us smile when traveling felt like it might be too much and we began to doubt our decisions; you make us laugh everyday; you have made us feel loved in ways that are beyond compare; your spirit has wrapped us in its own warm ‘gankie’ and has guided us to places that we never though were possible; and, you have made us smile more than we ever dreamed imaginable.
Kendley’s 3rd Birthday Interview
Goodnight, Birthday Girl! We love you!
The post Kendley Turns 3! first appeared on OliverTheWorld.
]]>The post Puro Flamenco first appeared on OliverTheWorld.
]]>Confession. I have never been a huge fan of flamenco prior to our time spent in Andalucía. The Spanish folk performance art is and has been popular all over the world since time eternal, but it never had a handle on me like, say my obsession with Roman ruins or volcanic columnar basalt. Sure, I could rattle off some basic trivia, the kind of stuff you could just as easily lift off Wikipedia, and I knew that its calling card involved some form of tight-fitting polka dotted dress. But that was where it ended, at least for me.
So like any pack of fools on their first swing though Southern Spain, we went off to seek flamenco out in its usual haunts. We found it in places like Grenada, Seville, and lesser-traveled Cádiz, and we received quite an education along the way. Among other things, we learned:
So, after shelling out more than a couple of euros for seats at ‘genuine’ flamenco tablaos in a handful of cities, can we consider ourselves connoisseurs? Certainly not. But we did see some pretty decent shows, even if they were put on for a bunch of silly tourists like ourselves (Granada’s Jardines de Zoraya , Seville’s Casa de Memoria). And while the flamenco was slightly amateur at Seville’s hard-to-find Carbonería, it did come at the right price (no door charge, and a few euros for some two-buck-chuck sangría).
All of that changed, however, when we arrived at that little mountaintop pueblo I wrote about earlier, El Gastor. Quite unexpectedly, we found ourselves one Saturday evening over dinner neck-deep in some of the most elemental, yet gorgeously spontaneous flamenco I have ever seen; truly the very best I could have ever hoped for. And it happened to coincide with my birthday!!!
[tubepress video=”AeZWixOrjew”]
The dancer was not famous, and neither were the singer nor the guitarist, but the way they all improvised together in a swirl of color and song left us speechless.
The bailarina dazzled us with her versatility as she transitioned from light into dark and back again, always her elbows bent, her back arched, her fingers snapping, her face a portrait of the music in physical form.
The descending melodies of the guitarrista were buoyed up by his bright falsetas (interludes). But it was the virtuoso of the cantaor, the singer, who left us with our jaws on the floor. The urgency and power in Juan Toro’s voice was wound into every note that fell from his lips, evident most particularly in his fandangos. With just a few stanzas, he dictated the energy in the room. As his voice rose, the guitarist whispered “eso es” (there it is), the dancer spun and twisted her wrists, and the palmaor helped keep time with his counter-rhythm of six claps.
[tubepress video=”D4OE-2yrz6k”]
The musical collaboration between all four individuals was perfect as it slid, shifted and filled that room with sound and movement. Before long, the chef and waitress sashayed out from within the kitchen and began dancing alongside the baileadora at the center of the room. A group of gruff-looking fellows up from Ronda for the evening clapped along in perfect time, shouting “Olé!” at the end of each of the singer’s impassioned stanzas. We found the flamenco at its very best when we least expected it, and that’s how I’ll always remember it.
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]]>The post The Light in Andalusía first appeared on OliverTheWorld.
]]>El Gastor is the little white-washed pueblo even the Spaniards have never heard of. It sits huddled along the northern face of a dry, olive-tree freckled hillside, and leans heavily into the shade of the towering Tajo de Algarín during long, scorching summer afternoons. We, of course, happened upon the place in early November; at the precise moment the winter wind came blustering up from the throat of the Sierra de Grazalema, rattling the pines along her lime-stone ridges and sprinkling her peaks with an early dusting of snow. We were therefore grateful when the little home we found for ourselves was steeped in the hazy light of the afternoon sunshine that lay long and heavy on the town’s south-facing hillside.
Our rincón, a corner of earth and whitewashed clay, was at once beguiling and welcoming, like an old friend from a faraway land that we had taken great pains never to forget. Beneath Moroccan tin lanterns and colored glass, crimson tiles pointed the way inside. Past the doorway, Moorish arches and arabesques concealed all manners of treasure and memorabilia from various points of the world. Antique leather-bound books in a variety of languages tumbled from reclaimed bookcases and called out to be read again: Burgess, Borges, Beckett. Glazed tagines and hammered bronze trays that had once borne glasses of mint tea led the way to the pantry; strings of multicolored beads trailed from curtain rods, and ancient timber beams with delicately carved corbels framed the entrance to the sitting room where a potbellied stone warmed the walls from within. A stairway wound past false windows where wrought-iron lattice-works had been set inside. Facsimiles of 17th century naturalist engravings jostled for wall space with Parisian Belle Epoque postcards and Indian Shisha.
All at once, inside this home, my life as a traveler in composite rushed back and flooded me with memories faster than I could place them. An ornate haveli in the Rajasthan city of Bikaner; the old antebellum mansions lining New Orleans’ Garden District; the quiet riads and carmens of Granada’s Albaicin. Places that dwelled in the convoluted lining of my subconscious, perhaps even those I had never before even experienced, lived in this house as well: the souks and kasbahs of Morocco’s great cities and palmaraie, the savannahs and rift valleys of deepest Africa.
But what stopped my heart and then soothed it like a balm was the light, the buttery afternoon glaze that reflected off the reservoir in the valley below. It was here, throughout every long afternoon, that my eyes were drawn. The long, azure-blue fingers of the lake, fed by mountain streams, filtered through the gathering clouds that hemmed in the limestone backbone of the sierra and spilled across the troughs of valleys that bore a patchwork of olive trees right up to our door. The air of pines, the very breath of the pinsapo, emanated from deep within the forest for which Grazalema is famed. It mingled with the mineral atmosphere of the mountains and held itself apart from Andalusia’s brittle and dry surrounds.
As I chopped carrots and skinned potatoes for dinner, the light arranged itself westward in delicate rays that softly spotlit a small herd of goats on the chaparral of our hillside. Among the scrub grass and milkweed, the young bleated after their mothers as they, bells-to-throats, rambled along the hillside.
Just before dusk, Ryan and I tucked ourselves into the chairs on the stoop to watch the sunset. The light lifted higher and higher and blazed the reservoir a burnished gold in one final thrust before it retreated to the core of the sierra, westward. There it simmered long and red behind the mountains that flanked the pueblo of Zahara on the opposite side of the water.
Because the clouds forever held court in the microclimate of the national park (Grazalema receives the most rainfall anywhere in Spain), the sky was streaked an alternating red, pink and searing orange that, at perfect angles, cast the mountains into sharp relief. In this way, each evening’s spectacle carried on more than thirty minutes before being swallowed entirely by the mountains. The last of the light haunted the edges of the lake before it finally trailed away into night.
Once inside again, Ryan would revive the fire in our stove as the kids were chased in by the cold, eager for their supper. A stew simmered in the kitchen while something sweet baked in the oven. Our nighttime rustling had become a familiar ambient hum that we savored for the moment we called that hillside our home.
The post The Light in Andalusía first appeared on OliverTheWorld.
]]>The post To the Love of My Life on Her Birthday first appeared on OliverTheWorld.
]]>Many who read about our travels have no idea that there is a story, many stories actually,that pre-date our traveling life. While I will not go into detail here, it is fair to say that you have played a vital role in shaping the man that I am today.
Since it’s your birthday, I’ve prepared some very special surprises for you…beautiful Mozarabic-styled pottery made by our good friends in Granada, a hack in the mountains on Andalusian horses, and even a child-free birthday dinner, as I miraculously arranged a baby sitter in our next port of call. But despite all of this, how strange is it for me to say that, in fact, I am the one who receives a gift each and every day that I am by your side?
As I reflect back on the nearly eight years that we have been together, a peace fills my heart and soul. Way back when, you did what everyone told you not to do. You bet your life and sacrificed your career for an unemployed alcoholic when you moved to California so we could try to start a family together. It was through your bravery, and your tremendous faith in me, that led you to see things in me that I could not see in myself. You believed in me and nursed me back to life and your support has been a cornerstone in my recovery.
Without sobriety, the life that I enjoy and cherish would never have been known to me, but without you, my greatest blessing and companion, the love that fills my life with meaning and purpose would simply not exist.
Thank you my dearest Emy for all that you have given me and for never giving up on me. Our love is truly a gift from God and below are the reasons why I Love My Wife:
1) My life is eternally better because you are by my side.
2) Every time I kiss Ollie and Kendley good night and sit on their beds and watch them sleep and listen to them breathe, I am reminded that all of the best in our children comes from you.
3) You are everything that I am not and more; my ability to multitask pales in comparison to your spirit, energy and soul.
4) You have always found happiness in the little things and you have taught me that what society tells us to value the most are usually the things that matter the least in life.
5) You are compassionate and kind and you always see the best in others.
6) You make up stories and go places in your head that I could never dream of. From the time you were a little girl and you thought you were a wolf, you have lived many lives and for that I wish the winds of your creative spirit could carry me away as well.
7) We first traveled and left the world as we know it because of you; without your firm nudge I never would have had the courage to stop working and break free of my own fears to face the great unknown.
8) Your gentleness provides me with a subtle reminder when I am too stern with our children and for that, I am thankful, as you have made me a better Father and man.
9) Everyday you help me to see things during our travels that I never knew existed as you can sit and shut your eyes and smell and feel the world around you.
10) You actually believe that Beast Master is a terrific movie.
11) You are a woman who expresses her love, not with words, but with action, loyalty, devotion and by always putting our family first.
12) Even after 15 months of traveling together 24 hours a day, I never get tired of being with you (I am not sure if you could say the same about me).
13) You are beautiful in everyway.
I asked Oliver and Kendley what they loved most about Mommy and here is what they had to say.
OLLIE:
1) I love Mommy because she is sweet;
2) I love Mommy because she reads the Hobbit to me and she sounds funny when she talks like Bilbo Baggins;
3) I love Mommy because she is my best buddy;
4) I love Mommy because she teaches me about the world, animals and plants when we travel and hike;
5) I love Mommy because she lets me wear my Ninja Halloween costume everyday (10 days and counting);
6) I love Mommy because she is beautiful;
7) I love Mommy because she makes me good food and she kisses me before I go to bed;
8) I love Mommy because I fall down a lot and she puts Angry Birds band-aids on my sores;
9) I love Mommy because she loves animals and she takes me to the zoo and aquarium a lot;
10) I love Mommy because she is always there when I need her and even when I annoy her and don’t listen, she still loves me;
11) I love Mommy because she makes me smile and happy.
I love Mommy more than anything!!!!!!!!
KENDLEY:
When I asked Kendley, ‘Why do you love Mommy?’ she said the following:
“I love Peppa Pig” (who is her favorite person in the world other than Mommy).
“I love Mommy TOO much.”
‘But no Kendley, why do you love Mommy?’
“Happy birthday Mommy; Happy birthday Mommy; Happy birthday” and she started singing and humming.
‘But no Kendley, why do you love Mommy? I am writing something for her birthday and I need to know why…’
Kendley promptly blurted out, “I have to go poopy; I need to go to the potty.”
I smiled and walked her over to the potty and she sat on the toilet and grunted like she always does and I held her hands and asked her one last time, ‘Why do you love Mommy?’
Kendley looked up at me with her beautiful blue eyes and she said, “I love Mommy cuz she‘s Mommy.”
I guess that says it all, my love.
Ollie, Kendley and I love you for you. The three of us love you with all of our hearts and as crazy as we are, nothing can replace the love that we have for YOU.
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]]>The post Take A Hike Series: Going the Distance and Dropping Our Shorts in Spain’s Cabo De Gata first appeared on OliverTheWorld.
]]>Far from the freeways that shuttle vacationers between Spain’s (in)famous holiday-home suburbs, the little knob of coastline that clings to the country’s extreme southeastern corner belongs to the Cabo de Gata–Níjar Natural Park. According to the dinosaurs that roamed the earth prior to the tourism boom that gave birth to the Costa del Sol, it forms a landscape that is a living relic of a southern Spanish Mediterranean seaboard that existed long, long ago. It is indeed a wholly separate sliver of Andalucía; one sans the flamenco dinner shows and English breakfasts. The Cabo de Gata, with its tiny whitewashed artisan fishing villages, abandoned cortijos (rural farmsteads), creek-fed oases and miles of arid volcanic cliffs might have more in common with the wild coasts of Northern Africa, just a stone’s throw across the sea. It also happens to be an excellent landscape in which one can go for a very long walk.
Agua Amarga – Las Negras Trail Length: 15.1km
This rugged and spectacular coastal hike followed a linear trajectory that required having transportation at one end. The friendly folks at lovely Bitacora in Las Negras, where we spent the night both before and after the hike, were kind enough to drive us to the trailhead at the little fishing village of Agua Amarga so we could hike all the way back.
This was to be one of our longer, hotter jaunts. By late October, the Andalucían sun still burned late into the evening, and we didn’t expect to encounter a source of potable water for nearly 12 kilometers. As our driver bid us farewell, we asked if he wouldn’t mind alerting the authorities assuming we didn’t return by 10pm. He laughed and reassured us, “todos en el mundo vuelven!” (the whole world comes back!)
We encountered signage for the trail just outside the city center on the left near the roundabout where the AL-5106 passed through on its way to Carboneras. 450 meters past the hotel El Tio Kiko was the official trailhead. This made for a bit of confusion, as the trail bifurcated right from the beginning. We had the option of either walking straight towards the sea, or up behind the trailhead onto the actual route. Thinking that this was a coastal hike, we did what was intuitive and begin hiking towards the coast. After about 500 meters, we had rounded the cliff-side facing Agua Amarga’s pretty beach and found ourselves staring down a dramatic white coastline that dropped precipitously to the sea from where we stood. The trail we had been following dwindled down to thin line of chalky white dust that simply meandered off the cliff and into the horizon. While it all made for several great photos, we had a pretty solid hunch that this path wasn’t exactly the one we were looking for.
We finally found the true trail that skirted the littoral via a long valley hidden from the sea. Over our shoulder, the Mesa Roldan, an old extinct volcanic dome, loomed a dark sentinel in the distance. After continuing on through the valley a little more than two kilometers, our first cove came into view: the bewitching Cala Enmedio.
Some say this is the most beautiful cove in the Cabo de Gata, and others have gone even further to argue that it is one of the top ten most beautiful places in Spain. I wish I could report on this definitively. As it were, we had just set out on our hike and had put scarcely more than an hour’s walk under our shoes when the path suddenly split. Sadly, there was no signage indicating anything either way, so we made our best guess and decided to press on. We will have to come back for that cove one of these days.
From Enmedio, the path continued around the backs of the coastal hills, passing what appeared to be a barracks, for another two kilometers. This was when the serious nature of our undertaking dawned on me. We had been hiking for nearly two hours and had not encountered a spot of shade en route. We were depleting the water we’d brought along quickly, and I began worrying that we’d run dry before making it to San Pedro where I knew I could refill our bottles at a spring that flowed up from mountains. Just then, the little oasis surrounding Cala Plomo came into view. It was fed by a little “rambla”, a creek that culminated at the cove, but the potable water point was still several kilometers inland. I was a little downhearted about missing Enmedio, so we decided to break for lunch and a dip.
These coves are famed for their inaccessibility and are therefore known naturalist/nudist destinations. We got our first glimpse as we passed by a family with a score of naked children scampering up and down the beach. The matriarch, a robust woman whose chest approached Wagner’s Valkyrie proportions, emerged from the sea like some kind of maritime pagan fertility symbol. I looked sheepishly at Ryan. Could we do this? As my Aussie fellow traveling mama has been known to say, were we up for baring “the whole hog”???
Evidently we could, and we did. And let me tell you, nothing quite compares to leaping fully nude into a Mediterranean cove after traveling on foot through an semi-arid mountain range for several hours. Once I was in that water, it was as if a switch had been flipped, I wasn’t coming out for anything. Or at least that was what I told myself for the hour-and-a-half I paddled around; long after Ryan and the kids had their clothes on again and were starting back toward the trail. And that was what I told myself again when the nude pagan fertility goddess rounded our corner of the cove and began heading right toward us with her bevy of equally naked offspring. When I finally hauled my butt out of the sea and slurked over to where I had dropped my sarong on the rocks, Oliver performed an exaggerated double-take and shot me a wide-eyed, quizzical look, the first he’d paid any mind to my nakedness since the clothes came off. “Mom…” he hissed, only slightly under his breath. “I think you’d need to swim naked in the ocean for a looooong time for your boobs to look like that lady’s….”
With the salt crystalizing on our skin, we picked up the trail again on the southern side of the beach. It fired straight up a hill for more than 200 meters, and over our left shoulders we kept a constant eye on a pristine cove that appeared to be entirely inaccessible due to the vertiginous cliffside that rose right out of the sea. Petrified dunes with alternatingnbone-white and ochre striations jutted out at sea level. Below their surfaces they harbored a marine ecosystem that was perfectly visible from our perch on the high, gray volcanic sierra above.
On the way to the New Age commune of San Pedro, we lost the trail a half a dozen times as it turned inland and continued uphill to the Punta Javana. The telltale blue and white stripes of paint that served as trail markers had vanished several kilometers back, and all evidence of a trodden path was covered in pyroclastic dust and coastal scrub. We were saved in each instance by the series of nondescript cairns that had been placed along the primitive route by prior thoughtful travelers. Oliver made a mission out of seeking them out one by one and at each he left his own stone; a token of his own passage.
At the summit, we rounded a sharp turn from which enormous white, jagged rocks stabbed through the hillside. Cala San Pedro quite suddenly came into view below us, framed in those eerie mountain teeth and rippling forward under a golden haze as the sun fell away to the southwest. We descended.
San Pedro is a sort of social experiment. Folks of a distinct hippie persuasion have formed a small colony fanning out from the cove where they exist entirely off the grid, sans electricity, plumbing or even a road linking them to the main arteries through the park. The cove is only accessible via boat from Las Negras or on foot via a four-kilometer path that skirts the coast. Its small community has managed to eke out a livelihood for hundreds of years in such relative isolation for one predominant reason: the presence of a freshwater spring that flows up from the heart of the coastal mountains.
At that point in our journey, fresh water was something we needed more than I cared to admit. Despite adhering to my Grand Canyon gold standard of roughly half a quart per person per hour, upon reaching the cove, we were nearing our last drops. In the shade of a crumbling veranda that had been chiseled into the hillside above the cove, we pulled long and deeply through that tap. And while San Pedro’s cherished spring wasn’t the best water I’d ever had (how exactly did the residents manage their sanitation, I wondered), it was pretty damn close.
Passing a score of dread-locked nudists soaking up the last of the late afternoon sunshine, we exited the beach along its southern side and climbed past the old garrison that had been built to resist Barbary pirates in the 16th century. Ahead of us, yellow-legged gulls wheeled in the waning light that filtered through the black hills and quiet coves leading back to Las Negras. The long shadow of evening crept inland over San Pedro as we left it behind us and small, distant campfires sprang to life down on the beach below. Plumes of smoke tangled with mauve tones that muted the eastern horizon out over the Mediterranean and a full moon pointed the way back to the small quiet white village where we would pass the night.
The post Take A Hike Series: Going the Distance and Dropping Our Shorts in Spain’s Cabo De Gata first appeared on OliverTheWorld.
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