…it’s summer. And with it, after school sidewalk parties, wine and beer on the stoop, sometimes with pizza, sometimes with dumplings and sometimes with steamed clams. I can’t say how long we’ll live in our building, this street or even this neighborhood, but I hope the girls will remember the sidewalk scene with their neighbor friends in “old-school Brooklyn” when they grow up (wonder what the neighborhood will be like in 20 years). School days are numbered and there is so much change in the air. We’re excited for the start of summer and a shakeup in schedule, but the change is also a little unsettling, if that makes sense? I can’t fully explain it. Maybe because summers used to not mean anything. Now they are clear markers of time.

It’s been a good 8 or 9 years since I did a proper road trip and this drive down to North Carolina was probably as close to a road trip as I’ve taken since then. As tedious as it is to sit that long in a confined space (and doing it with kids probably brings on a whole new dimension to the word “patience”), there is something really lovely, really romantic, even really American, about seeing parts of the country from the windshield of your car (as a side note, Mia kept track of all the different license plates we saw on the road during our drive from NY to NC and back, and we tallied up plates from 40 different states. Cool, huh?).

I’m feeling particularly nostalgic these days because this summer is the anniversary of something meaningful. It was 20 years ago that I left NY after quitting school in my junior year and embarked on the longest road trip of my life. I think back to that person who was so trusting of the world and hardly believe that was me. What is it about youth that makes us so adventurous, so not afraid? When I was 20 I did not plan things. When I was on the road for 8 months I didn’t worry about money or where I’d be sleeping that night (basically it was like any parents’ worst nightmare). I would make and sell jewelry at various venues and find seasonal work like picking blueberries with other migrant workers. I met a lot of people on the way who invited me into their homes, slept in tents and spent way too many nights sleeping in the car, deciding which of the lesser 2 evils we would subject ourselves to that night: being eaten by mosquitoes in order to catch a breeze in the stifling summer heat or sleeping in a suffocating car with the windows closed so we wouldn’t get eaten by mosquitoes. I spent time in Upstate NY, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Quebec, a month camping in the woods around the St. Lawrence River in Canada, and ended up in Ohio on that particular trip. I would then eventually move to the Northwest after the traveling was done.

It wasn’t my first time on the road. As soon as I finished my first year of art school, I left the city to travel around in a car for the first time for a few months. I spent the bulk of that time camping in Vermont, where we were stranded because our car broke down somewhere in the Green Mountains. It was during this trip that I hitchhiked for the first time, catching rides between Brattleboro and Bennington when we needed to go into town for more supplies. From where we were camped, however, we could walk to a road where there was a little convenience store, miles from anything else. We would buy pickles and potato chips and sit on the stone wall at the end of a lake on the other side of the road with our snacks (have you tried them together? Delicious. Trust.) I don’t think my friends and I really cared when our car would get fixed. We had no other commitments. The next summer I did my first cross country road trip. It would be the first of 3 times where I’ve driven across. We made a long stop in Minnesota to camp for 2 weeks and this is where I saw my first bear up close. I also adopted a kitten there and he traveled with me for the next 2 months before settling in as a city cat when we got back to NY. From Minnesota we drove further west and it would be the first time I saw the Pacific Ocean, via the Oregon Coast. This is why Canon Beach has my heart.

These are the years I’m sure that my mom would like to forget. It probably wasn’t easy for her, though I didn’t understand it at the time. There were no cell phones then, no email or text. I would call home periodically from a payphone when I remembered. She couldn’t stop me from traveling, but I know that neither she nor my dad were fans of it. Now that I have the hindsight, however, to look back on that time I know how important this period was in my life. These were the years where I really let go after being so intense and focused in high school. I let go of my competitive, type A personality and just trusted in life and didn’t get caught up in plans or the details of travel. I may have reverted back to my competitive, type A nature once I decided to go back to school to finish my degree, and certainly by the time I moved back to NY, but for those 3 years I really was a different person: a city kid who learned how to build fires even in the rain, who could survive in the woods for weeks at a time with just a backpack and a tent, who drove through just about every state in the country and saw the way people lived outside the city she grew up in, who experienced for the first time and became keenly aware of what it felt like to be the only Asian person in the places that she was traveling.

We didn’t travel at all or take vacations when I was a kid, so those road trips were easily one of the best experiences of my life. They were life-changing. I was taught to be so academically focused growing up, but there are life experiences that can never be taught in school. I think the thing that strikes me most about those years was that I was never worried or afraid. I think back to some of those memories and think I would never be able to travel so carefree like that now. I’m not even sure how I did it back then. I don’t know what happens to the brashness of youth and why we lose that as we get older, but sometimes I wish I could get even a little of that back.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the choices we have made in the last 8 years to craft this life of flexibility. Flexibility was born out of the need to become creative with childcare, to make it more affordable while still working as many full time hours as possible. It was also born out of the recognition that I don’t do well with routine, particularly within office and corporate culture. Flexibility is so valued in our lives that we have held off on important, big decisions like opening a store. Even though we crafted this life of flexibility to be more present and involved parents while juggling full time work hours, ironically it’s now the kid’s schedules that have made our lives become more scheduled and a bit more rigid. With Claudine entering Kindergarten in 3 months, our lives will be even more ruled by the school calendar.

I was talking about this with my friend Megan the other day, who is also struggling to adapt to this life according to school schedules. It’s not just that family vacations now need to be coordinated with school vacations (and with the rest of the world which makes traveling always on peak times), but many things revolving around the kids need to be planned, reserved and paid for well in advance. The kids have been committed to summer camp, which starts in a month, since last November. When I recently looked ahead at the calendar, I noticed that pretty much every week of summer, and in some instances, ever day of the week is accounted for between camp, Brooklyn Flea dates, work deadlines and our trip to the West Coast. It suddenly made summer seem fleeting and all accounted for.

This is not necessarily a bad thing, it’s just different and maybe something to get used to when you now have school age children, but I won’t lie and say that I don’t miss how life used to be more spontaneous. Not just for the big things like taking off for months at a time and traveling around the country in a car with no agenda, which was a big part of my life in my early 20s, but for little things as well – friends dropping by, last minute dinner plans, a movie in the middle of the day. I want – and believe I can – bring back some of that spontaneity back into our lives. Our calendar may be filled, our business may tie us down to home, and Mark’s schedule may have become less flexible than when we first started the company, but we are making some choices even if it does comes at a price. Our business and online store will be closed for nearly 3 weeks in August which also means we will not be earning any money during this time. It also takes a while to ramp sales back up from such a long break and I admit, it does make me really nervous to be closed for so long, but we are doing it anyway. I look at these vacation photos from our most recent trip, a trip where we had to pull the girls out of school for 3 days and close our business down for a week and think…was it worth it? Undoubtedly, yes.

Every stage of parenting brings on new challenges and a period of adjustments. It rarely stays the same and so it keeps you on your toes. Perhaps my once spontaneous life can never return to what it once was as long as the girls are young and living at home, but I also recognize that since they have become a bit older, school schedules aside, it’s totally possible to take spontaneous trips to the museum and little outings here and there and not be ruled by nap and bedtime schedules. If I can’t be spontaneous for whole summers, I can be for just a day. You lose some freedom, but you gain others.

If sunset and dusk on the ocean side of the island is all about dramatic sand dunes and powerful waves, the sound side of the island is tranquil waters and meadows of long grass. So many of you asked about the house that we rented. Our family rented 2 houses, one on the beach side and one on the sound side. I didn’t do the reserving so I don’t know details, but the realty company that Mark’s family used was called Sound or Surf . We stayed in the sound side of the island (we needed a wheelchair accessible house, so I imagine that housing choices were limited, but I think we lucked out with this great house!). I don’t feel like we missed out on anything by not being right on the ocean since the ocean is so accessible and a short drive away. It wasn’t until our last night on the island that we explored the neighborhood and I’m so glad we took a walk at sunset because what we found was so unexpected. The beaches here were quiet, the water was still (great for mosquitoes, though, which were plentiful, so beware), and an elaborate network of boardwalks connected different areas of the beach.

You know, I remember thinking when I first got married that I was gaining not one, but 2 other families (Mark’s Washington family and his dad’s side on the East Coast). I’ve known them for so long now. It’s kind of cool, you know? Having all this other family after living with just your own growing up and feeling like you’ve been part of the clan forever. As cousins get married and babies are being born, the family is constantly changing and expanding. After the success of this family reunion we vowed to make it a regular thing, every couple of years or so.

Some shots tooling around the island, including a fine lunch of fried food at a local joint called Pop’s Raw Bar (bikers welcome!), but today I want to tell you a story about a local guy employed by Triple AAA who rescued the day from becoming a disaster. I don’t know how it happened, but our car battery died during our visit to the Hatteras Lighthouse. We jumped the car battery with the help from a nice couple at the lighthouse parking lot, but the car died again while driving about a mile down the road as we pulled away. WHILE DRIVING, people. Do you know how scary this could have been if we were driving on a busy road? Mark managed to steer the car off the road while the kids started freaking out and getting immediately grumpy because plans to meet up with family at an ice cream place got derailed. Plus it was like a million degrees out and the air was filled with smoke from a wildfire some miles north.

Can I just say…what the hell did we do in the dark ages without cell phones in situations like this? We made a quick call to one of the cousins who swung on by and carted the kids away, leaving behind another cousin who called Triple AAA. Then we waited. Now, the old me would have been fretting by now, thinking up a million scenarios about being stranded in North Carolina without a ride back back to NY and getting upset because we had just spent $1000 on getting the car all tuned and fixed up before the trip, but the new and improved Zen Me was keeping it together.

About a half an hour into our roadside detour, Uncle Mike shows up in his car with jumper cables and we hook the cars up and try to get it going again. Not happening this time, or the next, or the next time after that. The car just wouldn’t start up, even after a full 30 minutes of trying to charge the battery. Huh. See, now the old me would have been freaking up the wazoo at this point convinced that we’d have to abandon our lives in Brooklyn because we were for sure stranded in North Carolina, where we’d be eating fried clam strips with bikers forever. But the Zen Me remained calm. We were, however, getting a little worried about Triple AAA taking so long to get here, partly because we were so hot and bored sitting on the side of the rode (btw, thanks sheriff who passed us who wasn’t any help) and partly because I was starting to feel dehydrated, but just like all those scenes where the General Lee from the Dukes Of Hazzard comes blazing into your television screen, Triple AAA was here!

Our hero of the day came in the form of Randy, a shirtless, dirty blond long haired, visor sporting, denim shorts with flip flop wearing auto mechanic who had bigger (man) boobs than me. But whatever…that’s not important (and for those of you who follow me on Instagram, you might have had the pleasure of seeing a photo of Randy yourself). Randy was just plain *awesome*. I mean sure, he had nothing to offer me in terms of a quenching beverage except for wine coolers that he had in his truck, but he knew what he was doing, identified and fixed the problem right away and wouldn’t even take our money until we saw him again later that day to replace our car battery (“aw, you ain’t in NY anymore, darlin’). He told us stories about mom & diddy and the questionable ethics of one of his competitors, who incidentally drove by us. “I’m a Christian man”, was his reply when asked if he wanted to flip the guy the finger as he drove by.

At some point Randy’s Girlfriend/Wife/Other jumps out of the truck and snaps some photos for their Facebook page, so of course I have to snap some pictures too. So I pull out my camera which has the bigger zoom lens on it that day and Randy jumps back like, “whoa, darlin’! You’re pullin’ out the big guns right there.”

Gotta say, Randy “Fat Daddy” Miller from Avon, North Carolina was as much of a highlight of the trip as any sunset or beach. In fact, I really wished that he could have ridden in the back seat between the girls on our drive home to NY, just in case anything happened. And no, I have not visited his Facebook page to see if our photo got posted to his wall and I doubt I will. I would rather keep memories of Randy, mythical. Like a unicorn.

Oh, did you think we were done with vacation photos? I have a few more posts lined up, if you don’t mind. Nothing much is going on back here in NY anyway except I’m still trying to get my bearings on jumping back into the swing of things. Summer is most definitely here, though.

So…these crazy colored houses. During our stay we joked that the house we were renting was like an M.C. Escher house because the house was all stairwells in the back and front off the exterior porches on every level. The kids would run down one side of the house and disappear and I’d have no idea which end of the house they’d end up in, and I’d go down one staircase and end up in a place I wasn’t expecting. I’m not used to multi-level living like this, but we all did get a workout going up and down 3 flight of stairs all day long.

PS. thanks friends, for alerting me to the Australian Sunday paper write up we were in. I got a scanned copy and it’s quite possibly the greatest piece of press we have every gotten. Not really sure whose life they’re talking about, but I want it.

The hour right after sunset until darkness falls is magic. My favorite time of day by far, made even more magical by a bonfire on the beach roasting marshmallows.

It’s Monday and it’s hard to get back into the swing of things, I must admit. Still have vacation brain and the end of the school year has snuck up on me. I am not at all prepared for when the kids are out of school.

PS. Thank you for the anniversary wishes, friends.

We’re not big anniversary people so our anniversary goes by without much fanfare (it’s today and it’s not a big one, our 9th), but this year does make it 19 years that we’ve been together in some form or another which is just craaaazzzy. That’s like, more than half our lives, yo. How did this happen? And now we have little ones who are not so little anymore. Still can’t get a decent family photo, though this one’s the best of the bunch. Guess it’s payback for all the goofy faces we made at this age.

Bits of wisdom from last year’s anniversary post here.

We’re actually back in NYC today (in gorgeous weather, I might add), but have so many more photos of the trip to share. I guess you can say it was a true vacation in the sense that I hardly missed my computer at all. One of our favorite evenings was taking an after dinner walk on the Avon Pier for sunset. The light was phenomenal.

The houses for rent here on the Outer Banks are huge. There are wrap around terraces on every floor connecting the first floor to the top like scaffolding. Our house had 6 bedrooms, each with its own bathroom, and it was the perfect house to lounge around and make big communal family meals in. More to come…