Please welcome our newest family member, Blake, into the world.
…read the rest →

It’s funny. I’ve recently been told—by more than one person—that Sara and I are “brave” for planning to deliver our baby at home. This from people who are educated, intelligent and have my respect. And yet, they couldn’t have picked a worse way to characterize the decision. What’s going on here?

Read on, and then you tell me: isn’t it actually more courageous for a low risk mother-to-be to voluntarily walk into a hospital to give birth?
…read the rest →

Finally posted the itinerary and photos from our summer trip to Quebec & Ontario.

Activities included:

• Visiting friends
• Cycling 100 miles of scenic converted rail line
• Genealogy research in rural Quebec
• Consumption of many and varied animal parts (not to mention: chocolate, cheese, poutine, et al.)
• Ice wine tasting
• Quebecois Folk music concerts
• Watching Beluga whales from the breakfast table
• Niagara falls in a barrel

It’s not easy coming up with names, so you take inspiration wherever you can find it.

Produce Roundup

This week’s vegetables. (Click for larger view.)

Fresh, organic and local. $12.

This week’s take:
…read the rest →

We’re back home. (Boo.)

We’ll post our photos as soon as we sort through [all 1500 of] them.

Heading to Phuket airport now. A mere 32 hours after we board our plane (Phuket -> Bangkok -> Tokyo -> JFK), we’ll be back in snowy New York.

For this final travelblog entry, I wish I could write something witty or amusing. But ending our trip has me so bummed that all I have to say is: it’s been a magnificent month.

Today’s plan is to:

1. have breakfast on our private veranda
2. beachcomb
3. bask by the pool
4. eat as much coconut ice cream as possible
5. get a beachside Thai massage
6. order fruit drinks by the coconut-full
7. lament that this is our last day here

We snorkeled the Similan Islands today. Remarkably, the breathtaking underwater landscape we saw (heaps of beautifully colored fish and coral) really did resemble the glossy posters in the tour company’s sales office!

Traveler’s Tip of the Day: When getting your hair cut in Thailand, don’t ask for it to be cut “short.”

After a few more hours of kayaking this morning (had some great wildlife sightings), we headed to Khao Lak for the final leg of our trip. We’re now at a 5-star resort just north of town, on a sparsely populated tract of white-sand beach. The contrast from last night is stark–we no longer need a flashlight to get to the bathroom. And instead of last night’s rudimentary, cold-water shower, we’ve got a teak-and-slate-appointed bathroom with a 2-person tub and 2 shower heads.

Besides kayaking, we’ve been doing some trekking here. Today’s hike was through a deep limestone cave, through which two different streams run. Thousands of bats, dozens of cave crickets, several large spiders, a few cave toads, and water deeper than our heads. At some points, I had to swim with one hand, trying to keep my other hand above the water (in that hand were: my [non-waterproof] flashlight, and our drybag, which held our [non-waterproof] camera.)

Definitely one of our trip highlights.

Today we arrived at our quaint “floating bungalow” in the remotest corner of Khao Sok national park. This is the third bamboo bungalow we’re staying at on this trip–and not the only one that hasn’t been on solid ground.

When we checked in for our flight to Phuket, the boarding passes which were printed had the wrong destination on them. No problem; the check-in attendant just crossed out the wrong destination and wrote in the correct one. I considered crossing that out in turn and writing “Hawaii” instead, but Sara convinced me that it wouldn’t work.

I spent the day at the Preak Toal bird sanctuary. (Or, more accurately, I spent the day traveling to and from the Preak Toal bird Sanctuary today.) Sara was sick, so I went alone, and alone I was: the only other visitors were a group of Cambodian university students on a science class field trip.

A very expensive, long day. I’m glad I went, but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it to serious birders. (More on this when we get back and flesh out our travelogue.)