A little background info...

Our messy new home, originally uploaded by Robbi Baba.

Sometime in the spring of 2003 my wife and I decided to sell our little farm in Sebastopol, California. We’d owned the place for six years or so and had poured our life energy into renovating the decrepit buildings and various attempts to grow food. I had never thought we’d leave it. I had fully expected to die there.
But after six years of hard work, an intensely frugal lifestyle and the never ending list of essential projects screaming for my time and energy, it seemed that I would indeed die there—much sooner than I’d imagined. I wanted out. So we pushed ourselves hard to get it spruced up and by the end of year we sold it.

We decided not to buy again right away. We’d made quite a lot of money selling the place and I wanted to kick back for a while. So we moved into town and rented a (too small) house. Krista is an artist and we’d decided I would tend to the kids while she spent the year painting away.
We fixed up her folks’ old detached garage for her studio. We put in skylights and windows and French doors and a wood stove. We painted the floor a pretty green color. It was pretty nice. She got a lot of work done there, had a few shows.

But we got restless. Our house felt too crowded. And the political situation in the US was making us very unhappy and scared—it seemed like we were quickly sliding towards fascism. Our daughter India, though only 15, was approaching draft age. Fear was in the air. Like many folks at that time we began considering emigration.

We had met some nice people who had explored New Zealand. They told us stories and showed us photos. After all those years tied down to the farm I now had the travel bug. I had it bad! We decided to go and check it out.
Also, we’d been hearing wonderful stories about Bali, and since it’s so close to NZ we considered a side trip to that magical island.

The best deal I could find on airfare was a “Circle The Pacific” ticket from Air Brokers. This ticket included a stop over in Thailand. Thailand was not on our agenda. All we knew about Thailand were some vague scary stories about Bangkok and sex shows.

But hey, we had a free stop over! I began thinking maybe, just maybe, we should stay for a few days and have a look around. It seemed absurd to skip it entirely. So I got some guidebooks and invited my friend Susan over to dinner. She’d been to Thailand twice for extended stays and she painted a pretty encouraging picture. Skip Bangkok, she said. Just go straight up to Chiang Mai. My plan for a few days gradually became our plan for a full two weeks.

Around this time Krista’s mom asked if we’d mind if she tagged along! She’d apparently been following our discussions with great interest. We were delighted. Joyce is such a gracious and fun person to have around. Also, she’s a more seasoned traveler (she’d once gone solo to Egypt and she and Krista had been to Paris the year before), having her along boosted our confidence.
And she has such a great relationship with our daughters, we were certain she’d be a tremendous help with them. She was—all through Thailand and for the first five days of Bali.

And so we got our tickets. We packed up most of our stuff and rented a storage locker. Our beds, dressers, computer, TV, houseplants and cats we moved into Krista’s art studio. We were there for about a week before our departure, mainly to give the cats time to adjust. The photo above is right after we moved in.
The money we saved on rent and utilities over these three months helped offset the cost of the tickets, at least a bit. It also added a level of craziness, stress and excitement to our preparations. It was a time I’ll never forget.

I’d read some travel article which said to have a bon voyage party. So we did. And then Krista’s brother drove us all to the airport and off we went.