Hermana Garfield checks in to the MTC

Gabrielle is now an official missionary of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. She entered the Missionary Training Center in Provo, Utah yesterday and will be there about 8 weeks studying Spanish before she heads off to Santiago, Chile. Stephen and I flew down with her to turn her over to the Lord's service. It was so hard to see her walk out that "Missionary Exit" door, but we have strong faith that what she is doing for the next 18 months is exactly the right thing for her.

Here is her address in the MTC:

Sister Gabrielle Garfield

MTC Mailbox #89

CHI-SATE 0601

2005 N 900 E

Provo, UT 84604-1793

There is a handy website called http://www.dearelder.com/ that allows you to send her letters for free, even when she is in Chile. They also have care packages you can purchase and have sent to her. Missionaries love mail, so I hope you will all take a moment now and again to send her your love. The above information is all you need: mailbox #89, mission CHI-SATE, date to leave MTC 0601. Her mission is called Chile Santiago East, which you will need to know when you send letters to Chile. Of course, you can also send a regular letter or package.

We are very proud of Gabby. She really is an exceptional young woman and we are confident she will be an amazing missionary.

Thanks to all of you who support her and our family. Many of Gabby's friends from college came to wish her well the evening before her first day at the MTC and again the next morning at Denny's. And most of Stephen's family were with us as we went to the MTC. Love matters, and we so appreciate all the kindnesses and generosity extended to Gabby and to us.

p.s. This is my first attempt to upload photos. Obviously, I know nothing about layout, so bear with me while I keep practicing over the next weeks and months. Tomorrow: Chicago!

OUR (ever-changing) ITINERARY

This has been tough, choosing just the few spots we can manage to visit around the world in 9 months. Basically, it becomes a question of quality: is it better to experience as many places as we can, or to go slower and experience deeper? We're opting for the latter approach, which I think will suit us for several reasons. 1) We've got kids in tow. That always slows things down, but in a good way. It forces us adults to look at the world the way a child sees it, and I anticipate
many refreshing insights to come from Grace and Gloria. 2) We've got almost-oldies along. Yep, it's true; Stephen and I are awfully close to being able to get those senior discounts. We're slower, too. So it's easier to think in terms of weeks, rather than days, as we plan our itinerary.

Now you realize this plan changes all the time. Not so much the stuff I've already booked (I'll mark those with an *) but the stuff we dream of, the places we talk about wanting to go. Our Spring/Summer segment started out much more ambitious (and included Israel, Egypt, South Africa and Victoria Falls.) You'll notice that all of those places are missing. There's simply not enough time to do it all. We chose to spend more time in Spain, since we're coming from a month in Guatemala studying Spanish. It seemed silly to waste that, trying to get around in Arabic or Hebrew.

So here is our travel itinerary, in its highly-fluid (except for those *'s) state:

April 3-7 *Chicago: visit Garrett and family, celebrate his #30, hug grandsons, see Chicago

April 7-27 *Antigua, Guatemala: study Spanish at a language school (apartment at school)

April 27-29 Tikal, Guatemala: visit Mayan ruins and cloud forest

April 29- Panajachel, Guatemala: visit our sponsored students and volunteer at
May 4 Mayan Families

May 4-6 Guatemala City

May 6-14 *Atlanta: visit Lisa's family

May 15-22 *Malaga, Spain: on the Costa del Sol, check out Andalucia (timeshare exchange)

May 23-30 *Ibiza, Spain: an island in the Mediterranean (timeshare exchange)

May 30-June 6 Barcelona, Spain

June 6-13 *Denia, Spain: south of Valencia on the Mediterranean coast (timeshare bonus)

June 13-14 Gerona, Spain

June 15 *Marrakech, Morocco (homesit)

June 19-July2 Vienna, Austria (pending home exchange)

July 2-7 *Paris, France (apartment rental)

July 7-23 *Copenhagen, Denmark (home exchange)

July 23-Aug 1 *Antwerp, Belgium (home exchange)

Aug 1-22 *London, UK (home exchange)

Aug 22-Sep 7 *Mongolia: tour with Bayra's family--Garrett & family here (hug grandsons)!

The dates get very fluid from here on:

Sep 7 -14 Beijing

Sep 14-21 Tokyo: visit Gordon and Aya!

Sep 21-Oct 17 Southeast Asia (Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam)

Oct 17-24 Delhi, India

Oct 24-31 *Bangalore, India (hospitality exchange with Indian family)

Nov 1-7 *Bapatla, India: visit sponsored students, volunteer at Open Arms India

Nov 7-23 Australia: southern coast, Melbourne to Adelaide; maybe Uluru, Sydney

Nov 23-Dec 3 New Zealand-south island (caravan camping)

Dec 3-10 *Roturua, New Zealand (timeshare exchange)

Dec 10-26 Chile: Santiago, maybe Easter Island, Christmas with Gabrielle!

Dec 26-Jan 9 Peru: Macchu Pichu, Amazon

HOME

DAVE'S DEATH

We just got word that Stephen's boss died today. He was at a conference in Florida when he had a couple of deep strokes a few days ago. He's been in a coma in a hospital there and died this morning. Dave was a friend of ours, just four months older than Stephen, and an all-around good guy. We are shocked and heartbroken.

Life can change so quickly. Unemployment. Illness. Accident. Death.

Would I be prepared? Would you?

I'm so deep into planning and preparing for our Big Trip that I begin to believe I have real control. That I can make happen what I want to happen. And often, that is true. Or seems so.
But the reality is, we control nothing. Not our families, not our stuff, not our plans, not our life. All we truly control is our own will.

Dave's death is a lesson for me in Serendipity. Again. A reminder to stay humble, to stay grateful, to stay flexible. To remember Who is in control. To remember to love life while I'm here. To remember to love.

Life is precious. And fragile. A gift of time and experience. I hope I use mine well. I hope you use yours well. I hope Dave is content with his, in retrospect.

Live well.

BLACK SKIRTS AND SKIMPY SHIRTS

It's all about simplicity. That's one of the great things about traveling. You have with you just your few clothes, your few books, your few choices. I love that! The first thing I do when I arrive at the motel or the condo or my mom's house is unpack my small suitcase and arrange my stuff. It's so freeing, to have just one drawer of things to wear, one little bag in the bathroom, a couple of books on the nightstand. Life is gloriously simple!

I'm packing today. Or practicing packing. Packing for nine months is really not much different than packing for a week. We three girls have our black skirts and our skimpy shirts. Skimpy as in lightweight. I've planned our trip to follow Summer all around the world. Stephen has his zip-off cargo pants and a pair of lightweight dress pants. I'm making piles on the bed. Here's what I have so far:

For us girls: 2 skirts (just 1 for Grace and Gloria), 2 shorts, 2 long pants, 6 blouses and shirts, 1 swimsuit, 1 nightgown, 5 pair of underwear, 3 pair of socks, 1 pair of good walking sandals, flip-flops, 1 light jacket.

For Stephen: 1 dress pants, 1 shorts, 1 zip-off pants, 6 shirts, swimsuit, underwear, socks, shoes, jacket. He doesn't own pajamas. (And I'm only taking a nightgown for the hostel halls.)

That should do it.

There is a difference, though, in packing for a long trip and for international travel. I have a separate pile with things like tampons, bathroom products, first-aid supplies, electronic stuff (including two new netbooks--what a great invention!), adapter and converter, sink stopper, calculator, clothesline, etc.. Then one more pile of passports, tickets, planner, notebooks, guidebooks, schoolwork.

I just bought airline tickets from Chicago to Guatemala on Mexicana, and from Guatemala to Atlanta on Spirit Air. Mexicana still allows you to check two bags free, but Spirit charges $15-$25 for each checked bag. Air travel is changing fast, and not always to our economic advantage. Spirit even charges $12 for a pre-assigned seat. Although, to be fair, the fares are staying low, and the airlines have to make money somehow. So I hope to fit everyone into a carryon bag. (I mean their stuff!) Though I'll have to deal with the stupid liquid/gel rule.

We're sorting and tossing and stashing like mad all the stuff we have here at home. Stuff is such a bother! Sometimes I wonder if I'm going on this trip just for the simplicity it promises. I'm hoping I learn something about bringing that simplicity home. I'm not a shopper, not into stuff. But still, the stuffed animals breed in the dark, the garage piles up with half-empty containers of brake fluid and fertilizer, and we all have too many clothes. How does that happen?

Someday I'd like to try the Walden Pond experiment, like Thoreau. For now, I'll enjoy the simplicity of traveling light. I'll don my black skirt and skimpy shirt (which I recently washed in the sink and hung to dry -- practicing, you know) and hit the road happy.

Now, back to packing . . .

Plans, Cancer, Serendipity

We've just survived a cancer scare. This is our first major health scare, so we're calling it our debut into the stage of aging bodies, boring conversations about our current aches and pains, and expensive prescriptions.

Stephen's doctor has been monitoring his PSA for about a year. Because it has remained high, he referred him to a urologist recently. Did you know they can do a digital exam of the prostate gland? (I will leave the details up to your imagination.) Since his PSA was high and his prostate enlarged, the urologist did a biopsy and told us that there was a 30-50% chance of cancer. We got the lab results yesterday: no cancer detected.

Waiting for results offered me a great opportunity to practice serendipity. Stephen gave me a book for Christmas by Richard M. Eyre called "The Three Deceivers/ The Three Alternatives." The three deceivers of this world are Control, Ownership, and Independence. When we live our lives from these paradigms, the results are not what we've been led to believe. Guess what the alternative paradigm is to thinking you have control over your life? Serendipity. Which I define as keeping an open mind and heart, so that whatever comes into your life you can welcome with optimism and joy. Yes, even "bad" things. Like cancer or cancelled plans.

Maybe you've heard stuff like this before. I had. How cancer brings its own gifts. How people learn valuable lessons through difficult trials. Sometimes it just feels like great theory, or great theology, so I do welcome opportunities to test whether I'm really "getting" it. Last week was an interesting test of my commitment to Serendipity.

I did remain calm and open, unworried. My approach to potential trouble is to play out various scenarios that may occur, "practice" my response, then put it all in a mental box to pull out as necessary. I can do this fairly fast now, perhaps because I include the Lord in the practice runs. So last week I created three boxes: A) Stephen doesn't have cancer and we'll proceed with our life (and our Big Trip) as planned. B) He does have cancer, but we can manage it and still do a modified trip. C) He's going to die soon and all my plans will change in a major way.

Remember that General Conference talk by Joseph B. Wirthlin called "Come What May -- and Love It"? That's the idea of Serendipity. Come what may -- I can handle it, I can be glad of it, I can love it. I believe in living life like that. We really don't have control over anything but our own will. So we can decide how to respond to whatever comes our way. That we can control.

Traveling with an attitude of Serendipity is crucial to a good experience. No matter how much I plan and prepare, no matter what my expectations, something will go "wrong" and lots of things won't be what I expect. So as I work on our travel plans, I'm always aware that Barcelona or Ibiza may not be what I anticipate, our home exchanges may have glitches, we're certain to get lost somewhere, someone will get sick, and it's bound to cost more than my careful budget projections. But that all makes me smile. Because I'm certain that Barcelona will offer up unexpected gifts, we'll find hidden gems of experience while we're lost, and the budget? Oh well.

WHY? . . . . WHY NOT?

People sometimes ask me, "Why do you travel?" I never know quite what to say. To travel seems as necessary to me as breathing or eating. It doesn't have to be a big trip. When we had no money in graduate school, I drove the eight hours from Chapel Hill, NC to my mom's house in Marietta, GA -- just me and my baby -- as often as I could. I'd pull over to nurse him as needed and munch on the crackers and apples I'd brought for myself. Just the memory of those trips evokes again the thrill of the road, of moving, the world whizzing by outside my window, ever new horizons just ahead.

I don't know what it is. I get excited thinking about what a wonderful world we live in, what amazing people populate the planet -- most of whom I'll never meet, never know, never understand as I'd like to. We can sink so quickly into our own narrow little world, a world of rigid belief systems and habitual patterns of living. Even those of us who think of ourselves as "enlightened" or "broad-minded" are just as stuck in our own myopic view of things (e.g. "I am so broad-minded.")

I travel to remind myself that what I think I know is not necessarily so. That there are other ways besides the American way, the Mormon way, the intellectual way, the middle-class way. There are other ways to live and contribute and be happy. I travel to shake myself up, to try to loosen up the inevitable rigidness in my own judgments of the world. To free myself to see.

My friend Tracey once said to me, "Lisa, you are an explorer. That's who you are, at heart. It's how you live your life, on all fronts, as an explorer." I'd never given that ineffable inner need a label, but I immediately recognized the aptness of it. It explains, perhaps, why this poetic snip by T. S. Eliot has sat on my desk for decades: "We must not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and know the place for the first time."

I expect I will come home to Camas from this Big Trip changed. For the better, I hope. But on a more mystic scale, I hope to arrive where I really began better than I left it. I have always felt like a traveler here, on a journey away from Home, a journey of exploration and discovery. It's a fascinating trip, and I'm trying to make the most of it. My objectives? Truth. Love.

No, you don't have to go 'round the world to find truth or love or adventure or beautiful, interesting people. But why not?

Snowed In!!!

This is Gloria talking. Hi peeps. Being snowed in is kinda fun and not. I mostly got frost bites. If you live in the mountains you'll have fun in the snow. All the kids will miss school a lot. We missed school four days and only had one day of school. It's a snow storm!!!!!!!!
TaTa for now(See you next time I write to you.)

Hey this is Grace speaking!!! It's really weird to be snowed in a whole week. The roads are really slick, and loads of snow. I just sleep, play outside, read, listen to music, and watch TV. CU l8er BE HAPPY!


SNOW everywhere! (This is Lisa now.) It's so beautiful, all the frosted trees and piled drifts. Our little fluffball dingbat cat is having a ball in the snow. Her more sensible big brother is just waiting it out in the garage. It's actually nice to have a good excuse to stay home, feed the fire, make music, play games, talk to each other, prepare our Christmas service gifts for the family. We had church in the living room this morning, complete with talks/testimonies by the five of us, songs, the Sacrament, and even a musical number -- Gloria playing "Stars Were Gleaming" on her violin. Amy Grant is belting out "Walking in a Winter Wonderland" on the i-Pod. The only bummer is that Garrett and Bayra, with my young grandsons Zach and Nate, are stuck down in Tualatin, where they went last Thursday to visit friends. They flew in from Chicago on Wednesday and we haven't seen them much since. We're planning to bless 2-month-old Nathan here at our house on the 23rd. That's my baptismal date, so it's a special day. We blessed two other grandsons--Zach and Gavin--on the same date two years ago, right here in the same place. I hope it happens -- we have a big party planned.

UPDATE on our BIG TRIP: We won't leave home until 7 April, since Gabby doesn't leave for her mission until 1 April. The plan is to fly to Chicago to visit Garrett and Bayra, then from there to Guatemala. We have some credit on Mexicana airlines, because we had planned to be in Guatemala all this year and had already bought tickets. But now they don't fly to Portland, so we have to get to Chicago. Luckily for us, we've incentive anyway!

I'm having great fun arranging home exchanges for our trip. So far, I've arranged exchanges with families in Copenhagen, London, and Antwerp during July and August. Home exchanges are the best thing going on in the travel world! We get to stay FREE in comfortable homes, all set up for families, and in most cases, use their car. This makes places like London and Copenhagen in high season actually doable. Accommodations is a large chunk of most travel budgets, and this will cut our costs considerably. I'm also working on plans to exchange our timeshares for places at Victoria Falls (Zimbabwe), Ibiza (Spanish island in the Mediterranean), Goa (Indian coastal resort), and Roturua (New Zealand). Other "free" weeks include the one we'll spend in Atlanta with my mom, brother, and sister (I hope--it depends on the flights); the week in Tokyo mooching off our son, Gordon; the two weeks in Mongolia with Bayra's family (though we plan to be out on tour with them most of the time); and the week we'll spend at the school in India where we sponsor a couple of students. We're planning to use caravans and campgrounds in Australia and NZ, so we'll have our wheels, kitchen, and beds all right there with us. And for the few remaining weeks, there are plenty of little apartments to rent here and there all over the world.

I'm excited about my progress in arranging accommodations for us. When I travel alone, or even with one other, I don't always arrange all the accommodations ahead of time. But it feels different with kids. Like this week of snow, I expect traveling long-term with kids will require a slower pace, a different mindset. One of the dangers of a trip like this, particularly with children, is trying to do too much, see too much, move around too much. So I think in terms of weeks, not days. We can decide what to do with our days within the context of our week+ stays. For instance, we have the London house for 3 weeks. That will be our base for exploring Great Britain.

We are open to all suggestions, ideas, and offers.

Have a wonderful Christmas!!

Gabrielle's Mission Call!

Well, I (Gabrielle) have been in the process of filling out the paperwork to be an LDS missionary for a few months now, and last week everything was finally turned in! So yesterday here I was waiting for the mail to come (it comes SO late-- like 4:00! Exasperating!). Anyway, I'm thinking my mission call could possibly come, but more likely not this week. So at 4:15 I venture out to get the mail with moderate hopes of seeing a big white envelope addressed to Sister Gabrielle Garfield. Sure enough, there was! I was very surprised, actually. So I'm all giddy and skipping back to the house. Dad was the only one home, though. So I call Mom who naturally has her cellphone off. I call my sister Genevieve who answers neither her home phone nor her cellphone. I call Garrett and Bayra who don't pick up either. And I think, "forget you guys, I'm opening it without you!" (Not really, but it was very frustrating) So I continued to make dinner as the most important piece of mail in my life was taunting me on the counter. Garret and Bayra did call back, I should add, a couple times ("Is Lisa home yet??"). And finally Mom and the girls sauntered in. Genevieve, however, was ever-elusive. I decided to try calling one last time before I would give in and open it without her. Miraculously, she answered and was on her way to our house for an unrelated reason! She didn't know what was going on when she walked in until she saw what I was holding. I got everyone I wanted on the phone and quickly proceeded to yell at everyone for several minutes to pipe the heck down. (My nephews were being very loud goofballs). Finally I opened it! I was trying to avert my eyes so I wouldn't see anything before I actually read it, so I moved the first paper to the back. Naturally, the next paper was an application for a passport, so I knew right away I was going on a foreign mission. To be more specific, and to end the suspense, I have been called to serve in the Chile Santiago East Mission! I am to report to the Provo MTC on April 1st. It's an unusually long wait, but oh well! I'm very excited to learn Spanish and go spread the good word to those Chileans! Until then, thus concludes my very detailed report of getting the mail yesterday.
Abrazos,
Sister Gabrielle Garfield

Here we go again!

We've had this grand idea for a round-the-world trip for quite some time now. And now we're finally going! We plan to leave in late March and be home around Christmas time. It's just the four of us: Stephen and Lisa, Grace and Gloria. Gabrielle will be on a mission, so perhaps we'll pop in and visit her (though we don't yet know where she's going.) We plan to go to Guatemala for a month, then on to Europe/Middle East/Africa for the summer, then to Asia/India/South Pacific in the fall, and spend most of December in Peru/Ecuador. We'll visit Gordon and Aya in Tokyo and spend some time with Bayra's family in Mongolia, while they are also there visiting.
We're scrambling to get everything in order before March. This blog will be our way to communicate with you. We even have a family blog schedule already set up, so we hope to be interesting and faithful bloggers, though we have no real experience. Now, let's hope the internet connections work wherever we are!

OK, our passports are ready, and we're signed up for Spanish School in Antigua, Guatemala for April. Stephen is busy trying to get his boss on board his latest shenanigans, while I'm researching French gites and volunteer opportunities. We'll keep you posted on our progress.