Travels of the Bay family and the Yoda Van

By Matthias

Now that I finally remembered Allison’s bad ass password for her laptop, I can try bringing our blog “Travels of the Bay family and the Yoda Van” back to life. For those of you who are not familiar with this blog, let me try to bring you up to speed.
In 2006 Allison and I quit our jobs, bought a 1983 VW Bus (Yodavan) and drove from Seattle to Panama and back. We were on the road for 50 weeks with our 2 boys William (4) and Julian (2). To sum it all up, it has been the best thing we have ever done in our life. Not only all the sights, people and countries made this trip the best thing of our life, being able to spend 24 hours a day with our children for 1 year is what I consider pure luxury.
Now almost 4 years have been passed and the yodavan has been replaced with Theo. Theo is now 3 years old and a Yodatrip souvenir.
After returning from our trip the one thing happened that I was most afraid about: we just stumbled back into our old lives. We found new jobs and life was just as it used to be before our adventure. The upside to this is that we have proven to ourselves that we have done everything right. We had the great adventure and we were able to continue with our careers right away. We even got better jobs than we had before we left. The downside, we are no longer on the road and with a stressful job, I don’t always look at spending time with my kids as pure luxury.
Something else I consider luxury is being able to remember almost every single day of an entire year. If we look back at our trip or read through our blog we have memories of almost every day. Looking back at the last 4 years, what do I remember? Some things come to mind: Theo’s birth, William being expelled from school by an utterly unqualified principal, who luckily didn’t make it through the first year of being principal (it’s safe again to send your kids to school on Queen Anne). I remember the stress of moving several times this year and probably a few more things that happened here and there. My point is that most days of our post yodatrip lives are just about the same and blend together as a big routine.
Why now writing the blog again?
For one, we have time on our hands while the kids are in summer camp and we are on vacation, but the main reason is that we planned this vacation different from other vacations we have had in the past. While we honestly didn’t have time for a lot of preparation for this trip (since we moved into a new house 5 days before we left), we also knew that we COULD do it without planning every detail in advance.
Before we left we didn’t know where we were going to live, how to get around etc. All we knew was that the kids had to start summer camp on July 11th and we had to get them registered in advance. We knew we can do this, because we have learned it and we are good at it.
When we arrived in Mexico City we decided to go to the hotel we stayed at and loved 4 years ago. This time it didn’t work out so well. The beds were big enough for 4 of us, but now we are 5 people and it was extremely uncomfortable. The floor would have felt better, but it wasn’t very clean so we decided to look for a different hotel. We looked at some hotels in the area on the way to get breakfast and found a great one. Granted it was a bit more expensive, but turned out to be perfect for us.
Getting around the town also turned out to be a bit challenging at times. Our preferred mode of getting around was the subway. You have quick access to most of the city, it is cheap ($3 pesos = 25 US cents per person) and it can often be an experience. Sometimes we have been in situations where we have needed to take a taxi and have been quoted exorbitant prices. One taxi driver quoted us $120 pesos, but with a little persistence we found the same ride with another taxi for $35 pesos. Another time we jumped into a cab in haste since a torrential rain storm had just begun. When he quoted us a way high price ($140 pesos) and refused the turn on the meter we told him to pull over and jumped out. Luckily we found a covered spot to wait until a bus came by. We weren’t exactly sure where the bus would take us, but we had a good idea that it would bring us close to a Metro station. Actually we needed it to be very close to a metro station, because we did this during torrential rainfalls and all we had to wear were modified garbage bags. This bus also doubled as a boat since the rain (once it starts) is like stepping into a shower and within minutes that water level on the street was rising above the first step into the bus. Once in the Metro it was easy to get back to the hotel, so we thought. Finding the right train is a piece of cake, but when it starts raining like this EVERYONE heads into the subway and the trains were packed like you could not even imagine. No need to worry about pick-pockets because everyone was jammed in and pressed against each other that there was no way anyone could raise or bend an arm enough to lift a wallet out of a purse or pocket without everyone noticing. Getting in was easy, but getting out was crazy. The train was so packed that we had to plan our exit 2 stops in advance. Every time the door opened we had to struggle our way a bit closer and at our stop push with full force to get out.
While things can be stressful at times, travelling lite and not everything preplanned ahead can also be very rewarding. You get to meet a lot of people, most of them very happy to help out and eventually find the perfect place to stay.
By the way, Theo did not drink the water in Mexico (at least to our knowledge), but he has not been in the title of any of our blog entries yet.

The first really amusing outing was our first dinner back in the USA.  Where else would we go than McDonalds?  It wasn’t that we had been missing it for the last 11 months – McDonalds are everywhere in the world.  We cruised the streets of San Bernardino looking for a McDonalds.  I was waiting for our food when a pudgy black guy with a see-through fish-net shirt, thick glasses, dread locks and a key chain with “Jesus Saves Lives” came in and started talking to me.  He bore a resemblance to a young Stevie Wonder and his belly rolls were clearly visible through his shirt.  He was very upset because they made us write our names on our receipt so they could call out our name when the food was ready.  “What if you are from a 3^rd world country and can’t write?  And this McDonalds is really going downhill.  They are slow and the food is bad.”

I guess what I thought was so funny about this encounter wasn’t really his outfit (although it did make me smile), but rather the eclectic mix of weirdoes this country has to offer.  People in Latin America seemed to be a little more homogenous in their outward appearance.  The fact that he also just started an animated conversation with a complete stranger was unusual for us.  Maybe it was just our bad Spanish, but we didn’t have so many impromptu conversations like this on the street.
While I was ordering at the McDonalds I was standing behind a rather shifty looking group of 3 adults and a couple of kids.  One of the guys was very jumpy and looking around nervously.  They seemed pretty ghetto.  They had darker skin and could have been Hispanic, but they were speaking English.  They ordered, got their food and went outside to the play area where Matthias was waiting with William and Julian.  While I was talking to Stevie Wonder Matthias came in with a big smile on his face.  William had gone up to the kids outside and started speaking Spanish to them.  Off he went playing with those kids and the entire time was rattling off in Spanish.  Eventually the mother said to Matthias “Does your kid speak Spanish?  Because my kids don’t.”  For the last 11 months William and Julian have been the only white boys and all other kids spoke Spanish.  It was so logical for him to use his Spanish with the other kids around him; especially since they looked similar to the kids he’d been around during the last year.

That is another thing that struck me in our first evening back in the USA – how diverse this country is.  You see people with all different skin colors.  Many people look like they are from somewhere else but really they are Americans – born and raised here.  The United States truly is a melting pot.

One of the most unfavorable impressions here is that much of this country looks the same.  If you drive up I-5 from San Diego you see one beige strip mall after another.  The stores you see are McDonalds, Burger King, Home Depot, Staples, etc.  In every city and every state you see the exact same strip malls and the exact same stores.  It is really uninteresting and it takes a lot of the character out of day-to-day living, in my opinion.  The only stores that appear to consistently remain independent are the nail salons in strip mall.  What culture this country has!

Overall people are very friendly – especially the supermarket checker.  Our first time back in a grocery store the checker was from Washington and gave us a hearty welcome home.  But if you listen to talk radio you also notice that a lot of people here are embarrassingly close-minded and just plain stupid.  Living in a city like Seattle it is easy to forget that a lot of the US is very rural.  Rural here means that a person can live hours away from a big city, whereas rural in Germany means you are about 30 minutes away from a bigger city and there is still a lot of urban sprawl between you and that big city.  Many people in the US haven’t ever left the US, or in more extreme cases, their own state or county.  That doesn’t make for great open-minded world citizens.  When people like that become adamant about not wanting to live anywhere where they force you to separate your garbage or recycle I feel more ashamed to be an American.

The unbridled patriotism here is also just freaky.  I would be the first to admit that overall people have more opportunities here in the US than in a lot of other countries.  But are we really more free here or is the US really the best country in the world?  What does that mean to be freer?  We are not a very family-oriented society.  I found that in the countries we have visited they received more support from their extended families in raising kids.  Am I really freer because I have to spend $1000/month for full-time daycare for my child while I am off working?  I felt like I have missed a lot being in the workplace instead of with my kids.  I certainly don’t feel very free when you look at the cost of health care and medicine in this country.  We were able to find modern, acceptable healthcare in the countries we visited for very little money.  It is not uncommon for people in the US to go bankrupt when they have medical issues because it is so expensive.  The US is also not the country with the lowest infant mortality rate.  We are definitely not “the best” in that respect.

There are lots of places in the United States that are nice places to live.  But I find statements like “The Land of the Free” and “The best county in the world” extremely arrogant and also ridiculous.  “The Land of the Free” sounds like we are the only group of people who have found a slice of freedom on this earth.  I bet if I asked the “average” American on the street “Why is the US better than Norway or El Salvador” first they would struggle to find either country on a map, and then they couldn’t give me many compelling reasons why the US is better.  First, most people don’t know all that much about many other countries, and second, how can you come up with a couple of criteria that make one country better than the other since it is such a subjective thing.  Even if we could agree on a few criteria that would constitute one country being better than another, isn’t it ridiculous to think that the US is better than every other country on this earth?

Here’s a great clip from Bill Maher on this topic.  He’s so much more eloquent and funny than I am on this matter.

In my opinion the US is just another country on this earth.  Collectively a lot of good comes out of this country and also a lot of bad.  In many ways the US is different than other countries and in some respects it definitely sticks out as a great place to live.  I’m relatively happy living here, but I know there are a lot of other places in the world that I want to see and would be sad if I never left the US again to experience them.

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