Reflecting on Two Years in The Bahamas: Best of

These two years have passed very quickly, I can remember vividly the day I arrived in this country, very fresh behind the ears and eager and full of all the knowledge I could gather between getting this assignment and my arrival.  And now? I have so many good memories, especially of the place where sweet baby elle grew to toddler elle, with her own notions.  That process is the one that will dominate my memories here, her first Christmas, her first steps, her first words, her first shake of the bum, her first swim.

As part of the process of saying goodbye, I thought I would share some of my favorite things Bahamian.  All of these come highly, highly recommended.  There is quite a bit of variability in quality in Nassau and the Family Islands and all these are sublime in my book.

Best place – Nassau: The Island House 

In truth, I wrote this post from the CoffeeBar at The Island House.  This complex of excellent restaurants, a movie theater, the coffee house, wine store and boutique hotel has been our center of gravity.  We love it.  This is the kind of place worth traveling great distances to enjoy, and I drove here from my house.

Beyond the excellent service, and food and wine and everything else, it is the design unity that really separates The Island House from all other spots.  Muriel, elle and I became true regulars here in our 2 years (well short of 2 years for elle), with lingering breakfast that turned into lunches, wine tastings with producers from around the world, many memorable dinners and jazz Thursdays.  I will miss it very much.

Best Beaches: Can’t pick just one, so many outstanding beaches in this beautiful country.  So I went with a top three.  

Gold Rock Beach, Grand Bahama: this is within Lucayan National Park, about 15 miles east of the Bahamas 2^nd biggest city.  The beach is a long stretch of white sand, with a ton of bleached toppled trees from hurricanes in years past.  The sand bar of the beach creates a V, so there are often little pockets of seawater trapped in sun cups.  The water is clear and your fellow beachgoers sparse.

Columbus Point, Long Island: this beach is at the far north of Long Island in the southern end of the archipelago.  This beach is accessed via a very rough 4 mile track, which eventually ends at some stairs and the beach to your right.  The stairs lead to a monument to Columbus, who maybe, could have landed at this point in 1492.  The beach is a short one, but the view from the monument showcases the majesty of this spot – with stark white salt flats and the crazy blue waters of the Bahamas mixing into the distance.  The snorkeling here is sublime, with a natural amphitheater about 100 yards off shore that has hundreds of fish.

Tropic of Cancer Beach, The Exumas: this beach is not actually on the tropic of cancer, but you can easily forgive this small fib for the beauty of this beach.  It is a long stretch of white sand on the east side of the Exumas.  We actually did not spend a ton of time here due to a big storm that rolled through, but with a little island sitting invitingly off the beach, and the rugged rock formations on the north end of the beach, it quickly rose to the very top of my beach rankings.

Best Overall Family Island: Eleuthera/Harbour Island

Okay, I am cheating a little by combining two islands – but they are intertwined and in fact the way to get to the later is often via a flight into the North Eleuthera airport. 

First Eleuthera, a spot I wrote about here (http://livingthekoroldream.blogspot.com/2014/10/love-yourself-multi-sport-in-eleuthera.html) and Muriel wrote about here (http://livingthekoroldream.blogspot.com/2015/10/babe-week-25-energy-choices-and.html).  This island is one of the long skinny ones, about 80 miles long and never more than a few miles across.  It has rugged coast and flat waters, bridging the Atlantic and the protected waters to the west.  It has solitude and remote beaches, and also seriously luxurious resorts and superb restaurants.  It really does have it all.

And then Harbour Island, just a hop, skip and jump off the northeast of the main island.  It is a smaller, denser community, which we went to a couple of times via a ferry from Nassau.  This is a place on the itinerary of the global elite, and it has really nice places to eat and stay as a result.  The beach here has a pink tint, and this beach regularly makes best beach in the world lists. It is nice, for sure.  I love the ability to stay on Harbour Island and walk everywhere.  We have had amazing meals here, both highbrow and lowbrow.  The best coffee roaster in the country is in a bungalow kind of in downtown.  Being here is both luxurious and laid back.  In conjunction with the main island, it is a combo unmatched in the country.

Best Family Island Hotel: Guanahani Beach Club, San Salvador

http://www.guanahanibeachclub.com/guanahani-beach-club-bahamas.html

The Bond franchises owes a lot to the Bahamas, several of the movies old and new have been shot here.  This small, quaint and perfect hotel made me feel like I was in a Bond film.  It has a white, bleached aesthetic that is infused with an Italian ethos from the owners.  Everything was super comfy, and yet you are perched in a truly remote setting on one of the smaller Family Islands. The improbability of this ridiculous luxury perched on a tranquil bay, down rough roads that seem to go to nowhere, is very special.  And the food is to die for – which is cooked for breakfast and dinner by Elena, the proprietor.  The dinners are extra special, with a mix of classic Italian cooking and local Bahamian ingredients – like lobster speared right off the beach.  This improbability of luxury in a remote setting is what had me feeling like a Bond film, and made for a really memorable stay.

Favorite water sport: Snorkeling

I was not much of water person before arriving in Nassau.  I like surfing, but am not that great at it.  I can swim, of course, but had not swam for exercise ever in my life.  Never had dove, and had snorkeled a few times.  Fishing is not really my thing.  Had never gotten on a SUP.  My interests and passion had always been more on the mountains and the cliffs and the slopes.  But you have to adapt and when in Rome.

So I tried all those activities above, and have grown to really love a few of them.  Swimming in the ocean water at the beach near my house became a nearly daily activity, and one that brought zen, especially when it marked the end of my day.  But the activity I really grew to love is snorkeling.  I love the simplicity of it, and took my travel snorkeling gear to every family island and every other country or territory we visited in the region.  Often to great results, be it the enormous, car sized ray I snorkeled over in Turks and Caicos laughing deeply to myself in wonder, or being immersed in the school of millions of fish in Eleuthera, or the Tiger shark in Grand Bahama, or the pod of three massive rays I swam with in Bimini.  Or swimming over the wreck of the Cesena in west Nassau.  So many great memories and a sport I will do the rest of my life.

Best drink: Daq Shack

Oh Andy and the Daq Shack.  The best drinks going, in a gorgeous setting.  Andy makes his drinks from fresh fruit and Fire in the Hole rum, I stopped asking for a specific combos a year and half ago and trust him to make whatever is best at the moment.  The setting is right off of Bay Street in the middle of the north coast of Nassau.  The sunsets to the west are big and grand and patient.  It feels like vacation every time.

Thing I will miss the most: Visitors!

We have hosted an astonishing 80 visitors in the last two years.  And more than that came and were not able to fit in our house.  People came from all over, and many for multiple trips.  After traveling and not really having a home for two years, it was a stroke of luck to be posted close to the US in a place that people want to come for vacations short and long.

And all these visitors gave us a big gift.  You see, Nassau is pretty small and having all these guests led to us showing off our beloved spots, to see our home again and again through the lens of our loved ones.  To be reminded about why it is a special place.  Thank you.

Long Kiss Goodbye to Nassau

Our very first post on this blog is titled Long Kiss Goodbye to the Bay and was written a bit more than 4 years ago.  Wow has a lot happened since then in our lives and in the world.  We have been kissing goodbye to Nassau now for over a month, in a long kiss that seems both similar and vastly different than the one we enjoyed with San Francisco four years ago.  My last day in the Bahamas is Thursday, Sept 1^st, and then it is on to DC.

So, we have been very quiet on the blog front since Muriel completed her impressive project of blogging each week of Elle’s first year.  Some of that silence is intentional, we wanted to step back and think about what this blog would be moving forward.  Spoiler alert, we don’t have a good answer to that just yet.

But some if it was also being super busy with a lot going on in our lives.  Muriel has moved on to a new job, as a Foreign Service Attorney for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).  This job is within their General Counsel office and is such a great fit for her interest and passions.  She has been there just short of a month and has been really enjoying settling into the role.  It means we will both be diplomats moving forward and will have to navigate our future assignments in tandem.  That is a challenge we welcome, and I am so proud of her for getting this great job.  It was sad to leave the Center for International Environmental Law and all that she had help build in her time there, of course.  But this was a career move for a dream job.

As part of her new job, Muriel and elle left the Bahamas more than a month before my last day.  So we have been using Facetime a ton and she has been solo parenting up there.  Tough on both of us, but Elle has been unfazed by all the changes and is doing better than ever.  She takes after her mom in resiliency.

So that means that we will be going together to Ethiopia sometime next summer.  The exact dates are still being hashed out, but we will be working together out of that embassy.  Working in the same embassy means that this will be the first time that our work lives have intersected in the slightest in the 10 years we have been together.  Super cool.  

Back to the long kiss to the Bahamas.  It is sad to be leaving but because we knew when we would be leaving before we arrived, it doesn’t have the same poignancy as our departure from the Bay, or even from Duke.  Your life is kind of on the clock the moment you arrive, and it is up to you to craft a life and build meaningful relationships.  Both of which we did, but knowing you are departing does put a bit of damper on your feeling of permanence.  2 years feels like a long time, we have lived many places for a shorter period, but it also feels short.

So how I have I been saying goodbye?

It has been a mix of lists - to do lists.  People to say goodbye to, things that I need to do at work, places I want to enjoy one more time, things I need to do at home to move.  A mix of life and work.  Due to life, I won’t get everything done on any of these lists.  But I will get close, and that is good enough.

When your travel blogs morphs to a baby blog

It has been about a month since Elle's first birthday and she has continued to thrive and be an complete joy.  Just today, she and I went to our beloved coffee shop and she was chowing down on an apple and a bran muffin, squealing in delight seeing people.  We walked, as in she held my hand and went where she wanted, around the grounds of the hotel and I put her in various chairs to big smiles and more squeals.  The evolution of her engagement with the larger world has been remarkable, even if that coming into her body and place within the world is mirrored by every kid.  

We also just got back from a great trip to Costa Rica (my work) and Miami (visiting friends).  She did great with the travel and charmed pretty much everyone she met along the way.  I wanted to take a moment and write a tribute to my amazing wife and the great project she undertook and completed with BABE blogging last month.  Being a new parent is hard.  There are so many new things happening and you care more than you can imagine about this little kiddo even if you have no idea what they want and how to keep them happy.  You have vague ideas at first and get better over time at meeting their needs.  Your love towards them is stronger than your pre-birth self can imagine.  And less sleep.  And failures.  And wanting to be better.  

Through all that, Muriel faithfully kept her schedule of blogging, and blogging heartfelt and perceptively and honestly. I am still in awe.  Some of the posts happened at obscene, crazy hours.  Okay, most of the posts.  And now she has created a fantastic record of Elle's first year.  I want to highlight a few of the reasons I am so appreciative of her work and her project. 

Parenting as a shared connection

Several days ago in Miami, we were hanging out a health store/cafe and there was another couple with a baby nearly the same age as elle. Of course we ended up talking with them, sharing some food with each other's baby and generally connecting in a way that would have been unfathomable pre-Elle.  This very same phenomena has been repeated time and time again, with fellow parents from across the globe. 

BABE posts have done that in the digital realm at a larger scale, with many of the posts generating personal and useful digital conversation. With our diffuse community and looking forward to life in the foreign service abroad, this has been very affirming.  Sharing parenting highs and lows and having others weigh in with their experience is wonderful and would have been entirely impossible in this fashion less than a decade ago. 

Mom and dad's anniversary dinner with a beloved +1

Recording Elle's first year

Parenting is usually full on in the moment and adding to that is difficult especially if trying to create a tender record of your child . Thankfully, all these digital platforms have made things much easier.  But I am really grateful that Mu has created this record of Elle's first year, and one that merges perfectly with our travelogue. As Elle turned one, I found myself going back to the beginning of BABE to read and see what was central to our collective lives a year ago.  Sometimes it recalls a great moments - bringing Elle 'home' to our airbnb - and some bad moments - re-hospitalization due to Mu's mastitis. Being able to see Elle on the blog as a 1 day old, or 1 week old, or 1 month old is such a huge contrast to her still a baby present.  

People love the baby blog

And for good reason. Elle is cute a button, oh so sweet and Mu has been wonderful in sharing her/our journey.  But I have to confess that I did not expect the shift in blog focus to Elle's first year to bring a tangible upswing in our readership of livingthekoroldream. You an see in the below chart from our blogger dashboard how Mu's blogging of Elle's first year established a new, better normal for our blog in terms of readership.  Stepping back from when we rolled this blog out, we have over 46k page views, from launch in August 2012 to June 2016. That is many, many orders of magnitude more than we ever expected.   

And Mu has crushed it with BABE authorship.  Metrics and numbers are interesting, but beyond the numbers it has been super cool to see so many loved ones throughout this year and have them already engaged with Elle's development.  It is still surprising to get to someones house and have them start talking about what was going in in Mu and elle's last week, or last month.  The continual reminder of the interaction between the digital and the physical has been surprising, as someone who loves reading and consuming digital media.  I often forget about our own digital content and that loved ones know so much more about Elle than they would have without BABE.

B.A.B.E. Week 52: Elle is 1!

When Wilson and I quit our jobs and travelled the world, I wrote a blog post about what we had learned after 100 days of travel.   It was a riff off of a section of the book Infinite Jest by one of gen X's greatest writers, DFW.  

I am going to use that same riff to write about this past year of B.A.B.E.dom.

So what have I learned in Elle’s first year?

Well...

If you ever have the great fortune of bringing a new human life into your world, you will acquire new, old, and purposely forgotten facts in that first year.  You will find that 365 days feels like a long time but it is short enough to have a laughing climbing 1 year old in front of you where a week-old newborn once slept.  

The year is short enough that you will realize that the 4-month sleep regression didn’t end until 5 months later and your darling was still sleeping in your bed at 9 months.  You will learn the centrality of the human body (its intake, sleep, excretions) and yet will forget the intensity of your own body’s abuse from bearing and birthing another human being.  That your body and needs are distant and often irrelevant.  That her tears, her laughter, her smiles are so much more than you ever imagined.

You will learn that the harsh thumping of your heart from African safaris is nothing compared to your heart’s thump of contentment as she nestles into your arms.  That, no matter what size she is, she fits like the last puzzle piece into the crook of your arm, along your torso, or seated laughing on your lap.

You will learn how little control there actually is.  That in the beginning she has to get her needs met without the ability to move or talk.   The she has  no autonomy with which to resolve her problems.  A hard role.  So as hard as it is for you to get your tasks done (or even sneak off to pee in the toilet),  at least you could grab that extension cord, wrap it tightly around your neck and chew on its electrical prongs to your heart’s content while she must deal with the frustration of the best “toys” being quickly put out of reach.

That you are lucky (or unlucky) to be dealt your particular life circumstances.   That your baby’s cries from momentary hunger or discomfort (from not wanting to close those drowsy eyes in the crib) pierce your soul and you can’t imagine how it would be to not answer that hunger with good food, or that fatigue with a safe environment.   That you are lucky for every day you don’t live in a war zone, for every kindness bestowed upon you, and every day she doesn’t throw up or cough or feel ill.

That your mind isn’t the same as it was before you became a parent. Emotions are much more potent and previously unrespected fear looms.  That you are afraid of jolting boats, cold viruses and have no tolerance for risk-taking situations at night.   That you share a connection with other parents experiencing the intensity, the fear, and the happiness.  And that happiness makes sleep deprivation laughable. 

That exploring, career, and exercise doesn’t end as a parent.  That she searches for meaning from us;  she wants what is valuable to us.  That you can be born on 5/5/2015 in Nashville, Tennessee and by 5/5/2016 travel to Utah, Las Vegas, Jamaica, Maine, Washington DC, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Panama, Cayman Islands, Bahamas islands (New Providence, Harbor Island,  Long Island, Eleuthera, Exumas, Bimini, Rose, Paradise, and Blue Lagoon), England, Switzerland, and France.  

That in order to exercise and lean into your career, you will threaten with bodily harm anyone who talks or walks too loudly and stirs your peaceful babe from her slumber.

That “sillies” and “happies” abound.  That she will giggle when she wakes, when you smile, when the world is just around her.  And that when the world is around, you obtain celebrity status because so many people notice her, talk to her, and want to make goofy smiles at your attached babe.  

That  rolling on the bed can be pure bliss.  And that it is hard to leave the contentment of home.

 

You will also learn that poop is very interesting and edibility is a shifting concept: peas, sand, or ice cream.   That your baby's refusal of spoon feeding vanishes as soon as she senses ice cream is around.  Or some days besides breastmilk, she may refuse to eat anything but sand and peas.  That breast milk poop smells much better than solid food poop.

That you will fall into the baby infrastructure trap--you need baby stuff everywhere and a lot of it.   That when you travel, your tiny human being will require much stuff... needing her own chair, spoons, cups, bed, to name a few.  And you will inevitably forget  some essential item while packing to travel or packing to come home.  It is all a war of attrition that you will lose but it won't matter because next week she may be too big for said spoon, onesie, chair, etc.

That it will pass too quickly.   Even as the rocking to sleep can feel interminable and the chasing of a diaperless bottom can shift a 30 second diaper changing session to 13 a minute diaper changing session, that all of this time wasted, isn't really a waste of time at all, it is the best of times.