Back from Europe... and Another Journey
July 29, 2006
Well, we all survived our two weeks on the Rick Steves Best of Family Europe Tour. I'm not going to gush about how wonderful it all was because the truth is traveling with kids can be difficult. Traveling with adults can be difficult too for that matter, so now I've decided that I'd rather travel alone or with at most one other person, and preferably by kayak. The tour itself and our guides were excellent and we did have some great moments. One of my favorites was when we had just arrived in Venice and were cruising down the Grand Canal in a vaporetto (water taxi) past the decaying buildings, bridges, gondole and a multitude of other boats, and Joel said, "Hey Dad, what city is this?" "Mamma mia! You don't KNOW?!" I said and left him to figure it out for himself. "Venezia!" He tried to blame ignorance on wearing "noise-reduction" headphones while playing Gameboy during the two hours our tour guide was talking during the bus ride from Tuscany. As an adolescent I too lived in my own little world.
More about Europe later. We got back home last night after 23.5 hours in transit. Despite that I've escaped jet lag and even spent the day paddling to see Tribal Journeys 2006, the annual gathering of Northwest Coast Native American ocean-going canoes. Today the canoes are at the Suquamish reservation and will spend Sunday there before ending the Journey at Sand Point on Lake Washington. Can you imagine 30-40 canoes making their way through the locks and crowded Lake Union into the very heart of Seattle? I wish I could be there to see it!
When I arrived at Suquamish this afternoon there was no sign of the canoes, just a crowd of people waiting at the beach, a few vendors selling t-shirts and cedar bark hats, a big fire pit and the makings of a huge salmon bake. I talked with some people and heard the unfortunate news that someone on the Journey, the chief of a Vancouver Island tribe, died when one of the canoes capsized in rough water in the Strait of Juan de Fuca. No one in the canoe was wearing a PFD -- very tragic. On the water I met a couple other kayakers and we messed around until the word came that the canoes wouldn't show up for another two hours. They were gathering at a point to the north. After a while I paddled there and found them lined on the beach.
The baidarkas from last year were there plus one or two new ones built by Marc Daniels. I also met Sean, a native King Islander who makes authentic King Island kayaks. In fact, he is the only living member of the King Island tribe who makes King Island kayaks. I remember seeing one of his kayaks for sale on on eBay or somewhere, maybe from a Qajaq USA post. Sean says that he had received a lot of inquires regarding the authenticity of his King Island heritage and his kayaks. Well, I can tell you that this guy is the real thing, except that when he started out building there were no elders who knew anything about kayak making to teach him, so everything he knows actually came from Corey Freedman!
When the time came an announcement was made: "Everyone get in the water!" I paddled alongside listening to the singing and drums from the canoes. Unlike last year, when I inadvertantly found myself paddling in the middle of the whole show in front of hundreds of cheering people gathered at the beach as the canoes came into view and overtook me, I kept a respectable distance near the spectator boats, occasionally drafting off a motor boat. Still after I got close to the crowd I couldn't resist showing off a few rolls before paddling away.
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