Butler Family Travels

Bath is beautiful.  I followed Sarah around all day. The scenery was nice also. They (Rebekah and Sarah) went to charity shops, a fashion museum and then revisited the charity shops again.  Actually, Levi and I didn’t follow to the fashion museum.  We went to a pub to read the paper and have a drink.  Oh yeah, we kicked some pigeons around.

I am a lifelong fan of the writing of JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis, but these three gems have shaped who I am and my day to day behavior and attitudes more than any other non-inspired writing.  Our first day driving through the English countryside awakened a resolve to reread them as soon as possible.  Thankfully our hosts here in England own a set and over the last week I did so.  This firmly set our visit to Oxford, home of both these authors, into the category of pilgrimage. “My happiest hours are spent with 3 or 4 old friends in old clothes tramping together and putting up in small pubs.”-CS Lewis. This is how we approached our day in Oxford.  A visit to Lewis house at the Kilns, lunch at the Eagle and the Child and dinner at The Turf with an appropriate amount of wandering about the streets and bookstores of Oxford made a perfect day.

We are learning that the attempt to see and do it all can be counterproductive to our desire to experience a place.  Making a list of the things we would like to do or see before arrival in a city or place is helpful.  Especially if we then do just barely enough of those activities to keep us occupied until our next appointment with a pub.

Turns out we traveled to England so that Sarah and Rebekah could go to the thrift store.  Here they call them charity shops and they are everywhere.  Starbucks and McDonalds don’t have a prayer in the race to be on every corner.  Who wants to see Stonehenge or the tower of Big Ben when there is another charity shop just right there?!

It seems that Rebekah has some Henrietta Willis (100 cupboards, ND Wilson) in her!  Exploring the graves of Endor (I Samuel 28:3-25)

Went to ancient hot springs for a day of soaking and we learned that in Israel one should always carry your Uzi to the Jacuzzi. May you also have a safe and Merry Christmas!

Before Rebekah took her rock climbing class to learn to lead a climb, we all went for a day of deep water solo.  Solo climbing means no ropes and gear for protection, so as the name implies we climbed cliffs directly out of the ocean and then jumped, or fell, back into the water.  It was a great, low key way to enjoy the super colorful limestone, warm water and white sand. I hope my pictures are enough to get your imaginations headed down the right track.

I was always quite satisfied with the simplicity of skin diving. Sometimes I feel silly about the number of activities that I have equipment and skills to participate in and Scuba was one that I figured that I could pass on. Right up until, two years ago at Thanksgiving time in Kaui, I was snorkeling along over the reef at Tunnels.  The reef there is lava that flowed into the ocean, cooled, and left a shelf with holes in it way up over the white sandy bottom.  There is all the usual beauty on this shelf, but as I drifted over a good sized hole, the realization that the frogs along the sand down in the bottom were actually full size divers, changed my mind forever. I saw the reason for all that gear and training. Kho Tao is primarily a diving tourism island.  The large majority of tourists are here to dive.  More divers are certified on Kho Tao every year than anywhere else in the world.  The other six are hippies looking for a quiet patch of sand between the granite boulders. We intended to come to Kho Tao to double the population of those looking for some quiet.  During our journey which started on a train and finished on a rusty old boat filled with sand and gravel, other travelers, predictably, asked if we were going diving and this made Levi decide that perhaps we should be.  I told him that I would, if he wanted to, and off we went to school.  So much for no book education this winter! We earned our Open Water Certification in a three day course that included three book sessions, one long lesson in the pool and then four open water dives.  Our third was the high point.  The holy grail out here is swimming with a whale shark.  Our instructor had never even seen one.  It had been four years since the assistant instructor had seen one.  On each previous dive, the boat would pull into the mooring and all the divers would begin gearing up and jumping in.  This morning, there were whale shark rumors in the air and the scene was dramatically different.  All the divers were geared up, standing in the bow and stern, buddy checks finished, while the boat was still under way.  As soon as the boat boy pulled up the mooring line every diver jumped in almost on top of each other and stuck their faces in the water to see if a shark was below.  It was!  For a few seconds it was visible beneath us, but thirty divers falling into the sea all at once sent it out of sight.  We carried on with our descent to the off-shore pinnacle that we were diving on.  WOW!  Nemo’s home!  The top of the pinnacle is covered with anemones, corals and the fishes that live in them.  As we finned along, “the edge” was just on our right.  Pixar didn’t exaggerate this scene. Well maybe the verbose sea creatures are a bit fishy, but not the rest. Suddenly, our instructor flipped over on his back. The whale shark, along with his entourage of remora, cruised over us from behind and left and continued on in the direction that we were going. This largest of all fish, whose five foot wide shovel of a nose contains a giant mouth filtering loads of food from the sea, whose pectoral fins are wings that make the best efforts from Boeing look crude, whose tail seems to move him through the sea with no effort expended, let Levi and I, with our own following crowd of other divers, swim along with it. After several minutes we turned off to leave it alone and resume looking at all the other ridiculous beauty.  The sheer, silly, volume and variety of creation continues to send adrenaline swimming through my veins.  I am going to keep learning new sports and buying gear; there is no limit to what I should see and enjoy.  That is why God made it. I am also confident that Levi has found a new passion for his life.

This window season Rebekah, Levi and I kept our spirits up and our squeegees moving at what is typically an unsustainable pace with the dream of a bungalow on the sand with delicious Thai food and drink nearby.  Finishing our work in less than the normal number of days would allow us to live in a Jimmy Buffet novel for a spell.  We finished the work, did some traveling, some sightseeing in busy Bangkok, and then hit the road to find our piece of paradise. Our second stop shows promise. We will see how long the Butlers can sit still.