We asked for and received two large wall maps for a wedding gift (thank you Andy and Nancy!) with the intention of creating pinned maps of our travels and now, almost two years later, have finally gotten around to it!  yay!  We also have a sad plant.

The guys at home depot were nice enough to cut us pieces of pine to make the frames.  At home I lined them up with the maps to make sure my measurements were right before staining and assembling.

 I then glued cork rolls onto backing, glued the map to the cork, and screwed the backing to the frame.

^^Double checking the sizing before gluing the map to the cork board^^

 Everything magically lined up!

 Once it's finished, we got to do the most fun part of this project - putting the pins on the map.  Purple for places I've been, brown for Eric, and white for places we've been together :)

as of today there is a book out there about dolphins featuring our research team from two summers ago!  we are literally in a children's book about dolphins!

here it is -  Pamela S. Turner's book called "The Dolphins of Shark Bay."  we have had an advance copy for a while and i'm so excited it's finally published and out there for people to buy.  pam was incredible to work with and the final product came out so much better than i ever could have imagined. i should have expected it to be great though, her entire "Scientists in the Field" series is superb and will be on our kid's bookshelves before they're even conceived.

another children's science book author, Loree Griffin Burns, did an interview with Pam about the book which can be read HERE.  i would highly suggest checking it out and have pasted question 4 below as a teaser.

4. Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

The dolphins would play themselves, and cheesy computer-generated scenes would be banned. I would cast Sandra Bullock as Dr. Janet Mann. Eric Patterson could play himself because he’s already ridiculously good-looking. I would be played by Steven Colbert in drag.

not only is eric "ridiculously good-looking," obviously ;), but he get's to work with sandra bullock and steven colbert. in drag.  i enjoyed the interview.

in all seriousness, it's a fascinating book and i appreciate that there's someone out there making biology interesting and relatable to young people.  if you are friends with us and decide to have a baby in the next 10 years, guess what you're getting for a present?

AND how freaking cool will it be one day to say "look at mom and dad when they first met in this published children's book." and they probably won't care...

oh and a couple of my photos are in the book, so i'm technically a published photographer. yes!

the book is out today and you can get a copy here!

it's a good thing we're going somewhere soon, because the travel bug has really hit me.  i've been battling with bouts of it over the last year and a half, but it's now become full blown.  it has been an entire year since i've left the country (something that hasn't happened since 2004), and i'm crawling out of my skin.

i can remember the first time i came down with it.  we all have our travel virginity stories, so below i share mine with whomever cares to read.

it was the spring semester of my first year of high school. i had decided to take spanish because i lived in texas and would never go anywhere else, so the only language i needed to know was spanish, duh.  my best friend megan and i listened as mrs. bowan made an announcement that our school would be participating in a study abroad exchange with a school in spain and that we could attend an informational meeting with our parents if we wanted to go.  we looked at each other and knew something, i dont' know what, but that this was something big.  also, it would cost $3500. 

well so much for that.  i was only 14 years old.  even if i could convince my parents to let me go, there's no way i could pay for it.  i went home and when my mom asked about my day i nonchalantly told her about this cool trip i'd learned about, but that it was way too expensive and would never work out.  she said "do you want to go?" and i said yes obviously but i know it's not reasonable.  "then you'll go!"

that was the moment that a butterfly in texas flapped its wings and changed the course of my life! okay maybe a little dramatic, but seriously.

in the fall we hosted rocio and eva.  we welcomed them into our texan home, took them to the rodeo, ate mexican food, taught them dirty words, and tried to learn as much about these girls as possible.  they had come from another place and were simply fascinating.

then in the spring megan and i went to live with rocio and her mom.  we were 15.  i still can't believe our parents let us go.  spain was my first love and like all first loves will forever hold a special place in my heart.  i gained 20 pounds, drank wine with dinner, spoke horrible spanish, fell in love with every single spanish boy i met, waxed my legs, and learned what a bidet was. i smelled spain, i tasted, felt, heard, and saw spain and i loved every. single. second of it.

 ^^getting some fresh fish for dinner at home in castellon^^

 ^^rocio and her mom put us in traditional magdalena clothing^^

^^ the lighthouse in benicassim^^

after that trip something changed.  my ethnocentric view of the world had quickly started to fade.  i had changed, and it was just the beginning.  what can you experience in such a short time that rocks your world so much?  for me it was and always will be the people.  obviously the art, food, and nature of different places is magical in itself, but it's this quality of the people that gets me every time. anywhere new can make you feel out of place, uncomfortable, like your ways are weird, and you can even find yourself judging the place you're in.  but then you see the people interacting with each other, with their families, with their pets, and you see how much we are all the same and for me that's where you see the beauty.  with all of our myriad of differences, fundamentally we are all the same.  it is in those moments where you see your own insignificance and the world feels so small. and to me that is beautiful.  often times humbling, but beautiful.

i didn't travel outside of the u.s. again for a while other than the occasional trips to mexico.  but freshman year of college i watched motorcycle diares and the bug was back. "let the world change you and you can change the world."  ok handsomest actor alive gael garcia! let's do this! (i'm not a marxist and don't support che guevara's ideals, but what 18 year old doesn't love this movie?!)

anyhoo, the world does change you and travel becomes a need for so many people.  that's why the term 'travel bug' exists, right? and once infected i'm convinced there's no cure.

so there's mine. what's your story?

When we were little, the entire family on my mom's side went to my grandmother's beach house for the summer.  I'm talking cousins, friends, parents, grandparents, boyfriends, girlfriends.  On any given summer night there could be 40 people sleeping in this two bedroom, 800 square foot, yellow cabin on stilts.  

Between the drinking, smoking, heat (no A/C), humidity, mosquitoes, and annoying young brats running around breaking things or ourselves, it never took long for some of the adults to get into a fight.  These arguments usually ended with someone speeding off in their car (forgetting a spouse or child) and yelling out the window they'd never come back.  Sounds kind of trashy.  Maybe it was.

As we sat around on the porch one day trying to enjoy the smell of the ocean and hoping for a breeze from 10 rows back, my grandmother dryly asked "when's the fun gonna start?"

Speaking as the youngest grandchild in this family, it already had!

The cabin wasn't nice: one bathroom, hot as hell, smelled like smoke, crappy furniture, and don't even think about a TV.  But there was never a dull moment; I loved it.  I may not remember enough to give detailed accounts of anything that actually happened while there, other than going to the beach, eating, hanging out, and sleeping, but when I do recall that place in my memory, it's so so sweet.  I still sleep the best on a mattress on the floor with the smell of salt in the warm air and the sound of rotating fans and creaky floors.

Years passed.  People got divorced, grew up, stopped going, died.  The cabin was even destroyed in a hurricane.  Even the bathtub I used to play in in the yard was washed away.  But for me the fun never had to start, every moment was magic.  The waves. The food. The swearing.  Sharing a twin bed with two other people.  Trying to act like the cool older cousins but then ending up sitting in my mom's lap.  Getting up at 5 in the morning to go crabbing and picking up pounds of shrimp off the shrimping boat on the way home - that's the best dinner anyone can ask for.

My Grandmother's saying caught on and the question is still asked by family members today when things turn into a mess.  Road trips.  Backpacking around europe.  Drinking too much.  Summer band.  Cleaning up dog puke.

The bad is part of the fun, and later when you look back, it was the fun.  The fun is right now, so you can't wait for it or you'll miss it :)