Lucas Camilo

This vacation update is late in coming because we just had an amazing visit from friends here in Seattle, essentially extending our vacation.  More on that visit (and Seattle snow!) soon.  But here’s a bit more on LA…

It’s hard to know how to describe anything in our lives with Lucas – sometimes language doesn’t totally fit our experience.  So both of these statements about our Los Angeles trip are true: the rest of our time in LA felt like a perfect, wonderful, “real” family vacation.  And, our trip was hard.  We were really tired by the end, and because of our limited mobility couldn’t do everything we would have liked.  But maybe that part – feeling tired and limited – is just part of what “family vacation” is all about?

The exhausting part had to do with the fact that Lucas isn’t sleeping well.  The morning we departed for LA Lucas was up and ready to go before 4 am, and of course we were along for the ride.  Other nights during the trip he’d wake up many times in the night, needing attention each time.  During the euphoria of travel (and exposure to sunshine!) the lack of sleep didn’t  effect us too much, but by the end at least one of us (the Momma dinosaur) was exhausted.  Besides sleep deprivation, there’s also a lot of effort, time, and energy that goes into setting Lucas’s gear up in a new place, moving pieces around to approximate our home set-up with ventilator, humidifier, pulse-oximeter and other critical pieces of machinery, meds, etc.

But all of that was to be expected, so the more exciting part is that we had a wonderful time.  Not just despite all of the challenges, but maybe also because of them.  The hard parts can make the many sweet moments feel so hugely triumphant.  We often savor small things — making it to a new museum, simply getting our kid down the beach to see the waves — with such joy, and with a present-moment gratitude we wouldn’t have had without disability.   So the joy of everything that vacation means felt luxurious: exploring a new place, tasting and touching and feeling new environments, relaxing into having more time to be with each other, catching up with friends.  A few highlights of the second half of our trip included:

– Watching the Superbowl and having a leisurely dinner with friends/ hosts Walker and Devon.  Lucas spent most of the 3+ hours of the game snuggling with Mies the chihuahua, but each time Burke yelled excitedly at the game Lucas would demand to know “What did the Hawks do?”  He learned new football vocabulary including the words “safety,” “interception,” and “Bronco Busters.”

– A trip to the giant LA Natural History Museum.  To our surprise, Lucas was initially extremely intimidated by the T-Rex and Triceratops fossils in the foyer.  It seems that books didn’t prepare him for the life-sized dinosaurs.  He insisted on going home, so we switched gears and checked out more fuzzy mammal-focused exhibits for a while.  Then we found the back door entry into the dinosaur exhibit, promised the that stegosaurus was friendly, and he agreed to go in.  A volunteer approached him and offered him some fossilized dinosaur poop to touch.  It could have gone either way, but he decided to be brave and go for it.  And once he touched the poop, there was no turning back.  We spent another hour checking out huge fossils.

– A visit with Franny and Ilana, good friends from DC who came out to Venice to hang out since we couldn’t make it to their place on the other side of the city.  Although Lucas hasn’t seen them in a long time — and probably can’t remember them from 2 years back — he treated them both like old friends, catching them up on his LA adventures.

– A trip to the Santa Monica pier and time to fly the kite (“just like the Cat in the Hat”), followed by a wind so strong that Lucas asked to go inside a restaurant.  Which obligated us to get a drink and watch the sunset over the ocean.

– On our last morning, we ventured to a public beach a few miles north where we had heard there were special beach wheelchairs for the borrowing.  We had to drive for a while to find the lifeguard station, but thanks to an amazing online accessible-beaches-of-southern-california guide, we had we had what we needed.  Eventually we found a lifeguard who lent us a wheelchair designed to move through sand.  If you’ve never imagined pushing a regular wheelchair through dry sand, try imagining riding a bicycle on a California beach.  Impossible.  But with gigantic tires, dry sand is navagable.  And the adventure was awesome!  It was a bit like the time we took Lucas sledding — he was having a good time, but it’s possible that the triumph of getting him there felt even more thrilling to the two of us.  He definitely enjoyed it too, especially the sandpiper spotting (hence the song at the end of the video).

We ended the trip in general awe of the generosity of friends and the MTM community.  We left the bungalow (where Lucas was ready to move permanently) and drove our wonderfully accessible van to the airport, where we parked it a few hundred feet from our check-in gate.  We hid the key and left it for Nancy and Donald to come pick up.  We couldn’t have dreamed up more perfect logistics, or a better vacation.