The Board... Has Arrived

A big thank you to,

The trip seems even more real now, and I'm super excited to go! This week, my board arrived. THE board that I am going to take with me for 650 miles!

Kenton and I thought for a long time about what we wanted to bring with us. We both have Sector 9's, but they just didn't seem right. I love mine, but its too high off the ground and a little too squirrely for a long stable ride. The wheels and trucks are huge, along with riser pads to make it even higher. This makes pushing hard because I have to go so far down to reach the ground. The quest for the perfect board continued.

Kenton with his new board. He decided to go
 Black Wave with the clear coat finish. Looks great.

In our searching for how we should do our trip we found distance boarding legend Rob Thompson. He holds many a record for distance skating. His first board he used was low to the ground, stable and solid. Just the right thing for long distance pushing. However it was a Rolls Rolls carbon fiber board and Rob learned his lesson with that. It was too stiff and just not the right material. He teamed up with Longboard Larry and the developed the Pusher 2.0. With this board Rob traveled the length of China! This seemed right for Kenton and I.

That was until Kahuna Creations came out with their masterpiece, the Black Wave. I really love Kahuna and their stuff, but beforehand their boards didn't match what I was looking for. They have great boards for cruising or carving. I was just missing the drop down, low-ride, stable board I needed. The Black Wave was that and more. Besides being a high-performance board, it just looks amazing. Not only will we be rolling along easier, but we will look good while doing it. I talked with Kenton, we compared our options, and in the end, the sheer beauty of the board, and our existing relationship with our friends Kahuna Creations, convinced us we needed the Black Wave. The quest.....was complete.

We contacted Kahuna and they gave us a great deal on the boards. Kenton's arrived first....and I was jealous. A few days later mine arrived up and my parents house. I had to wait all the way until the weekend to go visit and get the board, and it was beautiful. Wonderful board, with black Bear trucks, and clear orange Kahuna wheels. Behold my excitement as I opened up the board.

The box is here! I'm so
excited to open it

What could it be?

PAPER!

This was a good and happy moment. Look at the joy on my face.

Thanks Kahuna

Sadly I haven't been able to ride it yet because it has been snowing almost non-stop, all I could do was stand on it and imagine. I am super stoked to though. Kenton and I are really excited to take these boards on their first long-distance trip!

Thanks once again Kahuna.

With Your One Wild and Precious Life?

Jamie and I, and you can see the book right there.

I love poetry quite a lot. When I asked my fiancee, Jamie, to marry me I used a book of poetry to propose. I got an old copy of Poems by Robert Frost and I wrote her a note and a page number. When she turned to the page I had written the question, "Will you marry me?" there.

I have favorite poems like "If" by Rudyard Kipling, or Edmund Vance Cooke's "The Eternal Everyday", and I love Edgar Allen Poe, or anything Shakespeare. I just love poems. One that I've liked for a long time now is by Mary Oliver.

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

It's a poem about the beauties of life. All of the paradoxes that exist in the graceful swan and the lumbering bear. What a beautiful world that allows such diversity! The precious metaphor of the grasshopper who stays a moment and flies away. It gives the imagery of a lazy summer day, and then ends with a reminder how life will end, even these summer days. We are left with a question, "Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"

This is a question I ask myself a lot, especially in this time where I am trying to discover just what I want to do. This is one reason why I'm doing this trip, because it is something I desire to do with my one wild and precious life. I want to help people. I want to do something I love doing, like longboarding. 

We live in a culture where we love to tell each other to "go for your dreams", "reach for the stars". It is nice to pat each other on the back and say, "Yeah...go for it man." Its fun to say, but our culture only likes to say it, not to live it. It tells you to live for your dreams, but then tells you to wake up to reality.  Eventually we need to "grow up" right? 

We live in a culture that doesn't let people feel good about themselves. We're never skinny enough, never pretty enough, never wearing the right clothes, never eating the right food. One of the worst is that we have dreams about doing great things, like a good marriage or happy family, or helping other people. "That is not success or fulfillment," the world tells us, "What you need is money, this new car, or a nicer phone. A high paying job or promotion would make you happy. Marriage is a failed institution, not to mention constraining. Children whine and slobber. You can't make a living helping other people." 

Its hard to say with all of these influences shouting otherwise, but I don't believe those things. I really think that we can all go for our dreams and we'll be happier doing so. We have this time here on earth to be joyful.    However we don't have much time here in this life because, "Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?" So why not go for what we love.

That's one thing I hope to do with this trip. I really hope to be able to help the Romanian children, I hope to have an adventure, and I really hope that it can inspire others to go for their own dreams. 

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?"

Adoption, Foster Care, Orphanage

As a final installment on the situation of orphans in Romania I want to answer a few questions I've been getting. I've had a lot people ask me about Bridge of Love, the charity foundation I'm working with. What do they do? What is their purpose?

Courtesy of:
 http://momitforward.com/laurie-lundberg

Well on the Bridge of Love website it says, "Bridge of Love’s mission is to provide comfort and hope to Romania’s abandoned children by assisting them on a path toward lifelong happiness and success. Since 2001, Bridge of Love has been instrumental in rescuing Romanian children abandoned in orphanages and hospitals and placing them with caring foster families in their own country.
          Bridge of Love has spent the past ten years saving these abandoned and orphaned children. The foundation began its mission by working to find loving homes for the children and helping to place them, one child at a time, in foster care with Romanian families.
         Currently, there are nearly 40 children in foster care who receive support from Bridge of Love, plus a group of six older teens and young adults who were abandoned as children." People then ask me why foster care? Why not adoption? Isn't foster care still hard and unstable for the children?

Well that may be true. Foster care is still difficult for kids, but it is the best we can do. Adoption in Romania is incredibly difficult. Domestic Adoption is allowed but is is prohibitively expensive. There really isn't much in the way of adoption there, only about 700 to 900 children are adopted each year; a very small percentage of the abandoned children overall. 

Another problem with Domestic Adoption is that there are lots of difficult laws making it very tricky. One article shares that, "In Romania, to be considered "adoptable," a child's biological parents must be deceased or indicate that they have no interest in having a relationship with the child. But beyond this, all relatives as distant as siblings of grandparents also must sign away rights to the child."

Denisa, Alin's little girl

I remember one man I knew. His name was Alin and he was of Roma decent. He and his wife, Anka, were very poor and lived in this little field in a small shack they had constructed. I went to visit them in their "home" one day and I met their children. There was Denisa, a darling toddler girl, and little Alin Jr., who was running around the dirty field barefoot and naked. Every so often Alin would confide in me one of his biggest fears; that he wasn't providing well enough for his children and couldn't provide for them any more. He wondered about giving them to an orphanage where their lives may be secure but it frightened him. He kept his children with him and did everything he could to provide, which often wasn't good enough. I don't know if what he was doing was the best thing or the right thing. I do know, however, that there are lots of people in very similar situations, who cannot provide for or support their children and have to give them up.

An article I read mentions infants who have been abandoned in the hospital and says, "These days babies abandoned at hospitals are likely to stay there until their second birthday. New laws banning the institutionalization of children under two have backfired for them. Only when they turn two will they be legally allowed to go to a children's home. Not that that would be much better." The babies just stay there and the hospitals have too many children to give them sufficient comfort or stimulation. The infants give up on crying because nothing happens and nobody listens when they do. They just lay there silently, and the ones who are big enough to sit up just sit there rocking back and forth, showing that they severely lack stimulation.*

Foreign adoption used to be very common in the 1990's. However in 2001 and 2002 Romania enacted legislation to ban international adoptions. The main reason they stated for doing so was to eliminate black market trade in children (another problem Bridge of Love is trying to address). Romania was heavily pressured by the European Union of ban international adoptions as a condition to enter the EU. One English representative in the EU in particular made it her personal cause to eliminate foreign adoptions for Romania. 

One of the boys who came to the yearly activity
day** I had the chance to help out at in 2011.

When I asked the Lundbergs, who founded Bridge of Love, about the adoption situation they said, "Laurie Lundberg started efforts to facilitate foster care because of her belief that children were better off in foster care (in a family) than in an institution - a feeling that we share along with a lot of others. It was a solution better than the alternative - even though we would have loved to have seen the children formally adopted."

This is why Longboard For Love is trying to help. We're doing all we can do personally for these kids. I really like the project of getting a tutor for all of these kids. Lots of them come from difficult situations and circumstances and they are a little disadvantaged. Myself, I'm a college student right now and I've really gained an appreciation for the importance and power of education. Helping them with their education will help them to better their lives and make something more for themselves.

What a wonderful work.



*For more insights on why children need stimulation or care in orphanages click here

**To see more pictures from the Yearly activity days Bridge of Love does click here or here.

Final Route Plan!

Well...it is finished. We have mapped out the entire route. The total milage for the trip is roughly about 658.8 miles. This was hard to map because of all the different information. Some sources said that Highway One was about 655 miles going from Eureka, California to San Diego. Since this is what we were told we planned on starting there. When I mapped out the trip we discovered that we have been misinformed. It was a little over 900 miles. Sadly we don't have time to do that much.

I tried to map it out again starting from Leggett, but this was just under 800 miles. After much frustration with GoogleMaps (user error I'm sure) I finally worked it out to be about 650 miles, our original plan. We will start in Santa Rosa and head down the State until we reach San Diego. A lot of our miles comes from having to use the smaller back roads since it is illegal and dangerous to board on the side of the major freeways.

Our Mileage is as follows:
Week One: 126.3 miles
Week Two: 163.4
Week Three: 153.8
Week Four (plus two days): 215.3
Total Mileage: 658.8
Daily Average Mileage: 26.35 Miles

We will be starting on Tuesday April 30 and going till Tuesday May 29. This gives us about 28 total days, minus Sunday as a day of rest, leaving 25 days to be pushing along. It will be a hectic time for my own personal schedule. I believe my school semester ends on the 26th of April. Four days later I will be in California. Board till May 29, and two days later on May 31 I will be back in Utah getting married!

This summer is going to be so much fun.

Week One

Week Two

Week Three

Week Four

The whole trip

Highway 1

From Kenton:

Highway 1

Excellent
 Longboarding
Conditions

Now this little bit of road is what I’m going to be calling home for the next few months. I've driven parts of it, usually with my family on some adventure in California. But most of the time is spent it reading a book, talking or thinking about the fish and chips I had eaten for dinner. This last summer I drove down Highway 1 and found the road for conditions to be moderate or less than ideal. I'm not too worried about 

An ideal longboarding trail would be a cement or asphalt path that is free from rocks or other debris.

Notice the painted lines designating where to ride, pass and where oncoming traffic is coming. These conditions are safer and ideal for most longboarders. However highway 1 is void of paths like this. Most of the time we will be traveling in the  3-5 foot space from the white line to the edge of the road.

Our longboarders are experienced and will do fine with less then ideal road conditions. We are still going to have to be smart and keep our eyes focused on the road. Part of our safety will be in keeping our bodies physical strain down. their is nothing more dangerous to a longboarder then slow reflexes while riding. Other road conditions on Highway 1 such as construction or a lack of edge to the side of the road are something that we will have to deal with while on the road.    

An actual picture of part of the
trail we will be longboarding on.
What a wonderful view!

Commenting Open and Captchas Now Killed

This blog has been going for a while now, and I noticed one day how few comments there are. At first I thought maybe the blog was boring, but the stats are really good. Quite a few people read the blog. In the past week we've had about 250 people visit the site. Last month on one stellar day alone over 300 people visited the blog.

Examples of captcha 

I wondered then, why don't people say anything back? When I asked I got some complaints about how difficult it is to post a comment. A lot of people told me that they try but then they are asked to fill out a "captcha" or a difficult to read word, in order to prove they are real and not spamming the website. Most people try four or five times and then give up.

I am happy to inform all of you that I have figured out how to remove that and it is now easy as pie to comment. So please, feel free. With this amendment to the site it also makes it easier for us to be spammed by people. I apologize now if it happens and I'll try to stay on top of it and clean it up when it happens.

Feel free to comment now. We love to hear what you are thinking and we'll do our best to reply. If you want to contact us beyond just a comment, take a look at our Contact Us page.

We've also heard that it is difficult to become a follower on the blog. We're trying to figure that one out now. We hope to have it remedied soon.

Be Satisfied. Be Grateful. Be Giving

I've noticed that recently I have really had a thing for Jewish Authors. I loved Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, and Will to Meaning, as well as his Man's Search for Ultimate Meaning. I recently read Harold Kushner's How Good Do We Have to Be? I'll read most anything by Martin Buber. I just really like these books. I realized how many of them I have been reading when I finished another book by a Jewish writer. Mitch Albom's Have a Little Faith.

I loved the book. It was a Christmas present to me from my future in-laws who enjoyed it and know I love to read. I own a copy of Mitch Albom's Tuesdays With Morrie but I've never read it. I intend to do that soon because I really like his writing. In Have a Little Faith Mitch is gives chronicles meetings with his rabbi, Albert Lewis. Mitch is preparing a eulogy for the eventual death of the rabbi and meets with him frequently to prepare.

I love the story and the fact that it's true. I really learned a lot and enjoyed Mitch's conversations with his spiritual leader. One story I liked in particular. Mitch asks the rabbi "What makes a man happy?" and his rabbi answers saying, "The thing's society tells us we must have to be happy- a new this or that, a bigger house, a better job. I know the falsity of it. I have counseled many people who have all these things, and I can tell you that they are not happy because of them.

         "The number of marriages that have disintegrated when they had all the stuff in the world. The families who fought and argued all the time, when they had money and health. Having more does not keep you from  wanting more. And if you always want more-to be richer, more beautiful, more well known-you are missing the bigger picture, and I can tell you from experience, happiness will never come."
          They are interrupted by a baby crying in the hospital and the rabbi says, "Now, that child reminds me of something our sages taught. When a baby comes into the world, its hands are clenched right? Why?  Because a baby, not knowing any better, wants to grab everything, to say, 'The whole world is mine'
          "But when an old person dies, how does he do so? With his hands open. Why? Because he has learned the lesson. We can take nothing with us." 

I think this story shows where we can find true happiness. We cannot become happy by amassing things. In fact, as Viktor Frankl says, perhaps our quest for happiness is the very thing keeping us from true joy. If we focus on receiving things and being happy ourselves we are missing the true point. I don't believe happiness is the end goal. I think it is the by product of a life well lived. It comes from thinking of others and helping. Not by taking and getting, but by letting go and giving.

Mitch Albom continues the conversation between him and Lewis.

So, have we solved the secret of happiness?
"I believe so," he [the rabbi] said.
Are you going to tell me?
"Yes. Ready?"
Ready.
"Be satisfied."
That's it?
"Be grateful."
That's it?
"For what you have. For the love you receive. And what God has given you."
That's it?
He looked me in the eye. Then he sighed deeply.
"That's it."

Be satisfied, be grateful, and I would add, be giving.