Oh Eight Was Great

Susiestraveltales has been silent since the end of May, but not for lack of travel tales. I’ve had some fine adventures this year while, in between, continuing to find my roots in Austin. I’m not feeling terribly verbose right now, so I’m just going to let the pictures do the talking for now! Happy New Year, hope it’s a great one ahead for us all!

Special thanks to Steve Tamarkin, Dave Epperson, Jason Stawiski, Kent Christian, Nate Miller, Tanya Rinderknecht, Lisa Molinaro, and Ana Maria Medina for photo contributions!

Race Day

I've been fully enjoying my post-triathlon week of inactivity and margaritas, but am finally mustering up the energy to post a few pix from the race last Sunday. But first I want to send a huge THANK YOU for the generosity of all the folks who supported me and helped me raise $2,825 for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society and made this all possible. Our entire training team raised over $100,000 for LLS, amazing.

So without boring you with all the details, it went something like this: move your arms alternately in a circular motion through water...repeat for one mile; move your legs in a circular motion while perched atop a two-wheeled apparatus...repeat for 25 miles; put one foot in front of the other as fast as you can...repeat for 6 miles; raise hands in triumph as you cross the finish line...collapse. Very exciting, really.

It actually was quite fun, especially with 3,000 other folks along for the same ride. I had a stellar cheering squad camped out at the corner of Congress and 3rd St. who would cheer with abandon whenever I passed...my mom, sister, brother-in-law, and friends Mindi and Tashan, old DC friends from high school with whom I've reconnected since moving to Austin. Was happy with my time, 3:07, and will definitely be tackling more in the future.

Triathlon high: Running my fastest mile on the last mile of the race.

Triathlon low: Being perfectly situated to intercept the snot rocket of the man running in front of me on said last mile.

A flock of triathletes poised to swim down Town Lake

Biking through downtown

I promise I was not that cheerful during the whole race

The Gaskins ladies, post-race

Some of my most excellent teammates

T minus one week

T minus one week until the big triathlon event this Sunday! With just a week left, here starts my favorite part of training called “tapering”. It’s the part where it's actually sanctioned not to train so much so your bod can recover for the big day. Now I can feel good instead of guilty when I bail on a scheduled run to grab a beer instead. My mom comes into town in a few days to visit me and my sis and root me on Sunday.

Here is a shot of me and a few of my TNT teammates this weekend at a teammate’s fundraiser downtown…a rare moment in which we have seen each other not in exercise getups and sweating like pigs. The dapper young man with the outstanding handlebar moustache is one of our team’s Honored Heroes. Tom, a Hodgkin’s Lymphoma Survivor, had his last treatment of chemo almost exactly a year ago today. And did I mention he’s competing in the triathlon next week? And another member of our team who was declared cancer-free a couple years ago is about to tackle an Ironman...how's that for some inspiration?!

Life in Austin rolls along. Just had a visit from Nate, who some of you will remember as my better half from my trip-leading days in Central America as we traipsed around the subcontinent with our family of students in tow. He was in town to help teach a course on human consciousness and other such zen-master topics for a week. I got to check it out for a couple of days and learned lots…not the least of which is that I’m very far from zen-master status. Still working on that one.

A recent discovery (and now daily guilty pleasure) we made while he was here is the snow cone stand just around the corner from my apartment. As you can see, it’s a trailer set up in an abandoned parking lot sandwiched between two office buildings. But don’t let the ghetto-ness of it fool you, you’ve never tasted a finer snow cone in your life. And excuse me, is that a snow cone wearing sunglasses on the roof…what’s not to love?

And in spite of my love-affair with Austin, I leave in a couple of weeks for another summer of trip leading with Backroads in Yellowstone and the Tetons. Excited to be back in Jackson Hole, see some friends and not be a rookie at the job this year!

Rookies

Swim

Bike

Run

An amusing memory from my college friend Katherine, a seasoned triathlete: "I remember running with you once our senior year. It was a very short run, if I remember correctly, and there may have been some swearing involved.”

No, endurance sports have never been my bag. But thanks to great coaching and encouragement from my Team in Training (TNT) folks, I got to put three months of training to the test this past weekend. My friend Ana-Maria and I headed for the coast to hit a sprint triathlon in Corpus Christi to warm us up for the real deal at the end of this month. We checked into the hotel, carbed up on some pasta, woke up Sunday at the ungodly hour of 5am, chowed down some Power Bars (anyone else find these disgusting?) and headed to the race site like nervous little schoolgirls on their first day at school. It was a sea of spandex and swim caps. We assumed we'd be in good company as rookies competing in some small-time race in a po-dunk town, but we were wrong. In the crowd of 150, racers with Ironmans under their belts were aplenty, the rookies were few.

Not to be intimidated by these Goliaths, we donned our sexy wetsuits and orange swim caps, took a prelim dip in the ocean, and were off on a 1000 meter swim, 18 mile bike, and 3 mile run, a bit more than half of what we'll do at the end of this month. And are you ready for this? I placed 1st in my age group! A-hem...nevermind that I was the only one IN my age group (which I will remain vague about, except that it now proudly boasts a “3” as of earlier this month), that's neither here nor there.

Fundraising Update
As you know, I'm fundraising for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society and would love your support! I've commited to raising 2,600 smackers and I just hit the $1,000 mark...only $1,600 to go! Please consider donating today, every bit counts! http://www.active.com/donate/tntctx/susiegaskins

Some pre-race pix of me and Ana-Maria

Heading West

In other news…just before Thanksgiving I packed my car with most of my worldly possessions and headed West like every good hippie should do at some point. My destination: Austin, Texas. My mission: to secure a permanent address for more than two months. Austin has been lingering on my radar for years as a place to settle down. It seemed we might get along well from what I've heard about the place and from many visits here to see my sister over the past 10 years. My sister and her husband were super-kind to let me crash with them for a bit before I settled into my little one-bedroom apartment close to the action of downtown just after New Years. I'm now the proud owner of exciting household items such as house plants, a welcome mat, a coffee maker and real grown-up furniture. My favorite purchase is a big red sofa, which incidentally conveniently folds out into a bed...so if you ever find yourself in the area…

I've loved being a nomad for the past six years, but having a place to call home and put down some roots feels heavenly right now. Although truth be told, I've still ended up darting about the country between Austin, Arizona, and DC quite a bit over the past several months. Nonetheless, my clothes are very appreciative of a closet to live in instead of a backpack, and my books are happy to be on a shelf instead of in a box. Baby steps.

I've been working remotely for Backroads (awesome travel company out of San Francisco that I've been working for) in marketing communications. I'll put my trip leader hat back on in June as I head back out to Jackson Hole and Yellowstone to lead trips for them.

Speaking of trip leading, I had a successful first trip of my own to Guatemala in September, an experimental little maiden voyage with a small group of family and friends, we had a blast! I've definitely neglected that endeavor for the moment and hope to pick it back up once life slows a bit.

Come see me in Austin!

View of downtown Austin from my apt. complex.

Swim, bike, run for a cure...

Many of you don’t know this yet, but I have officially made the move to Austin, Texas and have been busy settling into the Live Music Capital of the World, a move that’s been lingering in my background plans for years. A “life” update is long overdue, which is coming, but first...a huge part of my life for the past two months has been training for the Capital of Texas Triathlon, taking place here in Austin on May 25th. This Olympic distance triathlon has me training about 5 days a week to prepare for a 1.5k swim (about 1 mile), 40k bike (about 25 miles), and 10k run (about 6 miles). This is the first endeavor of its kind for me...perhaps I should have started with a 5k fun-run, you say? Nah.

I’m training and fundraising through a wonderful program, the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s Team in Training, whose mission is to cure leukemia, lymphoma, Hodgkin’s disease and myeloma– and improve the quality of life of patients and their families. I have committed to raising 2,600 smackers and need your support in reaching that goal! While a portion of donations goes toward research for new life-saving cancer treatments, what I find even more appealing are programs that help cancer patients with the financial burden of cancer treatments. Chemotherapy is expensive. Traveling to and from treatment centers is costly. Not being able to go to work b/c you or your loved one is battling cancer presents a significant financial strain. Much of the money we raise goes to support programs that help ease these financial burdens for patients and their families.

Almost all of our lives have been touched by someone close to us who has battled this indiscriminate disease. Two close friends of mine from college, Anna and Patrick, survived bouts with cancer in their early 20s. Their stories are inspiring and hope-giving. And I also think about my close friend, Katherine, who lost her wonderful mom Ruth, a mother of four, to this devastating disease four years ago. Cancer does not discern between young or old, male or female, rich or poor, but strikes blindly. Defeating it is a cause that we can all unify behind.

To keep up with my progress and contribute to help keep me motivated as I rise for swim training at the ungodly hour of 6am, cycle those hills, and put more miles on my running shoes, please visit my website at www.active.com/donate/tntctx/susiegaskins. All contributions are tax 100% deductible. Whatever you can give counts!

Stay tuned for sexy photos of Susie in a wetsuit...

Another Summer Come and Gone

My 9-year-old niece Callie recently reprimanded me for my blog being way out of date, so I’d better get to it.

My summer as an active travel trip guide for Backroads in Yellowstone/Tetons has come to an end. This adventure started out in the beginning of June with three weeks of intensive training in Salt Lake City in the ninja art of preparing elaborate meals for 25 out of the back of a trailer in the wilderness, driving a sexy 15-passenger van with trailer attached, and racking a bike on top of it in under 60 seconds. I spent training with a group of 27 other freshmen, extraordinary folks (below, with the backdrop of the Tetons) who were then scattered over the globe to places like Ireland, Hawaii, Portugal, Switzerland, Croatia, and the Czech Republic.

Humble and sophisticated self-named TBTGE (The Best Training Group Ever)

Backroads does high-end one week trips all over the world, and the Tetons and Yellowstone in Wyoming were to become my home for the summer. Welcome to my office:

Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone

Lower Canyon Falls

Geothermal hot springs

And of course Old Faithful. After all these years there's still a man behind the curtain pushing the button every 90 minutes or so.

Don't mind me...

Buffalo: Truly amazing creatures with a fascinating history. Used to be 30 to 60 million of them roaming our continent just 150 years ago and we managed to almost wipe them out. Yellowstone spearheaded our first endangered species success story, protecting the 25 buffalo that existed in the park at the turn of the century and increasing their numbers to currently around 5,000.

An animal jam on the road

Yellowstone sunsets

Half of the trips I helped lead were family inn trips, half were family camping. The term “camping” must be qualified however, as purists may scoff. For the guests, a Backroads Deluxe Camping trip means being attended by a team of 4 Backroads leaders, three elaborate hot meals a day, wine and appetizers before dinner (albeit out of plastic cups), hot showers, a camp assistant to set up your tent and roll out your sleeping bag and extra-thick sleeping pads, and guided hikes, bikes, and kayaking trips through the parks. For me and my leader team it meant playing chef, bike mechanic, knowledgeable local expert, and entertainer of kids all at once. It meant 18 hour work days, cooking three meals a day out of the back of a trailer, and what’s popularly known among us as “permadirt”, the result of camping for a week with one shower, making for a layer of grime on your hands and feet that only starts to dissipate after your third post-trip shower. A camping high: I’m pretty mean with a dutch oven now...coffee cake, lasagna, chocolate mousse, roasted veggies. A camping low: The nasty black eye I got a few weeks ago from my face being crunched between the van and the van door due to an unfortunately-timed gust of wind. I told the guests that my co-leader Joel took some action b/c I wasn't pulling my weight around camp.

And then there were the inn trips...spas, long dinners with guests at nice restaurants, bison steaks, 600 thread-count bed sheets, hot showers every day. Nice.

The guests: Pretty much across the board wonderful and interesting folks. Somehow I've developed this assumption that I don't like kids/am not very good with them, yet interactions with the kiddos ended up being one of my favorite things. I met a 10-year-old who has a better vocab than I do (using "vile" and "parody" in everyday conversation), a 14-year-old pilot, and a kid with a photographic memory (kind of scary when you're only mostly sure about some of the details you're spouting off).

On the job with guests.

One of my most excellent leader teams: Joel, me, and Tanya

When not on trips I lived at the leader house in Jackson Hole, an old dilapidated ranch house with bunk beds jammed in every corner to accommodate the 20 leaders rotating in and out, and a septic and hot water tank designed for one. Its saving grace was that it was set on the banks of the Snake River, very convenient for frequent tubing excursions. Also went home twice, once for a wedding, once for the funeral of a dear family friend. Also had the opportunity to go out to Portland to see my brother John, dear friends Adriana and Monique, and travel bud Kieran.

Amazing Adriana, daughter of my close friend Monique, my former roommate and boss from when I taught in Guatemala in 2003. This girl melts my heart.

Some of my favorite moments this summer:

-Inner tubing down the Snake River with a group of my colleagues, putting in right from the backyard of our house, drinking PBR out of Twizzler straws. The 3 bald eagles that followed us much of the way down the river was icing on the cake.

-Leading a group of left-leaning Bay Area adults on a bicycle ride through the Tetons on a less-traveled dirt road and being left in the dust by VP Cheney’s entourage of 5 black Escalades (in town for a little R&R) and their subsequent heckling comments.

-Cooking a stellar meal for 27 people on my first camping trip.

-Singing and playing guitar around the campfire for guests.

-Getting paid to drive a company vehicle on my own from Berkeley, CA to Salt Lake City, on the way spending a day perched on a rock overlooking Lake Tahoe on a perfect day, and then watching a huge wind and lightening storm whip across the Nevada desert as I drove straight into it.

In reality it’s been a summer of both highs and lows, feeling the weight of needing to make some major life decisions, asking big questions about future and where I want to be, a clear sense of exhaustion setting in from a lifestyle of constant mobility, never sleeping in the same bed for more than a few nights at a time, living out of a backpack, feeling the urge to slow down just when everything seems to be speeding up. A lot of you may be saying "yeah right, Susie", but Susie may find herself with a permanent address sooner than later.

I’m blowing through DC right now for just a couple days and then am off again to Guatemala for several weeks! I’m taking a small group of friends and family down for a week, a trip that’s been in the works for several months, I'm very psyched for it. I’m doing it under the auspices of my own company to see how I like doing this sort of thing on my own, with a long-term vision of perhaps doing service trips for families with adopted Guatemalan children or with high school groups in the future, a possibility that could actually co-exist with this whole settling down idea. Lots of decisions to make, priorities to determine...watch this space.

Swimming with Jaws

Roatan, Bay Islands, Honduras

Sunset on Roatan from just outside our hotel

A hard day at work

Our last stop on the trip was a week of scuba diving in the Bay Islands of Honduras. All week the big plan was for the crowning glory of the trip to be a group shark dive after everyone got scuba certified. Get a load of this, they actually take you down 50 feet with a bucket full of bloody fish, the sharks catch a whiff from some amazingly far-off distance, come swarming around in droves, the bucket is released into the water and you watch the show as they go ape. No cages, no glass wall, just you and a swarm of 4- 6 foot sharks from straight out of Jaws, you could reach out and touch them if you wanted. Unbelievable.

Jaws in the flesh

And the anti-climactic conclusion to this exciting tale (for me, at least) is that while Nate, Armen, and Johnny were down in the depths experiencing said adventure watching the sharks thrash about, Susie was thrashing about in bed with strep throat and a 103 degree temperature, barely able roll over, much less frolic with sharks. Curses! All was not lost, however, as I did get to chalk another one up in my cache of Central American experiences...I finally got to experience the magical shot in the ass, seemingly the cure-all for any ailment down here, one I have heretofore avoided due to my usually stellar immune system. But I was feeling like a million bucks 24 hours later, so what can I say, it works.

The crew at sunset

Jess and me geared up for snorkeling...sexy!

As this chapter comes to a end, some new ones start. I'm back in the States, I got to sing in the wedding of two very special ladies these past two weekends; my sister Jen in Austin, and one of my college roommates Tracy in North Carolina. Right now I'm in Salt Lake City and heading to Yellowstone tomorrow for training for a sweet new gig leading biking and hiking trips for the summer with this great company, Backroads (www.backroads.com).

And in the midst of that, I'll be hosting my first trip on my own to Guatemala in September with a small group of family and friends to see how I like doing this thing on my own...

All exciting stuff, but it's been a pretty non-stop fast pace and and the idea of sleeping in my own bed and being in a familiar place with friends and fam for a bit sounds really good right now...

Hope all is well with all of you out there!

With my sister, the beautiful bride in Austin

And a couple of very handsome men at the Texas hoe-down (my dad and brother, Will)

(Most of) my best girls from college at Tracy's wedding

LEAPNow Trip Slideshow

LEAPNow Central America - Spring 2007

starring Armen Haftvani, Amanda Thorne, Jessica Lehrman, Johnny Bowman, Nate Marcus, & Susie Gaskins

Digging Ditches

We spent two weeks in the small, dusty town of Cofradia, Honduras working at this wonderful bilingual school called BECA that provides affordable bilingual education. The words "affordable bilingual education" are rarely found together in the same sentence. Being bilingual is one of the most viable ways to a better future for most of today's Central American kids, but usually it is reserved for society's elite. The school was started several years ago through a partnership of some community members and an American woman. Every year, a new team of volunteer English teachers come down and teach for a year and live in the community getting paid zilch, pretty phenomenal people. We passed through here on our last trip, so it was cool to get to catch up with the folks we'd spent time with in November.

With some of the volunteer English teachers

Our days were spent helping out in classrooms and digging a 10-foot sewage hole for the new bathrooms for the kindergartners. Glamorous, right? Local ranch hands would mossy on by and were quite amused at the site of gringos in their country with shovels in hand performing hard labor under the blazing sun. The irony was not lost on them, either.




My new nickname is "Susie Snacks" (as I'm always snacking) and my students have almost convinced me to open up my own line of snack food by the same name. A business idea to ponder.

We took a weekend trip to this spectacular 150 foot waterfalls, actually hiked down INTO them (deafening and borderline painful with the power of the water coming down) and got to hang inside them for a bit. Never seen anything like it.

Another highlight of this portion of the trip is being 45 minutes away from San Pedro Sula, Honduras, the site of a most excellent mega-mall that we affectionately call "America". Shiney marble floors, vaulted ceilings, a massive food court with every fast food option imagineable, the works. Malls, which I usually loath, never looked so good after two months of blissful hippie simplicity and non-materialism. It's nice to be a good old consumer every once in awhile :).

Hitching a ride to the airport in Don Max's rad truck.

One of the more hilarious signs I've come across in Central America (and there have been many). "We sell firewood, popsicles, sugar water, and rabbits."