Stokes in Bali 2023

[written jointly by Brice and Leah] Wrapping up our amazing trip to Bali. Currently, in San Francisco airport at 1:30 am waiting for our final leg back to Denver. I’ve been to the SFO airport a hundred times, and kind of bizarre to have Terminal 3 all to ourselves.  Focus of this blog post is … Surfing is harder than it looks, but we both did get up on the board. The “art of doing nothing is real” … morning coffee, sunsets with a cold beer, reading, writing, talking. To some it may sound boring when “doing nothing”.  But there’s a lot being accomplished during those quiet moments.  And returning back to Denver. Made the most of the past 6 weeks away from work and typical grind, but ready to get back in the saddle … and squeeze our sweet chocolate lab, Ruby.  As we embark on our 38 hour door-to-door journey back to Denver, we reflect and unanimously voted that our biggest take away is  –  Doing NOTHING is GOOD.   Leah's  nasty toe incident forced us to edit our plans, which was the

[blog takeover by Leah] Would you rather … … be a gecko that can climb walls or a monkey that can leap rooftops in a single bound? I started to use a quote to follow Brice’s lead.  Not a poet but Van Gogh seemed appropriate… he took off his ear; I took off the top of my toe.  Happy to share the gory pics to any of you rubber neckers – it’s pretty gnarly.  A night or two ago I tried to take out a small but mighty garden gnome with big teeth on our walk home from our new fish BBQ sunset on the beach ritual.  Not intentionally of course, it was dark and we were giddy from the best sunset ever and finally catching that live band Brice wanted.  The music here has been lackluster albeit entertaining… think “brown eyeS girl” and “Imma Creup”.  Their English is way better than my Balinese and bonus: their happy hearts paired with the curiosity of the Australians in Bingin is contagious. So instead of surf lessons and being on the beach with my toes in the sand appreciating surfer bods, butt fl

For all of you Star Trek “Trekkies”, the voice of Captain James T. (Tiberius) Kirk has been swimming in my head as I make these rando blog updates.  He always started the show with some sort of ominous foreshadowing, but that’s not the case here in Bali.  We continue to explore and dive into cultural experiences, without spreading ourselves too thin or getting sucked into a bunch of tourist traps. Got to protect time for all of those inexpensive 2+ hour massages and lounging by the pool. Attended a local shadow puppet show, referred to as “wayang”.  See pic below.  It’s basically a one-man show (but with a number of assistants handing him different characters) where he’s behind a torch-lit screen … and he grabs multiple puppets to tell a story of good and evil.  99% of the show is not in English.  But they do a nice job of teeing up the plot, and we were able to follow along for the most part.  It’s a small outdoor venue with about 15-20 people in attendance.  Highlight of this post wa