Lucas Camilo

We’re in L.A.!  Venice Beach, to be specific.  And after the first three days of vacation, we’re feeling extremely lucky.  And relaxed (mixed with a pretty splash or two of exhaustion).  But the rewards of being somewhere new, a little bit warm, and with old friends makes it so, so worth it.

We flew out of Seattle on Friday morning after weeks of organizing all the logistics involved in traveling, plus traveling with vent.  And it all paid off.  We made it with relatively few glitches and arrived and the bungalow that our friends Walker and Devon had made available – Devon rents the place on AirB&B and its just one block from the beach!  The highlight of our first few hours (for Lucas at least) was hanging out with Lotus Flower and Mies, two chihuahuas who were very gentle and funny with Lucas.

Later that evening we had a wonderful dinner with Nancy and Donald who are part of the myotubular myopathy community.  They live in Huntington Beach and are letting us borrow their wheelchair accessible van for the week which is extremely generous.

On Monday we met up with our friends Ken and Patri and their kids Mateo and Sofia.  We knew Ken and Patri before we all had kids and lived in Brooklyn back in the mid-2000s.  Its been a long time since we’ve hung out so it was great to catch up.  Our destination was the La Brea Tar Pits and the Page museum where Lucas was able to see saber tooth tigers and woolly mammoths… he’s pretty sure he saw the fossils of an Indricotherium too, so don’t tell him that it was actually an ice age camel!  The giant puppet saber tooth was a little too much for Lucas and we had some tears… but the rest of the visit was fun.

In the afternoon we took our second big walk on boardwalk of Venice Beach.  Lucas was loving all the funky characters, and our friend Ilana was along for the journey and showed him the skate park where some amazing skateboarders were tearing it up.  We would have stayed out longer but a winder storm blew in and the sand got overwhelming.  Luckily, there was enough time to hit the infamous “muscle beach” and scope out the old-school roller skate dancers before heading back home.

Today we’re getting ready for the Superbowl and Lucas promises to say “Go Hawks!” many times.  We’re also watching the presidential elections in El Salvador closely and hoping for a big victory for the leftist FMLN party!

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