The next is this month, when we’re taking advantage of an Air Tahiti promotion—kids fly, eat and sleep free—and traveling to Bora Bora for 12 days of bliss. (Hence the head’s up: EcoStiletto Kids archived content will run on Mommy Greenest for the next two weeks.)
Obviously, in sustainability terms, it’s deplorable to travel thousands of miles to sleep on a beach when you live not 10 miles from a perfectly snoozable stretch of sand.
But to all you sustainabullies out there, I say consider this
evidence:
- We haven’t taken a vacation in the 14 years that we’ve been married. (Despite their tourism-friendly locations, annual visits to family and New Orleans or Santa Fe don’t count.)
- The trip is to celebrate my husband’s 40 th birthday. (If making it this far doesn’t deserve a celebration, I don’t know what does.)
- With a 10, eight and two-and-a-half year-old in tow, we’re in the halcyon days between terrible twos and tweendom. (This may be the only family trip we get without massive stretches of screaming and/or sulking.)
Can you let us off the hook?
But between the staycation at the hotel and the real vacation in Tahiti, my husband and I managed to squeeze in a perfect day. Somewhere between a vacation and a date, this is what I'm now calling a "daycation."
It was even—relatively—eco-friendly. First, we spent the day scuba diving from a boat just off the island of Catalina, staring at bright orange Garibaldi and having a face-off with a corpulent bat ray, who watched us for one fascinating minute, then swooped away.
Sitting on the ocean in the middle of a kelp bed? Priceless.
Because it was the final day of our SCUBA certification process, the boat trip was a group affair—public transport, natch. We were certified by the fantastically eco-conscious (no spear fishing, regular reef rebuilding trips, on-board recycling and monthly beach clean-ups) Eco Dive Center in Culver City, CA. It is, hands down, filled with the coolest, most diverse, amazing and dedicated group of people we have ever encountered. If you’re going to spend four hours shivering, this is the group to do it with.
Spaced out and hungry after our dive, we headed a few blocks down Sepulveda to the yummy new Vietnamese restaurant Pho Show for bowls of tofu soup and rice-paper wrapped spring rolls, but were diverted by the Five Senses Spa, which had just debuted next door. Super clean, with traditional screened rooms and trained masseuses, it’s open seven days a week, from 9:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. They squeezed us in just under the wire, and we spent $50 for an hour’s worth of bending, pulling and kneading that unknotted muscles we didn’t even know we had.
Yes, the staycation was sleep-friendly and Tahiti will be spectacular. But one day I hope my husband and I can squeeze in another daycation, which took us underwater, to Thailand and Vietnam in eight hours and 40 miles.
Bliss.
