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G’Day Mates!

This is The Girl, writing to you for the DC Rainmaker weekly newsletter. This week, and for the next several weeks the DCR Headquarters has been relocated, “Down Under”. If this relocation is news to you or this is your first time reading the Newsletter, then you are way behind- go HERE to catch up on past newsletters and Ray gossip!

Apologizes to my loyal newsletter readers. Two weeks in a row I’ve been late on publications. I’m hoping to get a “pass” here, as technically my Tuesday this week didn’t exist? I boarded a plane on Monday night to Hong Kong and woke up sometime late afternoon on Wednesday in Adelaide with a beach view! What happened? Not too sure, but I’m not complaining either! If there is one thing in life that truly recharges my batteries, it’s listening to the waves rolling in while inhaling that salty breeze. I guess that’s a product of growing up on an island, but I will say that Australia has the upper hand on weather over my hometown island.  

Now, on with the show!

The blog has seen quite a few posts over the last few days. 8 in fact since the last newsletter, and they are all listed for you below. It seems the one that brought the most comments is the “Australia I have Arrived” post. To which, I think I will be submitting a petition to have changed to “We have arrived”. Later in the post Ray notes that there is indeed 3 out of 4 Maker Family members who made the trip, but come on… after that 24+ hours of travel I would think we would make the headlines no? Anyways, thanks to all of you Aussies for the suggestions on things to do and places to go while we are on the Island! Never know, at this rate of cool things to do and see maybe we should stay for February too!

Now if that’s too many blog posts for you to read, don’t forget you can pop over to the DC Rainmaker YouTube channel. A lot of those before mentioned posts have videos that coincide, and maybe you can save some time there? Sort of like having SparkNotes when you were in High School and didn’t actually want to read the entire tale of Othello.

Last week I mentioned that Ray and Ben Hobbs from TRS Triathlon Radio try to knock out a weekly Podcast (albeit they have recently failed). As well, I had mentioned that somehow I was talked into being interviewed one day. It appears that a lot of you went back to the archives and found episode 21, to the extent that now Ray wants to get me recording again… this time a Facebook Live session? How did this happen? I’m not sure I’ve totally agreed to this yet, we will see what the sun and the sand does for my mood and motivation over the next few days!

Now as always, if you have time after clicking on all of those links above, you might like to keep on scrolling down to below the fold where I take a moment to ramble about whatever is fresh on my mind. This week I’ll mostly be serving up a glance into traveling half way around the globe with a six month old and combating jetlag! It’s a long one, so take it or leave it J

This past week at CES, Suunto introduced not one but two different products.  Of course, it’s the Spartan Wrist HR watch that got most of the attention, complete with distracting…

As with most things in the tech realm – announcements from companies at CES usually fall into one of two camps: software or hardware.  This year we saw many software…

Well then, that was most definitely one of the more roundabout ways to get to Australia – but I have arrived!  Well, we finally arrived.  Upon leaving CES in Las…

Back at Eurobike this past summer there was a lonely tent outside next to the bike trial area.  Under that tent was a single Wahoo KICKR, a flat-screen TV, a…

Earlier this week, Casio officially unveiled their all new smart outdoor watch, the Pro Trek Smart.  This is their second GPS watch aimed squarely at the outdoor market, following last…

Here at CES, Misfit has significantly upped their activity tracker game by diving into the GPS watch realm.  The company, known for their lightweight and fashionable wearables, announced a new…

This week at CES, Suunto has officially unveiled their first optical heart rate capable watch – the Suunto Spartan Sport Wrist HR.  You may remember back this past summer, when…

Back in February of 2016 Garmin purchased U.S. based GPS device and map maker DeLorme.  In the press release of that acquisition Garmin specifically called out Delorme’s inReach two-way satellite communication…

In Depth Thoughts from the Girl

Some people looked at me crossed eyed when I mentioned our trip to Australia, and others said “good on ya”. Traveling with a baby isn’t a new thing to us, but this doesn’t make it an easy task either. Given that she’s only 6 months old, it might sound bizarre that she’s already cutting her teeth in the frequent flyer world. Landing at Adelaide Airport this week completed her 16^th flight. I guess it depends on which way you want to look at it, but we also live with a dog, in a foreign country with lots of foreign languages surrounding us, and not so much opportunity to enjoy support from family. We do the best that we can every day, as I’m sure every parent tries.

At this point she squeals with excitement to see our dog come flying around the corner approaching her for a morning sniff and kiss. I’ve seen other babies, not accustom to animals, lose their minds when a dog gets too close. As well, every day she is schlepped around town via stroller or carrier as I run errands, visit friends, or get work done. Rarely does she get spoiled by a car ride, and rarely at this point does she mind. She seems to take it all in stride now, as she has never been a house bound baby, sheltered from people, or restricted to a firm schedule.

Other families have 9-5 jobs a spacious house, regular routine, and very well adjusted, sleep privileged babe. I think both family situations are awesome. Believe me, there are many many days that I look at Ray and beg to return to North America, live on a cul-de-sac of young families, and let me fill up my SUV with all of the good things I can find at Target (pronounced “Tar-zhey”). But I know that time will eventually come.

For the moment we are soaking up living an amazing lifestyle, filled with adventure, and life long memories. Don’t miss understand me, this doesn’t mean life is easy for us, nor am I complaining. I have a serious amount of planning and prep, not to be forgotten headaches, when it comes to organizing for a trip like this! As Ray has a well-prepared suitcase of electronic goodies to test and review, I have the suitcase resembling one organize-extremist mom. So my point is, I know some people are viewing our travels with Babe as a bit crazy, but I think (hope) others can appreciate the efforts we put forth to keep our little healthy, happy, and spoiled with opportunity to fill her baby book with lifetime adventure.    

A lot of readers have shown interest in how one plans for a full day of travel with a baby? Let me say, life was a lot easier when she was exclusively breastfeeding. Yeah, it really limited what my every-day (mom’s day) looked like. I couldn’t just hand her off to Ray and go out for the night with the girls, and sleeping through the night was just a distant memory. But we often joked that I was like a traveling vending machine, no mess, no clean up. Now we are in a stage of bottles, formula, bottled or boiled water, heating systems, cleaning systems, how many scoops per ounce??? This is our first travel with her where she’s actually on a schedule/structure and taking foods that are prepared for her. I had packed in the carry on two extra outfits, not knowing the temperature of the plane, and as well backup in case of a famous baby-blowout. As well, I had six (empty/clean) bottles on deck. I didn’t want to have to mess with washing bottles and worrying about safe water. As well, the flight attendant gave me a 1.5L bottle of Evian, and I had 3 pre-measured formula meals in something like this nifty contraption. Plus a recycled jam jar of 2 days’ worth of formula, in case of delay or an unforeseen circumstances. Sadly, I did not take a picture of all of my creative packing, instead I give you a look into what the table in our hotel room looks like at the moment.

I think the key to our successful journey down here started with our attitude/ expectations regarding what a “good” flight looked like. Our goal was to try to have her sleep for the most of that first flight, and just “hang on” for the second. Well the sleeping for the first flight went out the window about 90 minutes in. We stuffed her with her 8:00 nighttime bottle upon boarding, and she had been out cold on Ray’s chest initially for taxi, take off, and a good 60 minutes in. But…then came dinner service… on with the lights, clanking of carts and dishes, passengers retrieving things from overhead bins, etc.

On previous flights, we hadn’t taken notice of such sounds as she was still in that developmental period of “sleep through an earthquake”. Now ehhhhh, this was a “problem”, and she was wide awake and ready to party. So we readjusted our expectations. You can’t stand up and ask everyone on the plane to stop moving “there’s a baby trying to sleep”. We also felt that we had a bit of a responsibility to not disrupt the rest of the cabin’s enjoyment of their flight by allowing our babe to just cry it out. Ray and I just took turns for dinner, walking the aisles with her, keeping her occupied. We both passed the baton on sleeping because there was zero prize for the parent who stayed up the longest. By the end of the flights she had slept about, hmmmm zero minutes, but she was smiling and the flight attendants were all goo goo for her. No one threated to open an emergency exit in flight, and we didn’t run out of formula or diapers. In my mind that was a super successful 21 hours in the air! 

I think we have been in Adelaide, or more accurately Glenelg, for 3 days now. After combating jetlag and a dry cough no doubt a souvenir from the dry air on the plane, we are all finally finding our bearings. It believe I have one more full day with Ray before he goes full throttle into “Tour Down Under” coverage. So in that case I’m going to get off of my soap box and go enjoy some family time in the sun! And don’t worry you Aussie readers, we are sufficiently “Slip, Slop, Slap, Seek & Sliding” on all of the SPF we can get our hands on!

As always, the email for the newsletter is below, so if you have any questions of suggestions, especially for our time here in Oz, we’d love to hear from you!

 ~The Girl