Life on Totem is different than life on shore. Back on Bainbridge Island, we’d have breakfast, go to school, go home, play, have dinner, go to bed, and do the same thing again the next day. Here we have a whole different routine. We get up when we prefer. We kayak or go into town. You don’t see the same trees like Madronas that you see on Bainbridge. Here we see things like cactus, red rocks, sand, and clear warm water.
To go to shore we take our dingy. But sometimes we take out our kayak. Sometimes we even swim to shore! But to go longer distances we take our boat TOTEM.
To get water we have a Spectra Water Maker. It has several filters that filter out the sea salt, algae and other organisms to turn it into fresh drinking water. But sometimes we use dock water from marinas. For food we can catch fish like bonito, jacks, sierra, tuna, dorado, etc. We can also get food like meat, tortillas, and vegetables from local tiendas.
Normally we don’t use clocks, watches, etc to tell time. We can estimate the time by looking at were the sun is in the sky. How bright it is outside. But we could just estimate.
For breakfast we usually have a simple cereal so it doesn’t involve any cooking. For lunch we mostly have Mexican food like quesadillas and sometimes we have a sandwich. For dinner a lot of times we have Mexican meals like tacos, enchiladas, etc but a lot of times we like to have things like pasta, rice and beans.
One of my favorite things about our big trip is snorkeling. Snorkeling is even better in clear and warm water and near rocks where there is lots of fish. When I am beach coming I like to look for fish skeletons. I also like to look for urchin skeletons and shells. I like to go into town to explore it, meet new people and to help shop in the local tienda.
I like our life on Totem. Our backyard is the entire ocean. I miss rain, we haven’t had a drop of rain in Mexico. I miss my friends in my neighborhood, and my school. But I like it here, where the water is clear and warm, the town is nice, nobody has much money but they have a home and a tienda where they sell food or fish. On Bainbridge, people have nice houses and two cars and paved roads and big grocery stores. Here, the roads are dirt, they have small houses of cement with maybe a couple rooms, instead of big grocery stores they normally have little tiendas or shops where they sell things like food and jewelry. Mexico isn’t better, but Bainbridge isn’t better, they’re just different.
