My Story
Welcome to my website. I am very honored to have you here.
John and I are avid paddlers and adventurers. I’ve been chronicling our travels and adventures via Facebook for the past several years but have decided to post it in a more readable format. Thus this blog. It started out as ThePinkKayak.com, featuring Miss Pink and Baby Blue, our beloved Romany Classic Sea Kayaks. But they are not our only mode of transportation and exploration. When in the States at our son’s home, there’s our pop top Toyota truck camper. There are two canoes. A raft. Two inflatable sit upon kayaks. Feathercrafts.
I love to write. I love to take photos with my iPhone and to think about what you might find interesting to see. And to read. I love to share our adventures, often in places that not a whole lot of people get to experience. It also helps give structure to my days and allows me to create. Enjoy!
More Specifics…
I started this blog on October 7, 2017 when Tropical Storm Nate hit San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua, our new home, and tossed all of the local fishing boats up on shore.
Followed by the early winter of 2018, when my husband and I flew back to the States and began a grand, solo two-month and 500-mile long sea kayak adventure, paddling 1/3 of the way around Florida, along the Florida Saltwater Circumnavigational Trail. I blogged daily then, using my two thumbs and my smartphone while John snored beside me each night in the tent. This blog at the time was called ThePinkKayak.com.
We moved the last of our State-side possessions from our former barn in Colorado to our son’s home in the same State, kayaked the Yampa River with our Water Tribe, and then moved full-time to Nicaragua in July, 2018, in the midst of the country’s 2018 social unrest.
The following winter we drove from Florida to Nicaragua and back again.
But on July 31, 2018, I began writing my Nica Nuggets. My first two year’s worth of Nica Nuggets, all 100 of them, were first published on my Facebook page as well as the Life is San Juan del Sur Facebook page.
In celebration of my Nica Nuggets’ two-year and 100th-post anniversary, I copied them over to this blog and renamed the entire blog to be more inclusive of my varied writings to SusanaField.com.
We have though done one REALLY incredible sea kayak trip here in Nicaragua. We ran the Rio San Juan from its source at San Carlos, on Lake Nicaragua, to the Caribbean Sea and the road-less town of San Juan de Nicaragua. It took us 6 days of paddling through monkey and scarlet macaw and crocodile-filled jungle and was truly otherworldly. It was a highlight of my already very highlighted life.
Hiring Myself as a Writer
My writing is mostly a private thing. A daily journal, off and one as far back as I can remember. I was a pen pal letter writer in my early teens and would love to get my hands back on one particular 100-page letter I wrote at the age of 14. What did I have to say?
I wrote a few freelance articles for San Juan, Puerto Rico’s, daily English-language newspaper, The San Juan Star, when I worked there as a copy editor in the late 1980s.
The articles were about the 84’ ferro-cement sailing ship R/V Heraclitus, associated with the Biosphere 2 Project, in which I had been actively involved for several years. I had also sailed on the Heraclitus, 1/4 of the way around the world, from Sri Lanka across the Indian Ocean, up the Red Sea, and across the Mediterranean to Cadiz, Spain. It took nine months. Pre-Blog. Pre-Facebook. Pre-internet. Heck, I didn’t even take a camera with me, thinking a camera would somehow get in between me and the experience. All I have from that time are my good, old-fashioned journals and less than a hand-full of photos others took. That and a lot of memories.
When I was young, I thought the best job in the world would be working as a photo journalist for the only really cool travel magazine around at the time, the National Geographic.
Now as a retiree, I’ve hired myself for very cheap (just room and board, you see) to do my dream job. Here. With this blog. (Although I must admit that my expense account leaves a lot to be desired.)
Our Story
My husband, John, and I are married, in our 60s, and retired.
We are U.S. citizens living in San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua, which is a small fishing and surf/tourism town on the Pacific Ocean, just a stone’s throw north of Costa Rica.
We moved to Nicaragua part time in 2016 and full time in 2018.
We lived in the mountains and high desert of Western Colorado for the 25 years before that. And before that, western Washington State, which is where John grew up and I went to college.
Our passions are outdoor recreation (hiking, sea kayaking, river running, camping), and travel. I’m also an obsessive reader and writer.
We have one grown son, Cliff, who was a nine-time Junior National Nordic Combined Ski Champion and participated in 5 World Junior Championships during his teenage years (we attended his last competition in Erzurum, Turkey). He now lives in Colorado where he’s a talented Engineer.
We Met Sea Kayaking
When I first laid eyes on John he was in his boat in the bay doing hand rolls. When he first noticed me I was running naked into the icy water for a swim.
It was the early 1980’s and we were on a multi-day self-supported sea kayaking trip with friends in Barkely Sound, Vancouver Island, British Columbia. We were in our late 20s.
The boats we paddled then were ones we’d each independently built from molds. Sea kayaking was a pretty new sport in the late 1970s, early 1980s.
In fact, the year before I met John, he and his friend Bruce Titus were becoming one of the first modern-day thru paddlers of the Inside Passage, sea kayaking from Skagway, Alaska to Olympia, Washington. The entire paddle took them four straight months.
Early Family Adventures
Now flash forward to 1993 in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. We had married and had a son. In our time off as small business owners and during the off seasons of John’s 23-year career as a Ski Patroller, we ran rivers throughout the West with our son.
We ran the Grand Canyon in our wooden dory. And the Kongacut River amongst river ice floes out towards the Arctic Sea. There, Cliff ran naked with the Porcupine Caribou herd, his young body a red welt of bites from mosquitoes.
When Cliff was old enough to paddle, the three of us spent weeks sea kayak touring in British Columbia, Canada, in Baja California Sur, and in the Bahamas.
We backpacked the 500-mile Colorado Trail as a family in 2000 when Cliff was just seven.
We hiked, biked, skied, camped, and soaked in remote, natural hot springs.
Now
Now, our son is grown and John and I are still paddling, hiking, camping, traveling and exploring together. It’s been years since he’s done a hand roll (although we both still practice our Eskimo Roll) and years since I’ve jumped naked into the cold sea (now the local sea is thankfully warm and I am clad).
Right before we retired in 2017 we worked two years as the Operations Managers for a sea kayaking outfitter in Loreto, Baja California Sur, Mexico. It was there that we were first exposed to to Nigel Dennis kayaks and we fell in love with the Romany, which is the make of the sea kayaks we have now.
At the same time, we committed to living a simple and exotic life along the beach in Nicaragua.
We love Nicaragua, its beauty, its slow pace, its sunsets, its people.
Thank You
Thank you for following along on our adventures. For letting us share our passion. On the water. Off the water. In Nicaragua. In the States, Canada, Mexico, wherever this life and blog takes us, which isn’t much of anywhere other than near home during this pandemic.
It means a lot to me to have a community to share our adventures with. Thanks!