Notes from a beginner surfer

Trying the world's hardest sport.

This newsletter: surf noobie, giving things up, and beach textures.

Happy New Year, Traipser! Dakota here with Traipsing About, my newsletter exploring living an intentional life while retrying creativity (as an adult!), all spiced with experiences from overland travel.

No bots around here, just my goofy daily drawings, photos from travels, and thoughts on topics that interest me.

Wow, heavy events, both international and domestic, this week. I hope you’re all hanging in there. We’re taking it all in from the desert after a rainy San Diego holiday with family. Big ocotillo plants, blooming desert flowers, corrugated mountains, and nowhere to be is the order of the week for us.

Tiny house, big view.

In case you missed it: Last time I wrote about hitting the road in our Airstream for round two of Traipsing About. Where will our wheels take us?

Also, a housekeeping note: If you haven’t seen my emails lately, they’ve likely been gobbled up by greedy Spam Goblins (aka your spam folder).

Things you can do to stick it to the Goblins:

• Add traipsingabout@substack.com to your contacts.

• If you spot my newsletter in spam or promotions, mark it as “Not Spam” or drag it to your Primary inbox

• Replying with a quick “hello” or emoji works wonders! Always great to hear from you.

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One of these people is a complete surf poser…

Surfing is easy (until you try it)

While we were in San Diego, I gave surfing an honest go. With a borrowed board and wetsuit from my brother-in-law, off I went.

In past years, my surfing forays involved friends handing me a board and disappearing beyond the pounding waves. “Just paddle out!” they’d shout over their shoulder.

Easy in theory, right? Just paddle when a wave shows up, then stand up on your board and ride that sucker to shore!

Instead, I’d fight waves, get tumbled in the surf (yay, free salty cerebral cavity rinse), and then drag myself up to lie on the beach like a discarded car tire.

Try again. Awkwardly pop up to stand on the tippy, slippy board. Ass over teakettle. Are we having fun yet?

Drag myself to beach. Lie flat on board, questioning physical abilities. Remember how natural mountain biking felt the first few times…and how this reaaaally doesn’t.

But THIS time around, I actually made progress. (Hell, just surviving surfing is progress if you ask me.)

Why? I took a different approach and applied deliberate practice to my efforts. I broke things down into pieces rather than doing everything at once.

In piano, this would translate to playing the same note over and over to get the feel of the key movement instead of learning a song. In language, it would be breaking a word down into components rather than saying a sentence.

It’s what kids who non-stop dribble a basketball do: one. simple. thing.

So I practiced my pop-up on the beach, recreating moves my friend Wes styled for me at a Reno trailhead.

Then I stood in waist-deep water and waited for waves to crash before simply diving onto my board and letting the whitewash carry me toward shore. A couple rides on my knees, feeling the balance points.

After a bit, I was popping up to stand and riding the whitewash in (almost always with an awkward fall at the end).

That awkward pose fully captures how I felt at the beginning.

By the fourth day of doing this, a) my body felt like I’d been smashed by a whale and b) I was catching real (small) waves, straight out of the green part of the wave. Every time was a rush; I saw a glimmer of why many friends of mine love it.

We’ll see where the surf energy takes me. I can picture myself plopped on a Central American beach or camped on the coast just throwing myself at it until I get good don’t look like Humpty Dumpty falling off a wall.

For now, I’m going to bike and hike my face off under the desert sun. No salty nasal rinses there!

But surfing this time around reminded me of something I keep encountering in my music, language, and creativity efforts: progress isn’t dramatic. It’s awkward, quiet, repetitive. “Ant’s work,” as my piano teacher says.

And then, suddenly, it’s intoxicating.

An idea to kick off the new year

No New Year’s resolutions for me to start 2026. Instead, this concept from Mark Manson resonates with me:

Instead of thinking about what you’d like to add to your life, ask yourself what you’re willing to give up or remove from your life.

Because in 2026, most of our problem is not that we lack access or opportunity to something. The problem is that we have access and opportunity for too much. We are scattered, distracted, overwhelmed, pulled in eight different directions, and as a result, we live our lives in constant motion and stimulation but still feeling like we got nothing done.

Watching an insaaaane sunset in San Diego with our new friends (and long-time Airstreamers!) Jim and Carmen from Living in Beauty.

Beach textures

Over the holidays, we camped on the beach at San Elijo State Park in Encinitas. While the roar of sport bikes on Highway 101 wasn’t my fav and the trains were noisy, the proximity to the beach made it worth it and the noise disappeared as soon as we walked down the stairs to the ocean.

As usual, I loved the subtleties and textures when I got up close to features. Here are some favs.

Up close with the sand, rocks and water.

Traipsing Tidbits

1. Campflare has transformed our travel, letting us to set up free notifications for campgrounds and snag last-minute cancellations for popular parks. You can get it as an app or use on your desktop.

2. Wait But Why’s “Tales from Toddlerhood” cracked me up (and friends with kids that I sent it to).

3. A recent study shows that hard exercise after a vaccine increases your risk of getting myocarditis (aka f’ing up your heart!). Well, that’s exactly what I did in fall 2024 when a vaccine landed me in the ER. (I’m 100% good now, luckily.) Take it from me and do yoga, not wind sprints or a hard bike ride, for a few days off after a shot.

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This Traipsing About newsletter is checking out of the campsite.

But first, a thought for the road from writer and designer Edith Wharton (the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize) on what causes old age:

“The producer of old age is habit: the deathly process of doing the same thing in the same way at the same hour day after day, first from carelessness, then from inclination, at last from cowardice or inertia.

Habit is necessary; but it is the habit of having careless habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive ... one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.”

Onward,

Dakota

P.S. I laughed so hard “how small a mailbox would your mailman deliver to?”

Parting shot: surf’s up, baby!