You see. If you just give it a chance, you'll find you like it.

I love road trips. The longer they are, the better. And when the destination is not so important as the trip there, that’s even better.

I’ve taken many road trips, often in the search of good waves to surf. And several as a family of five, with the latest trip up the coast of Central California.

Time seems to stand still on these trips. My thoughts wander as I stare out the window, and I dream. Stories flood into my head for this blog and elsewhere.

And we talk and listen to music.

It’s the tunes that often come to remind me months and even years later of those very moments out on the road or reaching a beach or a national park. The memories come flooding back vividly with pictures, tastes and smells.

When I was single, my road trips had a diet of my favorite music at the time, or that of my friends. Early on (after my Styx phase, of course), it was punk rock with bands like Bad Brains, Bad Religion, Circle Jerks, Suicidal Tendencies – and then U2. But more so, the trips were infused with tunes by Bob Marley, Janis Joplin and Neil Young as we drove our way north to Santa Cruz or south to Mexico in the search of waves. Then came Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nirvana, The Levellers and The Waterboys on an eight-month backpacking trip through Europe, thumbing it to surf spots in Ireland and taking buses and trains to hit beaches in England, Scotland, France and Portugal and then further inland without my board to visit Poland, Russia and Hungary.

The music seeps in and drives you along.

Now with three children, my music or that of my wife is not the only music. The kids, all under the age of 10, have a say in what gets played and they can easily sway me through the repetition of “pretty please.” I could squirm at their choices and say, “What’s this?” Or think that it all sounds the same, or that the lyrics suck.

But I’ve learned not to scoff, but to embrace. The lesson came early on with High School Musical.

So on our five-day road trip up through Central California, the albums of Adele, Katy Perry and Lily Allen reined. I discovered some good music. And we as a family came to sing along happily, my two daughters doing a superb sing-along with Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep.” And what fun it was for all of us to sing Lily Allen’s “Fuck You” as we drove through Carmel Valley and past a couple of Republican stiffs collecting signatures to impeach President Obama.

What could be better than to join the kids in listening to these tunes, to their tunes? It certainly is better than alienating myself from my very own children by scoffing.

So on a latest day trip with another family to Mar de las Pampas on the Argentine coast from our summer home in Pinamar, we blasted a new-to-me One Direction album and the kids sang along loudly and happily as we drove down the highway, and this made me beam.

Yeah, one day I'll find the look.

I’ve grown a beard. Becoming or not, that’s still a debate in my household – and with some friends.

I’ve always shaved once a week, a perk of working for myself as a writer. Now it’s been more than six months since using a razor, and I’ve come to think that the beard makes me look rather rustic. Or maybe a bit like the Scottish-born American naturalist John Muir, a childhood hero.

My wife found it adventurous at first, whatever that meant.

I’m still, well, scratching my beard as I ponder my new look and whether it is cutting it or not. My older brother has a thick and multicolored beard, and my uncle has a long white beard. They both look good. And me? Well, it’s a plain brown beard. And it has brought a few downers. First came the inevitable and nagging itchiness. Then came the appearance of my first white hairs after years of saying, “Hey, I still look so young. I’ve got no gray hairs at 44!”

Now the white hairs stick straight out of my beard.

I was still debating the bearded look the other day when I went to interview a CEO in Buenos Aires for an assignment. I had interviewed him before and he walked right by me in the reception area. He hadn’t noticed me. But I hadn’t noticed him either because, to my surprise, he was sporting a beard of his own. He said it is a summer tradition. He looked rather dashing, elegant and handsome even, a young and successful entrepreneur.

Me?

I’ve got a lot of remarks, but none of these.

Indeed, after the interview I went back to Pinamar, where we are spending the summer, and I went surfing on the best day of the season, with 6- to 10-foot waves roaring in and few people out. I surfed for two-and-a-half hours and then caught three long and screamingly fast waves before calling it quits and heading in. Near the shore, a random guy out for a swim said something to me. I thought he might have said something appreciative about my rides but I couldn’t hear him properly so I said, “What was that?” He looked at me with my long beard and wide-brimmed beach hat (yeah, I often wear a hat when surfing to avoid the sun burning my shortly shaven head), and he repeated rather amusedly, “You look like a pirate.”

I said, “Oh.”

And kept going.

But then I thought while walking down the beach, what if I look like Jack Sparrow of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” films or, better yet, the actual actor, Johnny Depp. That would please my wife tremendously.

But, alas, not many have associated my new look with him. I’ve become more attached to the Tom Hanks character in “Cast Away,” the film when he is stranded for years on an uninhabited island. The comparison seems to bring tremendous satisfaction to those who finally figure it out for themselves with a string of “I know, I know, I know” followed by a delighted declaration of the comparison, hearty laughs and then some uproarious – to them – impersonations of the Tom Hanks character saying “Wilson.”

My three children have been more direct and simple in their appreciation of my beard in saying that they think it’s pretty cool. And the youngest has taken this facial-hair experiment as an educational opportunity. She’s learning new words. And the latest is moustache. Her brother has just told her the word.

The four year old ponders this for a second and then says, “But what’s the beard?”

Her brother, who is seven and wiser, says the beard is that bit, pointing to the chin and jaws and just below the cheeks.

“And the moustache?”

“Ah,” he tells his sister, “That’s the part just above the mouth and below the nose.”

Her sister then looks more carefully at my face and then points up and says to me, “So what do you call the hairs coming out of your nose?”

“Ah, well…” I stutter before adding, “Right, who wants to go for a walk?”

There's nothing better than a good cat nap!

My son loves the summer. It brings a long break from school to do as he pleases, anything he wants. And this summer his role model is Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes.

“Look, look,” he yells to me, pointing to one of the comic strips.

It is about Calvin’s appreciation of Saturdays — and, by extension, summer — as a time of perfect freedom, with unlimited opportunity. “And what better way to appreciate that opportunity,” he tells Hobbes, “than by squandering it watching cartoons all day!”

I laugh.

He says, “You see, it’s good to watch TV.”

Left to his devices, that’s just what this seven year old would do on these lazy summer days after a morning at the beach, a whirl on his bike or a romp through the forest in Pinamar, on the coast of Argentina where we are spending the season. Then comes a chance to squander the rest of the day with delightful vegetation on the sofa watching cartoons.

Us parents, concerned about his upbringing and education – and maybe his reflection on us as parents, think: No TV. No, no, no. At least not too much.

He sighs despondently.

I try to perk him up. “Why don’t you read?”

He is a reader. He learned to read in first grade despite his learning problems, and now he is going into second grade. And he’s always loved books. But TV? It’s great too, he’s told me. So why ever turn it off?

We once lived without television and the kids played more, read more, and this made us parents feel like we were hip and advanced. But the episode was kind of like cheating. Wouldn’t it be better to instill the love and habit of reading while the temptation of 24/7 cartoons loomed in the very same living room? That’s real life, isn’t it?

Reading? I got the bug at an early age, happy as anything to read all afternoon. The Hardy Boys, Encyclopedia Brown, Swallows and Amazons, The Lord of the Rings. And summer was best for reading because you could get caught up in the stories and whole series like The Chronicles of Narnia. My wife, too, is a big reader, more so than me – or anybody I know, for that matter.

Our regular reading is a pretty good way on its own accord to inspire the habit in our children. But for added effect, this summer we signed them up to a reading challenge with prizes at the end based on how much you read. Our eldest daughter, who is nearly 10, is devouring the Dolphin Diaries series and Calvin and Hobbes. Our four-year-old girl is keen on a host of picture books, which we read to her – or her sister does.

And our son? I think he’s just made the click, just caught the bug, and just very well may win the summer reading competition! He’s been on the sofa – his favored hangout for watching cartoons – for the past hour reading Calvin and Hobbes.

I look up from my work on the computer every few minutes to admire his progress.

But what’s this? I think, as I take a longer look at him in his reading marathon. Wait a second… I get up and walk over to the sofa, where I discover that he’s not reading at all but happily dozing, the book on his face.

“What, pray tell, are you doing?” I ask while standing over him.

He looks up at me sleepily and says, “Sleeping,” before rolling over onto his side and adding after a long yawn, “And don’t wake me up because I’m going to win.”

“Win what?”

“The summer sleeping competition.”

Yeah, they'll be calling me skinny by the end of the summer, el flaco.

There’s nothing I like better than pulling off my shirt after a day at the beach. My arms ache from surfing, my back too. My eyes are heavy and my body feels good. My shirt peels off my salty, sunned and rough skin, and there’s a pleasant smell of salt and surf wax. I breathe in and remember the day, a day well spent, a day at the beach.

I’ve been surfing since I was 13, first hitting the waves on my brother’s Doyle soft board over Easter in the cold waters of Will Rogers State Beach in Los Angeles.

I was hooked from the start.

I read books on how to surf, practiced standing up on my parents’ bed and soon bought my own board, a seven-foot-something yellow single fin. I started making the trip to the beach by bus, skateboard or by nagging my dad to take my brother and me.

That was the start of a surfing life that has taken me up and down the California coast and to Baja and then Hawaii, Europe and South America. Often I hit the beach humming a song by Red Cross (now Redd Kross) with the lyrics: “We go to the beach because it’s fun.”

Simply put. But that’s what surfing and going to the beach is about for me: simple fun.

I still surf at 44, primarily in Pinamar, where many of the stories of Pine Tree Paradise are set. This is Argentina, a country not well known for surfing. Better waves can be had in neighboring Brazil, Chile, Peru, Ecuador and even Uruguay.

But the swells do come and I try to be there.

My wife and children know of my addiction, of my itch for surfing. I can withstand hitting the waves to take my children into the ocean to learn how to stand up. But my attention is on the surf beyond, and soon comes my declaration: “I’ve got to go surfing.”

So I go and surf, and these past two weeks I have been giddy. These are the first days of summer and more days will be had. The trouble is that my arms are still weak for paddling after spending months out of the water in Buenos Aires, where we live the rest of the year. Soon my arms turn to spaghetti after paddling in the surf. But not after an hour or more of good waves that put a smile on my face so that I glide through the rest of the day, contented and wanting to build sandcastles, take the kids back in the water and run into the sand dunes.

I’ve had my fill; the itch is gone.

At home, I help my youngest daughter, who is four, to have a bath.

She too is happy after a day at the beach. And even more so now that her brother and sister are out with friends. This means that she has the full rein of the house so she can splay out on the sofa watching whatever she wants on TV.

She sighs.

I sigh.

And she tells me her plans for life: “When I grow up, I want to have a baby just like Mummy.”

I smile.

“And I want to have boobies just like Daddy.”

My face sinks.

The youngest runs downstairs and I think about her comment, about my body, about too much work, about not enough surfing, about living so far from the beach. And my thoughts lead to a solution: I must spend even more time surfing this summer. My body needs it, so too my mind and my life.

I smile at the thought.

I drove my father to the coast, to spend the summer in our Pine Tree Paradise in Pinamar, Argentina.

My father is visiting from Los Angeles, 92 years old and with time on his hands to spend in his homeland of Argentina.

He’s not letting time slip by. He’s been reading though my library, hanging out in the cafes, chatting with friends and exercising. He talks with my three children and watches them play. All of this may be slow going for him at his age, but he is steady.

We all sit down at dinnertime and talk, but it doesn’t happen all the time. There’s been a lot to do: work, the children, and the end-of-year activities. The days go by and then we go to bed without much of a word.

My dad likes conversation. A cousin of ours asked how she could help. I thought of all the medical treatment, the nurses, the doctors’ visits, the supplies to stock up on. I thought for a moment more and then said, “Conversation.”

But it’s not always easy to stop and talk, to sit down and have a conversation. Even my father says his father wasn’t much of a conversationalist at home, busy with this and that in the raising of a family of four children and his work as an engineer in Buenos Aires. Really, my father told me, it wasn’t until road trips that his father would open up and talk. My father told me this as we drove through Chascomus, remembering fondly his trips with his father to the Argentine coast in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, when Carilo and Pinamar were yet to exist as the large resorts they are now, then but a few houses, a hotel maybe and small trees in a large expanse of sand dunes. My father knew families that owned the land and his father would drive them there, but they would spend the summer in Mar del Plata, a city an hour and a half down the coast.

But it was the drives that my father said that he loved as much as anything. They would stop for lunch in Chascomus, where they’d order fresh-caught fish at a small restaurant by the lake and then sit, eat and talk.

His father would open up and tell him stories of his own childhood in Buenos Aires and trips with his father, an American immigrant who lived in a large house, big enough for his 12 children and the American cowboys who came to help him run a ranch in the interior of the country. The cowboys would sleep in tents at the foot of the garden before riding south.

So my father and I pulled over for lunch in Chascomus and he told me of the day he started building a pool at his father’s house in Tigre, of cutting down eucalyptus trees at a friend’s farm, of meeting Victoria Ocampo, Borges and other writers, still little known then, and of living in Mexico and New York, and of meeting my mother in St. Louis, and of taking his three sons – my brothers and me – on a five-day hike in the Sequoias.

After lunch we got back in the car and the conversation continued as we drove along the long highway through the Pampas and toward the beach with nothing to do but to drive and talk. So that’s what we did.

Sing with me for peace and to save the planet.

Then it happened.

The makeup came, and the look, the walk, and then there she was on stage singing into a microphone with five classmates. My eldest daughter is nine years old and growing up.

I watched starry-eyed. And blue. I had both feelings at the same time watching her and her friends in the fourth grade singing at the year-end school party with lipstick and mascara, and the lyrics of a pop song I don’t know emanating from their mouths.

I watched and thought how far we’ve come, how far she’s come from a tike to what seems to be a budding teenager. She’s told me how to get to outer space. And how to get to heaven and back. She’s lugged a bucket of sand to our house in the city from the beach in Pinamar, where we lived for two years in our pine tree paradise. She said, “It’s for you, Daddy. So that won’t miss the beach so much.” She’s explained to me a wicked way to declutter our house and her bloody sure methods to make some extra cash. She’s beguiled me with stories of spooks and surprised me with her platform for the presidency, and, as importantly, she has taught me how to simply chill out, let the wind blow through my hair and enjoy today.

Now she’s growing up, transforming, thinking new thoughts and even contemplating the end of the world. “We’re ruining the earth,” she told mum the other day. “It won’t last forever. And I hope we’re dead before then.”

She’s trying to raise awareness about global warming and other causes. Walk by our house and you’ll see. Hand-drawn “Save the Planet” posters are scotch-taped to our windows, so too a proclamation to pick up your dog’s shit. It’s your civic duty. Well, it should be. But it seems too few people give a shit about clean streets or civic duties. That’s society today. Then we’ll be dead.

But that’s not the way for me. Not anymore. I’m going to pitch in and help, be civic, be dutiful, and be a help to this world for what time I have left. And on this very evening at the school party I’m going to let this pop song by my nine-year-old daughter and her friends move me to dance with my four-year-old daughter perched on my shoulders at the foot of the stage.

It’s good to dream of a better world and enjoy what’s good now.

Yeah, you heard us right. 'Panza llena, corazon contento. Full belly, happy heart.'

It’s hard to slow down as a parent with three children under the age of 10. There are meals to make, homework to help out with and after-school activities. Food to buy, birthday parties, sports and so on.

The day starts with the alarm clock and races without pause until the dishes are washed and put away, the dog is walked and you’re in bed at last.

Through all this, you’ve got to make some cash to keep the machine in motion and, oh, to go out and enjoy yourself, have a beer, play a game of soccer, go surfing, sit down with a book or, as of late, to watch all those movies and series that made a splash unbeknownst to us while we were having babies and changing nappies.

Is there another way?

My first thought is: publish a book and make a mint so I can throw in the day job and slow down.

I’ll give it a shot. But what about in the meantime?

I do have a proposition. It is a simple plan based on the premise of consume less, work less. The trouble is that it’s not so simple in practice with young children, at least not yet. Sure, our youngest daughter, who is four, has a killer wardrobe of hand-me-downs from her nine-year-old sister and older friends. That’s a help on our finances. And we’ve done a lot of cutting back this year as inflation screws our monthly budget. It’s 25% annual and thought to be speeding up in Argentina, where we live. So I’ve downsized my banks and trimmed the supermarket-shopping list: more fresh food, less processed. And I’ve become an ardent street parker. There are many ways to cut back, and more will follow. But still the pace of life continues at a fast clip – and my book remains unfinished.

So a couple of weeks ago I picked up a book to help out: “How to Be Idle” by Tom Hodgkinson. It’s a sort of loafer’s manifesto with tips and reasons to slow down, work less and enjoy life more. Yeah, it sounds a bit of hype, but it has sound foundations. What to do? Shun mass consumption, for one thing. That’s no problem for me. I’m not flash. So spending less, in theory, means you can work less, play more and sleep more, even take an afternoon nap. This is tough to apply for an American brought up in a society of the Protestant work ethic even as I tried to live as a surf bum and as a writer in the vein of Ernest Hemingway or Henry Miller enjoying the café life in Paris while spinning out prose.

Now I’m 44 and the realization has struck. I’ve been speeding for too many years, so it is time to slow down, and what better way to start than at mealtime with slow food. So I turned off the computer, inched my way to the kitchen, poured a beer and started slowly preparing a meal of locally sourced foods to savor casually.

My children sat at the table doing homework, drawing and playing a computer game. They seemed rather impressed to see me so casual at such an early hour of 6 p.m. I am a reporter, which means deadlines and fits of work, especially in chaotic Argentina.

We got to chatting as I peeled carrots and prepared a dinner of roasted pork with oven-baked vegetables and Yamani rice. No hurries. Everything will be savored in its time with a bit of Bob Marley playing along.

I took a sip of beer and a deep breath, and then suddenly something happened.

My youngest daughter’s belly rumbled.

“I’m hungry!” she said, sternly.

This was met by “me, too” from her brother and sister, followed by, “When’s dinner ready?” and, “I’m starving!”

Resolute in my newfound approach to a slow life, I smiled and said, “In a while. Don’t worry. It’s good to take your time.”

The youngest wasn’t having this at all.

She scowled at me and said, “If you don’t give me my dinner now, I WILL SCREAM!”

I looked at her nervously and resolved to try slow food another night because now was the time to work at the pace of McDonald’s.

Man, it's not easy to get a free lunch anymore!

When I was growing up in Los Angeles, money wasn’t flush in my family. We weren’t bad off but we didn’t have what it takes to be flash.

For a kid, this meant that treats were not always forthcoming. Certainly they came, but with five children my parents kept their spending on candies and stuff rather tame. My mother would take my two brothers and me to the beach by bus (she didn’t drive) and we’d have a blast and eat our home-prepared lunch on the hot sand, first, of course, running to the ocean to wash the sand off our hands. Then we’d bolt back and bolt down our sandwiches and crackers and fruit before bolting back to the ocean, or trying to at least after heeding our mother’s warning that you have to wait 30 minutes for the food to settle before going into the ocean. I think she let us wiggle away after we whined for 10 minutes straight.

On occasion she’d treat us to a cake at a café in Santa Monica, dividing in half the bus journey home to Brentwood.

They are memories we still savor.

And maybe this was because we weren’t hitting up the sweetshop everyday, a practice that didn’t kick in until we were old enough to go on our own after scraping together a few coins ourselves or by “borrowing” from my father’s stash in his closet, unbeknownst to him.

Hunger, thirst? We knew the feelings when out playing in the neighborhood or walking back from the bus or school or the beach, and we’d get home and dig into whatever we could, the fridge door ajar (this was before the days of the open-door beep warning) as we stuffed ourselves.

Then a joyous day came.

All three of us boys were on Little League baseball teams, and on one hot Saturday afternoon we had back-to-back games and somehow the organizers had selected my mother and one of our older sisters to run the canteen as volunteers. They had to open up for a few hours and sell food to players and spectators.

I couldn’t believe my luck as I walked inside the canteen and gazed at all the delicacies: candies, cookies and soft drinks.

Then the heavens opened up when my mother or sister handed me a chocolate bar and a can of 7-Up.

I don’t know if they paid for it or considered it a fringe benefit, but I savored every bite and sip of my free food, not wanting ever to reach the bottom of the can.

I remembered the story the other day when I picked up my youngest daughter from school.

It was hot and the four year old was grumpy, and the only thing that would improve her mood was if we went to the kiosk and bought her a sweetie.

I told her that my wallet was empty, which was true because my wife had gone out with all the money.

She stammered.

I said, “Sorry.”

Then she went silent for a minute before coming out with her plan. “I know,” she said, her face brightening. “We can have the kiosk guy pay for us. He can buy me a candy.”

I let her continue to dream of how to score a free drink and sweets because it is a good dream and, who knows, maybe one day I will have my very own canteen.

My god! Did you see the price of those shoes!

My father gave my three children a jar of pennies, and they were thrilled. We’d just opened bank accounts for each of them, and the credit union gave them a bunch of paper rolls, each to hold 50 pennies. They set out to count and fill, and soon they had $3 in pennies each. We went to the credit union and made the deposit, and they’re now watching their savings grow with the interest.

Mind you, this all happened at a credit union in the U.S., my homeland where we were recently on holiday from where we now live in Argentina.  You give a bunch of pennies to a U.S. bank like Bank of America or JP Morgan Chase and they’ll charge you a couple of bucks or more to accept them, hold them and then withdraw them. Many credit unions don’t have monthly fees or heinous charges. The costs are for your own mistakes like going overdrawn.

All of this also happened in a country where inflation is pretty tame at 2.2% annual.

In Argentina, inflation is 25% annual. That is unless you believe the president, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner. She measures it at 10% and pulls out her claws if you question her, turning your query back on you so that she never really answers you but makes you want to cry.

A deft politician? Certainly.

A good stateswoman? Not at all.

She dismisses inflation as a beneficial consequence of a bubbly economy. That was true for 2003 to 2011, when growth surged and inflation was left largely unchecked. But the economy has since run out of fizz. This should bring down inflation on less demand, and hence price cuts to keep people shopping. But no, it continues to rise as the government signs off on large wage hikes, prints pesos, pushes up public service rates and taxes, and basically errs in its economic policies. Private economists warn of 30% inflation in 2013.

I’d like to shout out on the behalf of my family, for my three Argentine children. But that would only fall on deaf ears, which may be worse than inflation itself. Too many people just go along with inflation without much of a hoot, almost with the pride that, hey, it’s been worse before so just get on with it.

Of course, if you are a government minder or a tax official and you are reading this, I know what you’re thinking – we’d better silence this guy by deploying the trolls in the comments section to write disconcerting threats IN CAPITALS. Or unleash an ideological devotee to wax critically and eloquently about my equivocations so as to put me to shame and steer the masses to praise their economic plan, the famed model. So write down my address and tax number and come after me. That’s what you do. You don’t think, man, maybe our economic model and our ideological ways are erring and we ought to change things so that pennies matter and children can start counting jars of centavos and saving for the future.

It’s good to think about change.

...and it will have all the food he can eat.

We recently drove to Big Sur on holiday for a week in California, where I grew up.

A lot has changed since I left Los Angeles to move to Argentina in 1994, from politics to the economy and culture. The landscape, however, remains pretty much as is, bar a rather more crumbling Pacific Coast Highway at spots along the cliffs of Big Sur. It was hairy enough at points for my youngest daughter, who is four, to close her eyes and say, “I want to go home.”

More change can be seen on the menus at some restaurants, not your Denny’s and In-N-Out Burgers but at a host of joints like on Fisherman’s Warf in Monterey that cater to my seven-year-old son. And in style.

My son not only has a milk allergy diagnosed a year ago but also an intolerance to gluten, a protein composite found in wheat and other grains as well as hundreds of processed foods. This makes shopping at the supermarket a chore and finding a take-away meal even harder. So we didn’t expect to be shown a gluten-free menu at a random restaurant or at a bunch of others on the Fisherman’s Wharf.

My dairy and gluten-free son was jazzed to look over the menu and find an assortment of his favorite: pasta.

He wolfed down a large plate and polished it off with a bowl of strawberries.

Along much of the California coast we found delicacies for our son. At the farmers’ market in Brentwood, where I grew up, we stocked up on his mainstay – fruits and vegetables – and bought bread, brownies, cookies, crackers and humus that he could eat without a fuss. The brownie and cookie seller said, “We try to make ours better than those with dairy and gluten.”

She was right.

All this attention to my son’s diet got our eldest daughter thinking. We were working our way back to Los Angeles through the Carmel Valley and stopped at King City for a coffee and a drink at, yes, a drive-through Starbucks. We opted to walk in and order only to find that we’d have to look for a fruit stand for our son.

That’s when our eldest daughter declared her call in life. The nine year old said she is going to open a dairy and gluten-free restaurant powered with solar panels so that her brother can always have something good to eat.

I smiled.

Then my wife warned her to stock up extra supplies because her brother has a huge appetite.

She pondered that for a moment and said, “That’s alright.”