Enjoy a vacation with your sister.

By Ellen Barone

Is traveling with your sister on vacation a recipe for disaster? It doesn’t have to be as long as you lay down some ground rules first. Here are a few travel-tested truths for keeping peace in the sister hood.
1) Leave the baggage at home: Sibling relationships can be fraught with the peril of childhood roles, divergent interests and unspoken resentments. So, no matter if you’re the big sis used to being in charge or the baby accustomed to being indulged, leave the birth-order baggage at home.
2) Privatize: Allow for private time in your itinerary.
3) Get thee to chocolate: If you start to get snarky, or she does, take two chocolates and another in the morning. If symptoms escalate, wine is also recommended.
4) Play well with others. Say please and thank you a lot. Show respect, admit your mistakes and never be a tattletale.
5) Money, money, money. Be sure to discuss in advance your expectations for sharing costs, the level of accommodation or how paying for meals is to be handled.

For the complete story visit HERE.

Pictured- Soft Top boards with a protection fin

A great indicator of what your first board purchase should be, has a lot to do with how often you will be surfing. Soft tops or foamies (pictured above) are ideal for never-ever’s or beginners. They are easy to surf, buoyant and you won’t get discouraged as you will be catching a lot of waves (even on your very first day!). However, soft tops aren’t ideal for an adult who has fallen in love with the sport and wishes to do it more than once or twice a year. Typically, an adult would outgrow their  soft top surfboard. This brings us to epoxy boards which make an excellent board for a newbie. Epoxy boards are in between a Soft Top and a Fiber Glass board with a thick coating of foam around the fiberglass. Not only are these boards virtually indestructible, they are also a great training board to take a complete beginner to an intermediate level. After you graduate from an epoxy board, your next board purchase will be a fiber glass board. These certainly get dinged up easily and are not buoyant like the soft top or epoxy board. Fiber glass boards are recommended for intermediate surfers and higher. Hope this helps! Catch a wave today, even if only in your mind.

Soft Tops are the best surfboards to learn on.

The Surfboard

The surfboard is the essential piece of surfing equipment. You can’t surf without it. But what is the real difference between a soft top surfboard and a fiberglass board (or hard top)?

If you’ve ever had surfing lessons with a surf school, you already have a good idea of what a soft surfboard is. Pictured above, think of a soft, pliable foam that is similar to a boogie board but long like a surfboard. Soft Tops are incredibly buoyant and helps beginners catch waves more easily.

The difference between a traditional fiberglass board and a soft top surfboard is that the regular fiberglass has a hard outer shell unlike the foamy shell soft tops have. You also need wax for a fiberglass board to maintain traction while surfing.

Check out next week’s post: What kind of Surfboard should I buy?

Time to clock some hours on our surfboards.

It’s that time again. Surf and Yoga retreats August 16th-29th! With two weeks of bliss, surf, yoga, massages, GREAT food and amazing guests coming our way, I can hardly stand it. Time to get out of the office and have some serious fun with our visiting guests coming from all over the world. I will be sure to keep you all in the loop with some fun pictures and posts during the next two weeks, so check back daily. If you weren’t able to surf with us this August, hope you can join us next year in 2010! Aloha!

SwellWomen Made the List!

Aloha Everyone! I’m proud to say that SwellWomen made the list of 10 Summer Camps for Adults. Read it here.

Follow our Blog for retreat posts!

It’s that time. My favorite time of the year when all the guests finally arrive after months of interaction via the web. We get to see real live SwellWomen and SwellCo-ed. My favorite things about our retreats; surfing, meeting new people. THE FOOD, and spending time on the west side. I also LOVE to watch the transformation of our guests after a week of being taken care of. It’s incredible. Visit our blog daily for posts at our retreat.

Lawrence from SwellCo-ed 2008 Ripping it up!

Looking for some men at our SwellCo-ed retreat April 12-18th. So far we have all women and have a couple of spaces left. So leave a long winter behind and welcome the first weeks of spring and summer with a refreshed mind and renewed body at our SwellCo-ed retreats in Maui. Enjoy meeting wonderful like-minded and healthy people at SwellCo-ed. Call 1.800.399.MAUI for more information.

Image by Mike Adrian Photography

Another Valentine’s Day and with a busy year and a lot going on, it’s sometimes easy to forget the ones that we love the most. Isn’t it? Tired of the same old chocolates and roses? Looking for something that is REALLY special for your girlfriend, fiancee or wife this year. It’s called SwellCo-ed and it’s located on the romantic island of Maui. 

SwellCo-ed is our surf and yoga retreat geared towards couples, men and women. Do you have to be a couple to attend SwellCo-ed? No, but couples that have came in the past have certainly enjoyed their time with their significant other while enjoying a Surf and Yoga retreat on Maui. Just ask Tom, a Fire Captain for the Alemeda Fire Department. He states, ““Every detail was taken care of and your passion for what you do shows. The memories my wife and I made at SwellCo-ed will last a life-time. ” Tom and Lori (his wife) have recently e-mailed me with an update that they both bought each other surfboards for X-Mas and have been surfing every week! Two more surfers have been born as the result of a vacation together in Maui at SwellCo-ed. 

If waking up each morning with your partner on a paradise island, doing yoga, surfing throughout the day and being fed delicious and healthy meals provided by one of the best chefs on Maui doesn’t appeal to you.  What about SwellCo-ed being the antidote for a way to leave the city and stress behind and rejuvenate for a week with your partner, a chance for you and your partner to get healthy and fit together or improving your well-being while bonding with your partner. Do these reasons sound appealing to you? 

If so, SwellCo-ed would like to offer a personalized Valentine’s Card and box of chocolates (because women still like chocolates) to each couple who registers for one of our 2009 SwellCo-ed retreats. Offer is valid for registration on or before February 14th, 2009. Click here for dates and other information.

See you in paradise!