A global adventure story

“It’s just before midnight and we just have been attacked by pirates.”

So began a not entirely atypical blog post by Kaye Caldwell of Hermosa Beach, who since last summer has been traveling the world with her husband and three children.

The April 26 attack on their Italian cruise ship far off the coast of Somalia was but the latest installment in an adventure that has taken the family to the Australian outback, riot-torn Thailand and South African townships.

Fascinated friends and relatives have traveled with them vicariously on their blog, https://www.caldwellsworldwide.com/, which is crammed with pictures of the blond, tan brood smiling on the backs of elephants and sharing potluck with slum dwellers.

“It reminds me of Forrest Gump,” said friend Leslie Landers, referring to the movie character who kept stumbling into momentous events he didn’t quite understand.

Caldwell, 47, laughs at the comparison. The family, she said, has always had a knack for showing up amid disaster.

In a telephone interview from a cramped hotel room in the Turkish coastal city of Izmir, she described the first vacation she took with her now-husband Jim -- to Florida in 1992, just after Hurricane Andrew ripped through. Then came the engagement a few weeks later in Hawaii, in the aftermath of Hurricane Iniki.

For years, Kaye and Jim, 49, dreamed of taking a year off to see the world. Then she was diagnosed with a brain tumor and had surgery. She saw it as a wake-up call. “You just sort of come to terms with you might not get to do this when you are 60 or 70, whenever the kids are grown,” Kaye said.

Jim, meanwhile, had left a job in intellectual-property sales to start his own firm, but was having trouble getting it off the ground. Henry, Ruby and Sam -- now 9, 10 and 12 -- were old enough, they thought, to benefit from travel but young enough for it not to disrupt their education too much. “We decided it was now or never to take this trip,” Kaye said.

They decided to limit their time in expensive cities in favor of more out-of-the way places, where they could rent houses for six weeks at a time and get a feel for how the locals live.

First stop was Townsville, on the northeastern coast of Australia, which served as a base for camping trips in the outback, snorkeling in the Great Barrier Reef and a crocodile hunt. The family headed to Thailand in November, shortly before anti-government protesters shut down two airports. (Jim had been planning to fly home for a doctor’s appointment but had to postpone the trip.)

The four days the family spent in Bangkok coincided with a funeral for the king’s sister, during which political protests were suspended. By the time they resumed, the Caldwells had moved into a house in Hua Hin, a three-hour drive away, where they learned on TV that the Constitutional Court had ordered the dissolution of the governing party and banned the prime minister from politics.

“The king spoke on all the TV channels,” Kaye wrote on their blog. “Unfortunately no one translated it to English, so I have no idea what he said.”

Later, from the South African city of Cape Town, Jim blogged about home schooling their three energetic children.

“Fantasy = ‘Dear Father, would you like us to proceed with mathematics or explore topics in science?’ Reality -- ‘You’re the meanest dad in the whole world,’ ” he wrote.

After Thailand, Cape Town felt reassuringly Western. But the children were unsettled by the massive shantytowns on the fringes of the picturesque city. After sharing lunch and an afternoon with a family in Khayelitsha township, a somber Henry asked his parents: “What if the person who is smart enough to cure cancer lives in Khayelitsha and doesn’t have enough money to go to school?”

The Caldwells had been planning to fly to their last destination: Turkey. But then Kaye saw a picture of the MSC Melody on the wall of their Cape Town rental and Googled it. It turned out the liner was scheduled to sail from South Africa to Italy and had lots of cheap deals to offer.

The Caldwells were assured the ship would be giving Somalia a wide berth. And the opportunity to see the Egyptian pyramids and the Suez Canal on the way seemed too good to miss.

They were 500 miles east of Somalia when Jim and Kaye were shaken from their sleep by a loud blast. She thought their laptop had exploded. But when Jim peeked out their porthole, he saw a shipload of pirates shooting at the upper decks.

“They were just out our window. We could hear their voices, see them in their small white fishing boat, and see the flash of the guns when they fired,” Kaye wrote on the blog. “Oh, how I wish I had pulled out my camera!”

The couple dispute the captain’s account, that the ship’s private security guards returned fire with pistols. They saw only flares. When the pirates got too close, some of the passengers tossed deck chairs at them, they said.

“After 8-10 loud blasts, we heard them yelling, ‘Au revoir,’ and waving,” as the cruise ship sped away, Kaye wrote. The Caldwell children slept through the encounter.

Two days later, the family heard about violent clashes between Turkish authorities and Kurdish separatist guerrillas, part of a decades-long conflict.

“TURKEY????” Kaye blogged. “It’s a wild world!”

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alexandra.zavis@latimes.com