October 10, 2005 (Seattle-Tacoma International Airport): Shannon here. Sean and I leave for Guatemala tonight on a red-eye flight to Houston, then on to Guatemala City. We’re sitting in the airport at Sea-Tac as I write. I can’t say that I really feel all that nervous; perhaps maybe a little anxious about finding a place to sleep once we reach Guatemala City. For those that are not aware, Hurricane Stan caused some pretty severe landslides in Guatemala - in one case burying an entire village. Sean and I aren’t really sure what impact that will have on the places we in [View Full Entry]

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Sean: The next part of the story isn’t nearly as fraught with danger and excitement as the previous one. After leaving New Orleans, we boogied fairly quickly across this great nation, eager to get back to the Northwest as soon as possible to spend time with family (and not to mention that we had just driven across the country less than an month before). Hurricane Rita (about to make landfall in the Lone Star State) convinced us to alter our route and not travel across Texas. We definitely didn’t want to keep arriving late at night to “No Vacancy” signs. So [View Full Entry]

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Shannon: After spending a few days in Spokane with family at Sean’s mom’s house, we moved on to Sean’s dad’s house in Port Orchard, hanging out with family and visiting friends in Seattle and Portland. On September 15, 2005 Mayor C. Ray Nagin officially announced that areas of New Orleans would be opened in stages - first Algiers on September 21, 2005, then a part of Uptown (zip code 70115 - our area) would be opened 2 days later. We spent most of the day on the phone from Port Orchard trying to make arrangements to get down there and get [View Full Entry]

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Sean: We spent a couple of days in Little Rock checking out the sites and waiting for the powers that be to open up the city. Looking back now we know that that was a laughable idea, but back then we thought for sure that the Corps of Engineers would fix the levee breeches quickly and that this unfortunate flooding would be pumped out lickety split. After all, water in New Orleans isn’t anything new - the streets frequently flood in heavy rains. The whole city is dependent on an intricate system of pumps that takes rainwater and dumps it into [View Full Entry]

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As everyone in America not living in a cave is probably aware, Hurricane Katrina arrived on the doorstep of New Orleans on August 29, 2005. The crazy luck is that if Katrina had arrived 24 hours later than she did, we would have already been well on our way to our trip around the world. Instead, because of the capricious winds of fate, we became evacuees (or refugees, or whatever politically-incorrect name you want to give it). Here's our story... As Shan and I toiled at our final week of work, we were aware that a storm was churning in the [View Full Entry]

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With about 2 weeks left in New Orleans, we have finally decided to put forth some effort to get this blog up and running. Thus, if you received an email directing you to this site, consider yourself officially in the “test group” to make sure we’ve got everything running smoothly… As you all probably know, Sean and I are planning to take approximately 15 months “off” and do something that we’ve been planning for about five years - travel around the world. In general terms, the plan is to vacate our apartment in New Orleans at the end of August an [View Full Entry]

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We're still here in the sunny south anticipating the day of departure. We've started our list-o-things-to-do which includes paring down all the accumulated crap from over the years. We've started wearing our backpacks in the mornings to get used to the weight and fit. I've packed mine with a bunch of old running t-shirts which seem to not be in short supply. [View Full Entry]

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This is the first of many writings for our RTW. We plan on taking off from New Orleans, our current home, and then "seeing what we can see". [View Full Entry]

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