Planning

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Planning

Here are some of the details to give you a little bit of an idea of all of the planning that was involved for a trip like this and some of the costs that we’ve incurred along the way.

Medications/Immunizations

Love the Alberta Health Care system, they don’t cover the cost of vaccinations such as Hep A, Hep B, Meningococcus, Typhoid, TD Polio, Tetanus/Diptheria, Yellow fever, Rabies, Dukoral or the Flu vaccine, so in total we’ve spent about $3100 including the cost of the Malaria pills that we’ll be taking for almost the entire year we are gone. We’ve opted to take Larium as our Malaria pill of choice; we did a test run for a couple of weeks in June/July and figured the side effects weren’t too bad. The good thing about Larium, is it’s only taken once a week, starting 1 week before we enter an area with a risk of Malaria and then 4 weeks after we leave, hence we figure we’ll be taking it for the full year. We’re also taking along some antibiotic pills just in case of illness or minor infection and altitude sickness pills for when we attempt to climb Mt. Kenya or Mt. Kilimanjaro.

Visas/passports

Our passports had to be valid for 6 months from our expected date of return, unfortunately when we extended our trip in January to include Rwanda/Uganda, that put Jordan at risk of being declined entry into those countries since his passport was only valid for only 5 months after his expected date of return. It probably would’ve been ok; however we just didn’t want to risk it. And of course January/February is when there were huge long line ups at all passport offices due to US border crossing requiring a passport for those flying to US as of January 2007. We decided to take a Friday off from work, get up early, go to Timmy’s, and stand in line at the local passport office for 6:15am, sadly we weren’t even the first ones in line, we were about 10th or so. Then 4 weeks later, his new passport arrived.

We’ve been told that we can get all of our entry visas at the border crossings, so all we need to do is bring sufficient passport photos with us and then all of the paperwork could be completed at the borders.

Condo/car obligations

It was a tough decision, initially when we were planning on leaving for a year we were planning on selling everything including condo, truck, furniture etc. But then after thinking it through a little more carefully, we decided just to rent out the condo for the year we’re gone, so we hired a property management company that came and inspected our place in early May to tell us approximately how much we could rent our place out for and any minor upgrades that we needed to do to make the place more rentable. The property management company said we had to paint all the walls, including the relatively fresh lime green walls in the living room, as well as replace the lighting fixture in the bathroom, and replace the carpets. Well you can imagine our thoughts as she was telling us to replace the carpets; it was like…we don’t have the money in our budget to do this! So we succeeded in convincing her we’ll paint and then make some minor changes to the bathroom. We went a little crazy with the changes to the bathroom, it all started with changing the light fixture, but then the sink faucets didn’t match, so we figured we should just replace the sink, but then we decided let’s just get rid of the whole thing and replace the sink, counter top, and cabinet! Then we thought about replacing the lino flooring, Jordan’s boss said he did his bathroom and it was relatively easy, so we figured we could do it to, but when we spoke with the carpet/flooring people at Deerfoot carpets, he suggested going with tile because it has better resale value, so here we are 3 months before we leave for Africa redoing our bathroom.

Since we initially set a departure date of February 2009, we thought it would only make sense that we lease a car until then, so we wouldn’t have to worry about selling the car before we leave, we could just simply hand over the keys and be done with it. Ooops, mistake number 1, car leases are not as flexible as they make them out to be; especially since we bumped up our departure date by almost 18 months, so we still have 16 months left on a car lease. Thank goodness, Jordan’s parents are in the market for a new car and have agreed to take over the lease payments for the remainder of the lease term.

Wish us luck with our packing, that is tonight's challenge!
Kathie & Jordan

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