Advertisement
Published: August 16th 2005
Edit Blog Post
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 and spend the month of September in the Pacific Northwest with our families before leaving for Central and South America around October 1st. We plan to travel in South America until Christmas, when we will be back in the NW for the holidays. Then the plan is to leave again sometime in early January and head east to North Africa and Europe, making our way through (mostly Eastern) Europe into Asia and eventually ending up in Australia and New Zealand.
But that’s still ahead of us…Right now Sean and I are focused on the mundane tasks we need to
do for the trip - mostly sorting and packing up our apartment (which includes paring down the crap we’ve accumulated in the past 4 years), getting shots, doing bits of research… and more important things, like figuring out which restaurants we should eat at before we leave (we will definitely miss the food in New Orleans!). We already know where we’re going for our last meal - Jacque-Imos. Home of the alligator-sausage cheesecake. Heaven on a plate…
Of all of the decisions that we have made up to this point, the hardest has actually been deciding
where to go. The other stuff I think we’re pretty comfortable with - actually making the decision to take this trip was easy and the nuts-and-bolts stuff (renewing passports, packing, etc.) is manageable if you do a little at a time. But with the possibility of all this time off -
where do we go? A year off… it sounds like such a long time. But when you actually list all the places you want to go, a year hardly seems long
enough. Sean and I initially started off with a huge list - being true spreadsheet geeks, we sat down in front
of the computer one Saturday morning armed with a map and coffee. We probably listed 50 places right off the bat. Then added more as we had the “oh, and I forgot…..” moments. After that we started trying to pinpoint how much time we wanted to spend in each area. And that was when it first hit me - to make this workable, we were going to have to skip at least half of the places on our list. Narrowing down the choices was actually pretty hard for me. It’s like the feeling you get when you go into a restaurant and the menu is so large that you don’t know what you want - there are just too many choices. We went through the list once - trying to keep as many “musts” as possible - with the idea that we would revisit it again later. In the meantime, we assigned some rough daily costs to each place to get an idea of whether our ballpark cost estimate was going to hold any water. We visited the list a few more times, making adjustments here and there. Our budget was one consideration - by every account, Western Europe is
not friendly to the pocketbook (especially with the exchange rate of the dollar hovering slightly above the value of Monopoly money). Plus, we rationalized that most of those countries would be an easy vacation destination later. In the end, we came up with the following rationale - skip the places we will probably go to later in life (Spain, Morocco, Italy, etc.) and focus on the places that either we really have our heart set on visiting or those that we might never visit if not for this trip (Lithuania, Croatia, Jordan, etc).
Not that we consider our list “final” - we expect changes once we are “out there” - but here are our current thoughts on where we will be visiting:
Fall 2005: Guatemala - Panama - Peru - Argentina - Chile - back to the U.S. for Christmas
2006: Egypt - Jordan - Turkey - Croatia - Ireland - England - Lithuania - Latvia - Estonia - Russia - Japan - South Korea - China - Nepal - India - Thailand - Cambodia - Vietnam - Laos - Australia - New Zealand
Even though our list is as solid as Jello on a hot day, if y’all find yourselves heading to any of the aforementioned destinations, please let us know and we’ll make it a point to meet you there. And if there was ever a reason to visit some of these places, the added bonus of our smiling faces plunked down right next to you, sharing the adventure has got to count for something.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.384s; Tpl: 0.015s; cc: 23; qc: 111; dbt: 0.0974s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.7mb