After months of discussing where to go, we started to work on the harder part of this trip, which is how to go. So, over the last few weeks, we started to connect the dots and string together a rough itinerary. We plan to map out an itinerary three months in advance and then do our best to keep it flexible so we can discover new places that we never heard of or thought to go to sitting on our small couch in our little house in the middle of a little neighborhood in New Orleans. So, the itinerary as it stands today is as follows:
May 1-10: New Orleans for Jazz Fest and other events
May 11-16: Holly Springs Mississippi with Annette's Parents at Foxfire Ranch (and a wedding in Jackson)
May 17-19: Jefferson City, Missouri with Ebony and Alfred
May 20-21: Longmont, Colorado with Rose and the Shank family
May 22-25: Crested Butte, Colorado with Ham's brother
May 26: Henderson, Nevada with Jennifer and Tom
May 27-29: Los Angeles, CA with friends for Memorial Day Weekend
May 30-June 2: Backpacking in Zion National Park
June 3: Amarillo, TX with Toni Kline(?)
June 4-6: Dallas, TX with Dee Dee and family
June 7-12 New Orleans, LA
June 13: Foxfire Ranch (http://www.foxfireexperience.net/)
June 14-16: Smokey Mountains National Park
June 17-19: Philadelphia with the Stack family
June 20-30: Ham's family in NY and a sailing trip in Vermont
July 1-4: Adirondack Camp with the Gorczyk family
July 5: Ghent, NY with Ham's family
July 6: Depart for Paris
July 6-8: Paris
July 9-12: Amsterdam
July 13-15: Hamburg, Germany
July 16-18: Denmark
July 19: Gothenburg, Sweden
July 20: Oslo, Norway
July 21-23: Bergen, Sweden
July 23-26: Fjords
July 27: Oslon
July 28-29: Stockholm, Sweden
July 30: Kariskrona
July 31: Denmark
August 1-4: Germany (Heidelberg)
August 5-6: Prague
August 7-10: Austria
August 11-13: Croatia (beach)
August 14-22: Italy
August 23-25: French Mediterranean
August 26-31: Spain
September 1: Ferry to Tangiers, Morrocco
Simply typing this makes me feel like there is so little time to go all of the places we want to go. Undoubtedly, this will change many times before we land in Paris.
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
New Space Opening Up
There is this phenomenon that happens when you let go of a major commitment. As we have put in our notice and begun to tell various people that we are leaving our jobs to travel the world, all sorts of new possibilities have emerged. I used to study tai chi and they have a teaching about how you cannot put anything in a closed hand. So, leaving jobs where we each spend 50+hours a week creates a wide open hand. All of a sudden, we have 50 free available hours in the week, a new blank canvas to fill. We are both looking to be very intentional about how we fill our weeks for the coming year, with where, who, what and when. Yet, as soon as the space was created (in fact, as soon as it was simply spoken, as we are both still currently at our jobs), new things we hadn't seen before showed up to fill the space--new potential jobs, friends to visit, weddings to attend. We literally didn't see any of these things before. It was like they weren't imaginable or possible when we were both nose to the grindstone and focused on our current work. We look forward to a year of new perspectives and the new possibilities that come with them. Undoubtedly, we will re-enter the United States with a whole new perspective on how to define our work and spend those 50 or so hours each week.
Monday, March 14, 2011
While your knees are good
Inevitably, after you tell people you are getting ready to quit your jobs and spend a year traveling around the world, there is this empty space that seems to beg an explanation. So, Annette and I have gotten really good at the short explanation: It is something we have both always wanted to do and we want to do it before we have children, which we would like to do in a year or two. Sometimes, I feel the need to throw in something about the fact that we have the money to do it, which my mom left me when she died, and that it would please her to see us spend it that way. (Invoking the dead seems so irrefutable should anybody question our motivations or commitment to do the trip).
It has been interesting to see people's reactions to our plans. Our friends with small children say, "Do it before you have children. Now's the time."
Folks from a generation before us say, "Do it while you still have good knees." I like this practical bit of advice. There is something nice and fundamental about it.
When I volunteered as a creative writing instructor in an adult literacy class in New Orleans years ago, we used to do all of these fun lessons to try to get the classes' creative juices flowing. It was always fascinating how brilliant, articulate and creative the students were, but when it came to writing it down, they were trapped inside a first grader's vocabulary and grammar. And a very boring first grader at that. It was like the tip of a pencil restricted all of that creativity and brilliance from flowing onto the page. It was just too small for it to fit through. One day, we brought in a Langston Hughes poem. I think the poem was called, On Freedom, but google doesn't seem to deem it popular enough for it to come up when I search for it. Anyway, after we read the poem, we did an exercise in which we asked people to talk (and eventually write) about what freedom means to them. There was one gentleman in the class, Michael, who was in his forties, and suffers from cerebral palsy. It had left him on crutches with limited mobility. And he wrote a poem about running through the hallways at school. That was his dream of freedom: to run unhibited through the hallways at school.
Perhaps this trip is our version of running through the hallways at school. It is certainly a blessing to have such mobility, much less to exercise it. It is good to have good knees. I look forward to putting them to excellent use in the next year!
It has been interesting to see people's reactions to our plans. Our friends with small children say, "Do it before you have children. Now's the time."
Folks from a generation before us say, "Do it while you still have good knees." I like this practical bit of advice. There is something nice and fundamental about it.
When I volunteered as a creative writing instructor in an adult literacy class in New Orleans years ago, we used to do all of these fun lessons to try to get the classes' creative juices flowing. It was always fascinating how brilliant, articulate and creative the students were, but when it came to writing it down, they were trapped inside a first grader's vocabulary and grammar. And a very boring first grader at that. It was like the tip of a pencil restricted all of that creativity and brilliance from flowing onto the page. It was just too small for it to fit through. One day, we brought in a Langston Hughes poem. I think the poem was called, On Freedom, but google doesn't seem to deem it popular enough for it to come up when I search for it. Anyway, after we read the poem, we did an exercise in which we asked people to talk (and eventually write) about what freedom means to them. There was one gentleman in the class, Michael, who was in his forties, and suffers from cerebral palsy. It had left him on crutches with limited mobility. And he wrote a poem about running through the hallways at school. That was his dream of freedom: to run unhibited through the hallways at school.
Perhaps this trip is our version of running through the hallways at school. It is certainly a blessing to have such mobility, much less to exercise it. It is good to have good knees. I look forward to putting them to excellent use in the next year!
Saturday, March 12, 2011
Why?
It is funny. This little idea of quitting our jobs, renting our house out and spending a year traveling around the world started in August 2010. We were coming up on a one-year wedding anniversary and this was the first vacation we had taken as a couple since our honeymoon. And while the honeymoon was great, it was overshadowed by the recent diagnosis that Ham's mom had Stage 4 lung cancer. Most of the travel for the six months following that diagnosis (and our honeymoon) was to see Ham's family in the northeast. She died March 1st, 2010. (To see her blog, visit http://vickicancer.blogspot.com/).
So, in August, we went to Portland for a friend's wedding, rented a car and took a week to drive from Portland to Los Angeles. We stayed with friends, stayed in a great bed and breakfast, and camped. The sights along that route don't need detailed description here. Highlights included eating fresh dungeness crab in small fishing towns on the Oregon Coast, camping on cliffs in Big Sur overlooking the Pacific Ocean, and a sixty-foot scenic waterfall into the ocean. We figured it was a combination of not having to deal with daily work and household responsibilities and the sense of beauty and adventure we were surrounded in. Regardless of what it was, we really fell in love with each other. We remembered why we married each other in the emotional sense and not just the intellectual one, which we had both learned is a bit like a spotty cell phone connection. It goes in and out. We had such a great time that we began to discuss how to organize our lives to maximize these sorts of experiences.
And so we began to hatch up a plan to quit our jobs and travel the world for a year...
So, in August, we went to Portland for a friend's wedding, rented a car and took a week to drive from Portland to Los Angeles. We stayed with friends, stayed in a great bed and breakfast, and camped. The sights along that route don't need detailed description here. Highlights included eating fresh dungeness crab in small fishing towns on the Oregon Coast, camping on cliffs in Big Sur overlooking the Pacific Ocean, and a sixty-foot scenic waterfall into the ocean. We figured it was a combination of not having to deal with daily work and household responsibilities and the sense of beauty and adventure we were surrounded in. Regardless of what it was, we really fell in love with each other. We remembered why we married each other in the emotional sense and not just the intellectual one, which we had both learned is a bit like a spotty cell phone connection. It goes in and out. We had such a great time that we began to discuss how to organize our lives to maximize these sorts of experiences.
And so we began to hatch up a plan to quit our jobs and travel the world for a year...
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