Category Archives: RTW

The Moment Before Leaving

Wajis4

Do you have a favorite restaurant? I have plenty of favorite restaurants. Typically my favorite restaurants are of the white-linen variety, notable only because my husband’s are of the food-in-your-hand variety. Given that you’ll be surprised to learn that this restaurant, Waji’s, a humble Japanese food stand on Concourse C in SeaTac airport is and will forever be a special place for me. These days I typically pass it when rushing, half-asleep with the rest of the early-bird (nerd bird) commuters to catch the 6am Seattle – San Jose flight. Every time, even if I’m power-napping as I walk, I find myself slowing down and standing, staring for just a moment at the green and red neon. Sometimes I stare through the closed grating. Always my heart races just a little.

On September 1st 2010 Murph and I shared a beer at Waji’s waiting for our flight to Miami and on to Quito, Ecuador.
We had packed up our life, packed in our jobs and boxed up our belongings.
Our children sat by the gate.
We all sat waiting.

At one point Murph and I clinked glasses.
“We’ve really done it now Murphy”.
He squeezed my knee and we kissed just as BigB came running back to tell us it was time to board.
We gathered our bags and boarded, the very first steps in a 365-day, 26-country journey.

The emotion of that moment, a flood of excitement and adrenalin. The warmth of love for my life-partner. The affection and energy of my reluctantly excited children.
All of this comes back to me every time I stand outside Waji’s. It’s like an echo over time and experiences but clear as a bell as if I’d just hollered “Hallo” across the canyon of now and then.
It warms my heart.
It reinvigorates me.
It helps me tolerate the humdrum of today with memories of what I did yesterday and the belief that I can do even more tomorrow.

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Post-Trip Depression

How does it feel to return to the real world after having taken a year out to travel, having executed on a life’s dream? Well, in a word, it sucks. There I’ve said it. I don’t expect your sympathy or even empathy. I’m writing this post today to round out the how-to series on our family world trip that I started just after we got back. It wouldn’t be right to leave you thinking that we all arrived home and life went back to normal without a hiccup.

We have done surprisingly well. Our kids re-entered the regular school system pretty painlessly. Murph and I are now gainfully employed again. We’ve had a variety of house disasters but those could have happened any time.

But. Even before we got back to Seattle I was worried about impending post-trip depression. Worried enough to strategize about how to manage it way back in July (I’m nothing if not a planner). After a healthy dose of self-analysis, usually over many glasses of wine, I’m happy to say that my post-trip stay happy goals are very similar to what they were before we left: exercise regularly, drink moderately, take time to stop and smell the roses now and then.

I heard stories of typical post-travel depression triggers from other travel-junkie friends: reverse culture shock; lack of comprehension of the enormity of your trip or the breath of experiences had thereon; lack of understanding of how seeing the world North and South, East and West had changed you forever. I thought about these triggers for maybe a minute before quickly realizing that they’re all like your first pregnancy. When it’s happening, it’s the most important thing to ever, ever happen to you. Your life will never be the same again. As the nine months progress, or maybe when it’s all over, you realize that no-one else really cares – at least not the same way you do. They’re happy for you and all, but they’re not obsessing about everything like you are.

Extended travel is like a pregnancy. Your friends will cheer for you when you announce your trip, follow your progress in a mildly interested fashion and congratulate you when you’re done, but mostly, they’re just living their own lives with their own priorities and that’s OK. Don’t let it upset you when you get home, your travel experiences will be yours to savor and treasure forever.

Which brings me back to my one day of real post-trip depression. I had all the classic symptoms: I was lethargic, I couldn’t concentrate, I was irritable and agitated. Why and when did this happen? It was my first day back at work after the winter holidays. The deadening responsibility of having to go to work every day from now until for-e-ver was like my own personal pathetic fallacy with the typical rainy winter day outside my window. It took a good night’s sleep and a re-evaluation of those stay-happy goals to help me reset myself.

So, my two snippets of advice to anyone fearing the re-entry after extended travel:
1. When you’re still on a floaty cloud of trip happiness, take a moment to think about what will help you keep that feeling when you’re back into humdrum daily life. Write down your ideas and goals and put them somewhere safe.
2. Remember that no-one else cares about your trip as much as you do. That’s just life. It’s your story, no-one else’s. This is a good thing, you get to play all the juicy parts, make it Oscar-worthy :)

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Family World Trip Logistics Part IV: Travel Planning and Booking

We traveled for a year and now we’re home. Our project is completed. Now I feel comfortable to write about logistics and comment on what worked (or didn’t) as a reference for anyone else out there planning to do an around the world trip with or without children.

Planning A Round World Trip
We actively planned our trip for about a year prior to leaving. Determining our itinerary was the most important decision we made during this time. At the beginning, a year seems such a long time, you think you can go everywhere and see everything but then just by looking at simple numbers, 263 countries in the world for example, you realize that you have to make choices.

Once we had an itinerary we researched the countries we planned to visit but not exhaustively. We’re lazy travelers like that, we like to learn as we go. When leaving Seattle we had booked a couple of flights, a hostel for the first night, a house on the beach in Ecuador for ten days (to get over the shock of what we’d just done) and the Inca Trail – this last because you must book ahead with an approved tour company.

Once on the road we booked what we needed as we needed it. We did try to follow the old-style “true” (for Murph) backpacking method of finding accommodation when we arrived somewhere. However, there are too many backpackers booking ahead via cell phone or internet now which means that in popular destinations travelers arriving without bookings can find themselves in really crappy digs. Even I have my limits.

What follows is more detail on the how for accommodation, transportation and food, broken down by region because what we did varied considerably between say, South America and Central Asia.

Backpacking Accommodation
Before we left home we found our first hostel on HostelBookers.com and cross-checked the information for the same hostel on HostelWorld.com and on TripAdvisor.com. This became our default method of finding places to stay in South America. We did look at the recommendations in our Lonely Planet guidebook for initial suggestions but honestly, the online reviews were better and more reliable. Ditto for South-East Asia.

China was different (no surprise in that!). Things are changing so fast in China that our (2009) guidebook was useless for everything except history. We found YHAChina the best resource for finding quality budget accommodation. We also used Agoda.com a couple of times – for a hotel in Macau, for example. For the record, in Hong Kong we stayed at the Chungking Mansions (described as the ‘Ghetto at the Center of the World’ by the Economist) and we found it clean and comfortable. Just saying so you know where my standards are.

We stayed mostly in home-stay accommodation in Kyrgyzstan, hostels in Uzbekistan and hotels in Iran usually found using recommendations from other travelers. Budget accommodation is scarce in Iran but we did find some gems such as the Silk Road Hotel in Yazd and Niayesh Hotel in Shiraz.

Other backpackers were a vital source of information everywhere we traveled and we swapped, shared and learned about places to eat, stay and visit from them in every country.

Street Food
We ate as cheaply as we could everywhere we went – mostly. (We did treat ourselves occasionlly). Wherever possible we chose accommodation where breakfast was included in the price of the bed or room. In South America we ate a lot of in-your-hand empanadas for lunch and self-catered in hostel kitchens in the evening. In South-East Asia you can eat like a king all day long from the food carts that set up along the streets in any town. In China, Uzbekistan and Iran we found little restaurants for lunch and dinner. We didn’t go out of our way looking for “authentic” but a busy clientele of local diners and an incomprehensible (i.e. not in English) menu were good indicators that the food was cheap and good. In Kyrgyzstan our home-stay hosts fattened us up like Christmas geese.

One of our favorite food memories is of a little restaurant in Hanoi, Vietnam. At a glance, the large Lonely Planet logo on the sign outside the restaurant made us think that this was an LP recommendation. Then one of the boys noticed that the text above the logo said: “Should be recommended by…”. We felt such brazenness deserved our custom (and the food was good too).

Buses, Trains, Planes, Automobiles and Ferries
Yep, we tried them all. It is unbelievably easy to travel by bus in South America. Easy, convenient and cheap. There’s always the cheap bus, but in Chile, Argentina and Peru, you can pay more – not much more – and ride luxury buses between major cities.
Transportation was most frustrating in South-East Asia. It’s a continual battle between you and the plentiful scam artists touting luxury buses which are really over-loaded, under-air-conditioned jalopies one bend in the road away from a crash. Midget-sized beds on night buses was another personal favorite. The train in Vietnam was a relaxing treat. (You need to book early to have a hope of getting a spot).
When I was planning our itinerary through China I thought we could rely on the train. That turned out to be (a) difficult and (b) not efficient. In such a vast country, it’s hardly surprising that we ended up using every mode of transport except donkeys and ferries.
CBT Kyrgyzstan provided us with a driver which was good because there really are only two decent roads in that entire country. You need nerves of steel – gained by say, having served in the Soviet Army in Siberia like our guide/driver Anatoly – to drive in Kyrgyzstan.
We took the train in Uzbekistan. They have fancy new trains but only between Tashkent and Samarkand. For everywhere else there’s old, clunky, no air-con rolling stock but the beds are massive compared to China. In Iran we wanted to take the train but, since train travel seems to be pretty popular with the Iranians, we were out of luck – there were no seats available on any route for the entire time we were in the country! Thankfully there are plenty of buses, budget to luxury depending on how much you want to spend, running between all cities.

In general, we booked trains and planes (in China) two to three days ahead of when we needed them. With most buses we just turned up at the bus station and took the next bus heading in the direction we wanted to go. The only time this didn’t work was in Portugal at the end of the trip but then we were with Murph’s sister who kindly gave us a ride to the next town – where we got a ferry across the river into Spain and a bus on to Seville. Easy Peasy.

Related Posts
Family World Trip Logistics Part I: What We Left At Home
Family World Trip Logistics Part II: Insurance and Medical
Family World Trip Logistics Part III: Schoolwork
Family World Trip Logistics Part IV: Travel Planning and Booking

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Around the World and Back with Stories to Tell

Family World Trip

Svalbard Spain United States of America Antarctica South Georgia Falkland Islands Bolivia Peru Ecuador Colombia Venezuela Guyana Suriname French Guiana Brazil Paraguay Uruguay Argentina Chile Greenland Canada United States of America United States of America Israel Jordan Cyprus Qatar United Arab Emirates Oman Yemen Saudia Arabia Iraq Afghanistan Turkmenistan Iran Syria Singapore China Mongolia Papua New Guinea Brunei Indonesia Malaysia Malaysia Tiawan Philippines Vietnam Cambodia Laos Thailand Burma Bangladesh Sri Lanka India Bhutan Nepal Pakistan Afghanistan Turkmenistan Tajikistan Kyrgyzstan Uzbekistan Japan North Korea South Korea Russia Kazakhstan Russia Montenegro Portugal Azerbaijan Armenia Georgia Ukraine Moldova Belarus Romania Bulgaria Macedonia Serbia Bosonia & Herzegovina Turkey Greece Albania Croatia Hungary Slovakia Slovenia Malta Spain Portugal Spain France Italy Italy Austria Switzerland Belgium France Ireland United Kingdom Norway Sweden Finland Estonia Latvia Lithuania Russia Poland Czech Republic Germany Denmark The Netherlands Iceland El Salvador Guatemala Panama Costa Rica Nicaragua Honduras Belize Mexico Trinidad & Tobago Puerto Rico Dominican Republic Haiti Jamaica The Bahamas Cuba Vanuatu Australia Solomon Islands Fiji New Caledonia New Zealand Eritrea Ethiopia Djibouti Somalia Kenya Uganda Tanzania Rwanda Burundi Madagascar Namibia Botswana South Africa Lesotho Swaziland Zimbabwe Mozambique Malawi Zambia Angola Democratic Repbulic of Congo Republic of Congo Gabon Equatorial Guinea Central African Republic Cameroon Nigeria Togo Ghana Burkina Fassu Cote d'Ivoire Liberia Sierra Leone Guinea Guinea Bissau The Gambia Senegal Mali Mauritania Niger Western Sahara Sudan Chad Egypt Libya Tunisia Morocco Algeria

Map Legend: 9%, 26 of 263 Territories
In Progress
Not Yet Started


ArgentinaAustraliaCambodiaChinaChileEcuadorFranceGreeceHong KongIcelandIranItalyIraqKyrgyzstanLaosMalaysiaNetherlandsPeruPortugalSingaporeSpainThailandTurkeyUnited StatesUzbekistanVietnam


The map above shows all the countries we visited on our family world trip. Now that we’re back, I’m realizing that we have thousands of photos to share and hundreds of stories to tell about this amazing adventure.
As I write stories and share them here, I’ll update the map. Clicking on a country that is ‘In Progress’ (Yellow) or ‘Completed’ (Green) will take you to a summary page with photos and stories about where we went and what we did when we visited that country.

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Family World Trip Logistics Part III: Schoolwork

We traveled for a year and now we’re home. Our project is completed. Now I feel comfortable to write about logistics and comment on what worked (or didn’t) as a reference for anyone else out there planning to do an around the world trip with or without children.

In today’s installment I’ll cover what is probably the most difficult topic for me to write about: schooling.

Let’s just get this out there first: I am not a teacher; Murph is not a teacher. We opted to “homeschool” our children while traveling because we could. The school system in Seattle permits, and indeed makes it easy for, parents who opt not to send their children to school. We both value education very highly but boy, do we differ on how to educate a child and what matters in terms of a student’s educational excellence. I’m very old-school. I like my rapid-fire times tables and page-long essays. I value production and demonstration of knowledge. Murph’s more about understanding and will take discussion over writing any day.

So, how did we do? (measuring ourselves up to very high standard set by travelswithanineyearold)

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Family World Trip Logistics Part II

We traveled for a year and now we’re home. Our project is completed. Now I feel comfortable to write about logistics and comment on what worked (or didn’t) as a reference for anyone else out there planning to do an around the world trip with or without children.

Insurance. It’s such a boring word, totally at odds with the ideal of adventuring to exotic locales as a carefree traveler. For our usual travels (to visit with family), we rarely take out travel insurance but this time at least medical insurance seemed necessary.

Travel Insurance
I did my initial research on available policies and vendors using SquareMouth.com but we ended up buying our policy through WorldNomads.com. The WorldNomads.com interface is simple and straightforward to use. With two clicks you can get a quote for family coverage for travel worldwide for up to six months – and you can renew or extend the policy online. Although I was initially dubious about the coverage provided by a policy that was so easy to find, the coverage provisions and amounts were comprehensive.

Two things worth noting:
Firstly, all our pre-trip medical preparations were covered by the health insurance we had through our respective employers.
Secondly, in preparing for our trip, we took the approach that while we needed travel insurance in case of a medical emergency, we were less concerned about baggage or equipment coverage. Instead, we opted to pack light and pack only things that were easily (and cheaply) replacable. The netbook we carried with us being the only exception and it was guarded carefully throughout the whole trip.

We had two bags stolen during the trip, both in Chile. I have just submitted a claim against one of those thefts. Look out for my review of WorldNomads.com insurance from that perspective in the future.

International Association for Medical Assistance to Travelers
This organization provides members with a listing of english-speaking doctors worldwide. Given that we are shamefully unilingual (even if we have excellent pidgin French, Spanish and German), the $100 membership fee for IAMAT seemed like a no-brainer.

Additional Medical Insurance
This is only relevant for U.S. residents. A month before our trip we were deep in pre-trip preparations. We had a master to-do list on which we added items or checked off items daily – sometimes hourly. It was in one of these frenzied “work the list” sessions that Murph had a light-bulb moment: we needed U.S. medical coverage too. Our travel insurance policy (like most such policies) stipulates repatriation to primary residence in the case of a medical emergency. Following that thought, in a disaster situation, we could end up back in the U.S. with a broken bone or worse but without any health insurance. We deemed that the potential to be out-of-pocket for thousands of dollars for post-event care in the U.S. was huge.

We considered COBRA – the optional extension of an employer-sponsored plan. Unfortunately, the cost of the very excellent medical insurance provided by Murph’s employer way out of our budget.

We did our research and found an independent health insurance broker who helped us choose an insurance plan with Lifewise. The plan is not cheap but now that we’re home, we happy we have it since it also gives us coverage while we’re looking for work.

Related Posts
Family World Trip Logistics Part I: What We Left At Home
Family World Trip Logistics Part II: Insurance and Medical
Family World Trip Logistics Part III: Schoolwork
Family World Trip Logistics Part IV: Travel Planning and Booking

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Family World Trip Logistics Part I

We traveled for a year and now we’re home. Our project is completed. Now I feel comfortable to write about logistics and comment on what worked (or didn’t) as a reference for anyone else out there planning to do an around the world trip with or without children.

All questions relating to trip logistics fall into four general areas: home-related, medical, school-related and trip-related (planning, booking, etc) so this will likely be a four-part series ( I have a storage unit to unpack and a job to find, but be assured the intent is there). In this post I’ll focus on home-related topics.

The House
We did not sell our house, we rented it for a year. This meant we spent most of the month before leaving emptying closets, packing boxes and carting stuff to the dump, Goodwill or a storage unit. It was like an archeological dig through the history of our family. I guess if I had a regular closet-cleaning routine it wouldn’t have been so bad but I don’t so it was a very worthwhile, if monstrous, effort.

I listed the house on craigslist in June and had a lease signed within a month. (I bought and downloaded the lease document from an online vendor such as uslegalforms.com). The rent paid our mortgage for the year.

I sold some pieces of furniture (on craigslist) – including my kids’ bunk beds. I think they may hold that against me for a long time. They came home from camp to find their beds gone and were not impressed.

We gave our tenants the option of choosing furniture they’d like to keep in the house to use which helped them and us. In the end, we needed only to store a couple of sofas, rugs and a coffee table – and a gazillion boxes of books, clothes, bedding, towels, dishes, kitchen equipment and every single little knick-knack my boys have made or bought ever. (That last is staying in the storage unit until I have every other box emptied and then we’ll see whether or not it comes back into the house or “accidentally” gets routed to the dump).

Mail
Using usps.com we opened a P.O. Box and registered a change-of-address routing all our mail to the P.O. Box. We had “home team” support: J, a friend who cleaned out the P.O. Box monthly, dumped the junk mail and let us know (via email) if there was anything that needed our attention. We let all magazine subscriptions expire – except the Economist so we could continue reading it online.

Bills
I switched to managing our bills electronically using our bank’s bill payment services a number of years ago. Before we left, we changed any bills for which we were still receiving the paper copy to e-bill – any I missed were picked up by J from the P.O. Box. Although, it’s worth noting that since all utilities were changed to our tenants and we no longer had subscriptions and services to pay for, we only had four or five monthly bills to think about while traveling.

Our second “home team” member was a different friend who had power-of-attorney over our finances so that in the event of an emergency there would be someone in the U.S. who could represent us.

We put originals of all important legal documents (birth certificates, rental lease, and the like) into a safe deposit box in our bank.

Phones
We parked our cell phone numbers with family-phone.com a handy service which keeps your number active, records voicemails and emails the voicemail to the email address you provide. Google Voice may provide a similar service today, but I haven’t researched this service yet – even though Murph keeps telling me I need a Google Voice number :)

Initially we thought that this and Skype would be sufficient for the year but a family medical emergency in October prompted us to sign up with OneSimCard.com. The roaming international rates with this provider are super-low, but again, we kept this just for emergencies, picking up cheap sim cards locally when we needed to have a phone for travel planning.

Murph did keep his iPhone but without a service plan so that he could use it to connect to the internet whenever there was a wifi connection available. We also used it a handful of times to make phone calls via Skype.

Money
I wrote about the cost of our trip in RTW Travel – How Much Does it Cost? The only additional logisitical detail I’ll add here is that while on the road we used a Fidelity mySmartCash account as our primary checking account. This account reimburses ATM fees – even when the ATMs are in out-of-the-way countries – a big bonus when you know you’ll be hit with a charge for every ATM withdrawal for a year. We managed cash-flow and transactions using a combination of our banks’ online tools and Mint.com .

Related Posts
Family World Trip Logistics Part I: What We Left At Home
Family World Trip Logistics Part II: Insurance and Medical
Family World Trip Logistics Part III: Schoolwork
Family World Trip Logistics Part IV: Travel Planning and Booking

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A Road-Schooling Day

It struck me recently that I’ve said a number of times that road-schooling is hard work but that I’ve never really explained why this is so. It seemed like a description of a typical “school day” would be a good idea to remedy this.

The diary below describes a day in Emei Shan, a mountain two hours drive from Chengdu. It was Saturday. We’d hiked the mountain on Wednesday and Thursday (60km, 3,000m) and been in Leshan (to get our Chinese visas extended) on Friday. We were overdue for a school day.

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currency.jpg

RTW Travel – How Much Does It Cost?

currency

How much to travel the world? This post on our costs is way overdue…

To travel around the world was my childhood dream. The restlessness behind such a dream is one of the few personality traits that I share with my husband. We left Ireland in 1995 planning to spend “just a couple of years” living and working in the US before continuing onwards ever onwards. Fifteen years later, as I approached my 40th birthday and we considered high schools for our older son, our settled, normal life rankled.

How Much To Travel The World: Our Research

Our dream to travel for a year took shape slowly. We agreed to research costs. We postponed any decision-making until we had facts, in dollars and cents, to evaluate. The data posted by sixintheworld and 360degreeslongitude was invaluable. (The recent collation of real-life examples of RTW trip costs by jackandjilltravel.com is excellent). There is general consensus in these sources that $25,000 per person is a good baseline approximate cost for a year’s travel.

How Much To Travel The World: Itinerary Choices

To refine our budget further, we needed an itinerary. I read Tim Leffel’s excellent World’s Cheapest Destinations for ideas on where to go to make our money last longer. I pulled per-country budgeting guidelines from the Lonely Planet website and plugged the numbers into a spreadsheet. (Look under Practical Information/Costs for the country you’re interested in visiting. Here’s the entry for Thailand, for example). I used a per-country simple formula of:

(LP’s higher daily budget amount) * (number of days we planned to be in the country) * 4

and then summed that up across all the countries we planned to visit.

How Much To Travel The World: Our Budget

A copy of our initial budget lay on the table. We both stared at the rolled-up total, which came in at just under $80,000. We went back and forth on whether we should or should not go. The conversation ebbed and flowed over a number of days until we faced the decision which we’d probably really made the minute we had agreed to do the research. We had to go. Not to do so would leave a dream unfulfilled.

The decision to make this trip required that we plunder our savings and home equity. Or what was left of them since we’d already seen our savings decimated twice: once with the dot-com crash and again with the market implosion of 2008-2009. Deciding to spend what we had left before it too disappeared was perversely, an easy decision.

Taking this trip is a huge gamble. We’re betting that once we return to Seattle we will be able to get work and continue working for another 30 years to rebuild retirement savings. That we’ll likely need to work past normal retirement age is a price we’re OK with paying for an unforgettable, once-in-a-lifetime experience.

How Much To Travel The World: Our Actual Costs

* Flights have been our single biggest cost. We chose not to buy a RTW ticket, preferring instead to travel overland as much as possible and buy point-to-point tickets as necessary (i.e. to jump oceans). Total cost per person: $3,200.
* We’ve scheduled (and may add) a limited number of Big Ticket Experiences, roughly one per continent: the Inca Trail Hike and the Gibbon Experience so far. Next week the boys will be doing a one-week scuba certification course. I’ll add the total spent when the trip is over.
* Our Daily Budget is $150 to cover food, transportation and accommodation for all four of us. This is easier to keep to in some countries (Thailand, Ecuador) than others (Chile). As I add per-country pages to this website, I’ll include the actual average daily cost – see the Ecuador page for example.

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Photo Credit: LiteForex

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