The Laughing Nomad

Backpacked The Hippie Trail In The 60’s? If Not It’s Not Too Late!

Taking the kids to Mexico, the grandparents to Hawaii and ourselves to Central Asia in the mid 1990’s on an 18 day trek in the Atlas Mountains had pretty much been the extent of our international travel together. Bob had climbed Mt. Rainier and Mt. Kilomanjaro and some of the lesser mountains in Nepal and Tibet but he thinks climbing mountains is a thing of the past for him. “Crossing borders and boundaries…climbing cultural mountains much less painful and ultimately more rewarding,” he says.

So in 2002, after Bob retired from 35 years as a pediatrician in Salem Oregon and I retired as an educational administrator and after raising our three sons, Greg now 41, Doug 39 and Josh 35, we rented our house and set off for a year around the world with only our backpacks. But we didn’t honestly do the “Hippie Trail.” Landing in high-rent London in February, we forged our own trail and moved quickly through France, Spain and Portugal. Looking for warm weather we finally found it in Morocco.

Then back to Southern France, Spain and Italy before moving on to Athens, the islands of Sifnos and Santorini in Greece, Cairo and Luxor in Egypt and finally to Nairobi Kenya where we took an overland truck with about 15 twenty and thirty-somethings from England, Australia and New Zealand for a month and a half through East Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia and Botswana) and across to Namibia on the Atlantic and down to South Africa where we, desperate to be in one place for awhile, rented an apartment for a month in the beautiful Cape Malay district of Capetown.

After a few days in a bed and breakfast in Soweto, the Black township near Johannesburg, we flew to Mumbai, India…in hot July…which, after Rajistan and New Delhi, made Bangkok Thailand feel luxurious! After backpacking through Thailand, Burma, Laos and Vietnam we spent two months in a cold wintery China with no central heating and gratefully ended the year on a beach in the Philippines.

A year eventually became four years. A few months after we returned home, Bob took off for Argentina, Chile and Uruguay.

When Bob returned home, and with our then unmarried sons living in Las Vegas, Thailand and New York, we found ourselves ready to hit the road again. So in July 2004 we rented the house again, flew to Frankfurt Germany, traveled across Eastern Europe including my maternal ancestral home, Poland, and on to homestays in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Then we took the Trans-Siberian Railway across Asian Russia and through Mongolia to Beijing…spending two more months in China before going on to Southeast Asia again (Burma, Viet Nam, Thailand and Laos). After a month driving around the island of Bali we returned to Thailand.

In the meantime, our son, Doug married his Thai girlfriend so we spent several weeks in Krabi Province visiting them…Doug and Luk having barely escaped the tsunami with their lives the day before we arrived! They now live in a little Thai-style bungalow on the island of Koh Samui and welcome visitors.

We emailed our renters to not pack up anytime soon, however, and we sublet a furnished apartment from September 2005 to January 2006 in Brooklyn so we could be near our son Joshua who was a chef at the Tocqueville Restaurant near Union Square in Manhattan at the time. Upon arrival Josh and Amy, who was getting her PhD in history and was teaching at Rutgers University, surprised us with wedding plans that would take place at the Brooklyn courthouse in two days!

Our oldest son Greg who is an anesthesiologist in Las Vegas, visited us later in New York.

January 2006 saw us in Thailand again…I spent a month in Bangkok getting dental and medical work completed and then to Koh Samui Thailand to spend a month with Doug and Luk while Bob disappeared somewhere in the Thai environs. After Bangkok I went to Chiang Mai in Thailand for a month and on to Laos for the rain festival in April.

With the renters out of the house by this time, Bob flew back to Salem on March 29, 2006. I flew back to Bangkok to catch a flight to the States at the end of April. I visited my son Greg in Las Vegas before continuing on to Salem to pack up my stuff for my move to Oaxaca Mexico June 1 2006. Bob rented the house for two more years and returned to Thailand with a year-long visa in August 2006.

Josh and Amy and about a dozen friends celebrated their “real” wedding on Poipu Beach Kauai Hawaii in July. Josh has taken a position as Chef de Cuisine of the new “One East On Third” restaurant at the Hilton Hotel in Beijing China. Amy followed at the end of her term teaching at Rutgers in September 2006. She is now teaching history at an international school in Beijing.

A year became 6 years. I obtained a one-year Mexican visa to live in an apartment in Oaxaca City. Oaxacan teachers were striking and had been camped out in the Centro for a month when I arrived June 1 2006…at once educational and harrowing. They have been striking every year for the last 26 years. They were finally driven out of the city on November 25 2006 by Federal Riot Control Police using tear gas and arrested and beat scores of people…many were innocent bystanders.

I drove nearly 4000 miles from Oaxaca to Salem, Oregon in August 2007. Being in my house in Oregon felt like I was on vacation.

I returned to Asia in February of 2008 and visited Josh and Amy in Beijing China for 12 days. It was unearthly cold so I went south to Kunming and then Jinghong China. Next was Bangkok Thailand in March for unending dental/medical care. In May Doug, Luk and I will fly to Kuala Lumpur Malaysia to renew our visas.

Bob and I are separated now and he is living in Thailand in Jomptien, south of Pattaya. He will be returning to the States in May 2008 to visit our oldest son Greg in Las Vegas and his mother in Portland, Oregon. I will return to Oregon in June to figure out what to do with house.

You can view pictures and videos I made of our travel by clicking on the links under “My Links” on the right side of the screen if you scroll down a ways on the home page. To get there just hit the “Home” button at the top of this page.

Thank goodness for the internet calling device I use with my computer to make calls costing about .019 cents a minute…Skype. If both parties have Skype calling is free. Check out http://www.skype.com.

Eunice “Zoe” Goetz

Oh, I forgot. I hitch-hiked through Europe with a friend the summer of 1965.

In the beginning of this country, the New England colonies were being settled by the Puritans who endeavored to spread their intolerant “purist” religion across much of rest of the country. But from the time the Dutch West India Company sent Henry Hudson in 1609 to form New Amsterdam, Manhattan has been a rough and tumble place attracting the flotsam and jetsam of the rest of the world. New Amsterdam only occupied the tip of Manhattan and the “wall” along Wall St. was meant to keep both English and Indian raiders out of town. When the English showed up in in battleships in New Amsterdam in 1664 , Governor Stuyesant surrendered without a shot. King Charles II promptly renamed the colony after his brother the Duke of York.

Later, the Reverend John Moore whose descendents include my son Josh’s eighth great grandfather in his fraternal ancestral line, moved to the newly formed Newtown in Long Island in 1652 and became the first minister in the village. In the winter of 1655-56, he returned to England, probably to receive ordination. Moore returned to America in 1657, and died in September of that year. Moore, described as an educated man and excellent preacher, had descendants who were prominent and influential in the town and church, including two bishops of the Episcopal Church, two presidents of Columbia College, and Clement Clark Moore, the author of ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas. The Moore family developed the Chelsea neighborhood in Manhattan. The Moores’s ancient home in Newtown was torn down a few decades ago. A park off Broadway marks its location. See what comes of genealogy research? You never know where your ancestors will turn up.

Our family’s fraternal Hunt line also began in New York beginning with Ralph Hunt of Newton Long Island…one of the Hunt’s marrying into the Moore line. After moving from Long Island to Trenton New Jersey with his father Jesse, George Hunt, Josh’s GGG Grandfather, accompanied Capt. Moore, his brother-in-law, to Clermont County Ohio. “George and Sallie Moore Hunt emigrated the fall after their son, John Moore Hunt’s birth in 1816 to Batavia in Clermont County Ohio where George followed the profession of school teaching, and was the first schoolmaster in Batavia and subsequently taught two years at Columbia (Ohio). He returned to Batavia and settled on a nearby farm where he died in his sixty-eighth year. A History of Clermont County reads: “The oldest teacher remembered in the village [Batavia} was George Hunt, an old-time pedagogue, but withal an excellent teacher, with a discipline equal to military rule, who taught from near 1819 to 1822.” Ref: “History of Clermont County-1880″ By Lewis Everts.

John Moore Hunt’s son, Charles Moore Hunt, Josh’s GG grandfather, fought for Ohio in the Civil War and spent 11 months in the Andersonille Prison…surviving to move to a farm in Klamath County Oregon.

Josh’s maternal ancestors, the Mroczynski’s immigrated from Poland, through Ellis Island in 1892. You can view photos of their ancestral village near Olstyn Poland on our web site at http://homepage.mac.com/laughingnomad/2002-5.

Video We take local electric trains three hours north from Warsaw to Ostroda where we book into the Park Hotel on a lovely lake that caters to German-speaking tourists many of whom ... [Continue reading this entry]

I am looking forward to visiting my grandfather's little village in the north. Seven generations of his ancestors were farmers and lived in the same little village of Szczepankowo. In ... [Continue reading this entry]

The Vatican City, one of the most sacred places in Christendom, attests to a great history and a formidable spiritual venture. A unique collection of artistic and architectural masterpieces lie within the boundaries of this small state. At its centre ... [Continue reading this entry]

Before we began our first round the world journey, a friend asked us to "report back to us at home what your travels reveal about the human heart and what we have become in this world. Look beneath the surface ... [Continue reading this entry]