About Me
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 and Cambodia 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 home stays 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, Cambodia 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 in Salem 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 then took 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 taught 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 for Chinese New Year 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 flew to Kuala Lumpur Malaysia to renew our visas.
Josh and Amy since moved to Hong Kong in August 2008 where Josh is the Executive Chef at the American Club and Amy taught school at the HK campus of the same school where she taught in Beijing.
Bob and I separated in 2005 and he is living in Thailand in Jomptien, south of Pattaya. He returned to the States in May 2008 to visit our oldest son Greg in Las Vegas and his mother in Portland, Oregon and take care of some business.
I returned to Oregon in June 2008 to spend the summer and fall of 2008 in Oregon. I rented out the house in Salem and returned to Oaxaca Mexico on November 1, 2008 where I live in a beautiful apartment in the Centro with a veranda overlooking Conzati Park. I returned to Salem on December 17th, in the middle of an ice storm, to pack up some kitchen and personal belongings on December 29…via Las Vegas where I spent Christmas with my son Greg. After returning to Oaxaca, I then took a short journey through mountain villages in Guatemala for two weeks…returning to Oaxaca through San Cristobal Chiapas.
The end of September 2009 I joined Greg’s father in Las Vegas and then up to Salem Oregon for a month to see son Doug, some friends and Bob’s 93 year old mother. Then Bob flew back to his home in Jomptien Thailand and I flew to Hong Kong to see son Josh, (newly divorced) then Thailand for 5 months…a good amount of dental work…and a month on Koh Samui with my daughter-in-law and her mother to help them set up the new beach restaurant that my son rented. Watched the demonstrators rally but left before the burning of Bangkok. Then back to Hong Kong for a week before flying back to Oregon for a couple weeks and home to Oaxaca via Las Vegas. Whew! I didn’t care if I saw another airport again!
However, I missed having a car to visit mountain villages in Oaxaca, so in September 2010 I flew to Oregon where I spent a month with my son Doug who was visiting there from Thailand, negotiated the purchase of a Nissan Xterra, and drove to Las Vegas where I spent 3 weeks with my son Greg. Then picked up a Oaxaca expat friend near Palm Springs and drove across the border at Nogales…no searches…no stops! 🙂 On to Guadalajara, Guanajuato and then Queretaro to see an old expat friend. Then took the new toll road from just south of Queretaro straight across to Puebla and down to Oaxaca.
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.
With kids scattered all over the world, thank goodness for Video Skype.
Eunice “Zoe” Goetz
Oh, I forgot. I hitch-hiked through Europe with a friend the summer of 1965.
Tags: About The Nomad, Doug, Greg, Joshua, Progeny
Zoe
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