Wild Places and Open Spaces

One year later, 11 flights, 72,000 driven kilometeres, 3 cars, 200 different campsites, 20 states, and several pairs of shoes, we are back home. We aren’t exactly pleased at the abrupt conclusion of our pacific adventure, but we have succeeded in creating a lifetime of wonderous memories in a relatively short time.

Apart from some minor mishaps ie stings, scrapes, falls etc. we were very fortunate to have endured our journey without any significant snags. Remarkably we only lost a bird book and a few other minor things along the way. We wore out several pairs of cheap shoes and a normal amount of clothes.

We were also fortunate to have a terrific supportive cast from home with our parents taking care of our stuff and affairs while we were gone – not to mention taking care of us before, between and now after our trip.

A lot of people ask where or what our favorite part of the trip was, but that is extremely difficult to give a simple answer. The best part of all was probably breaking away from our ‘normal’ boring existence and daring to break the rules. Like we said before we left, “If we can be of any inspiration to anyone small who wants to think bigger, then we would be happy”.

After that it has to be all the incredible people we met along the way, as they have served as inspiration to us! Our lives were touched by so many amazing people, that they alone made our trip worth every step. We especially thank our friends and family in Australia who helped us and gave us a place to stay and get organized, as did both our Canadian/Kiwi and Canadian/Alaskan friends in both respective places. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts for helping to make our trip easier and more fun.

That being said; we set out on this journey to experience wild places and open spaces, and we did just that. The highlights are many – too many to list- but between the vast open spaces of the colourful southwestern US landscapes, the open untouched tundra and large animals of Alaska and Yukon Territory, the beautiful scenery of the Inside Passage, the warm weather and waters of Hawaii, the wonderous animals of Australia, the rolling landscape and friendly people of New Zealand, the amazing reefs and underwater life of Fiji, and the lazy days of lying on the beaches of Samoa, we truly had a thrill of a lifetime discovering thousands of amazing treasures everywhere we went.

The problem now is we have the travel bug, and even the great distances we’ve travelled and all the things we’ve seen, the bug has only opened our eyes to how much more there is to encounter – places we’ve never even considered prior to our travels.

Now we just need to find the means and the money to continue our journey. One of our friends told us if he won the lottery he’d fund our travels just so he could keep reading about them….That sounds perfect to us! We’re pulling for you……and thanks!

Nobody knows what lies ahead and we don’t either, but the mystery is part of the fun, don’t you think? For now we’ll settle back into our ‘boring, structured lives’ but we will be dreaming of further travels in the near future and that will always get us through!

We have no regrets for the money we’ve spent, and we intend on doing it again soon. Our only advice to everyone is ‘dream big, then do it!’.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 26th, 2007 at 5:51 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.