Wanderlust

Things have settled down a bit recently. We found a new roommate to take over our room in the shared house starting May 15 (he’s already paid us back our deposit and he’s given Angela 1 1/2 months’ rent). We’ve packed all of our stuff that we won’t be using for the next 4 days, so it’s all ready to go to Steve’s mom’s house for storage. One of Steve’s friends is going to take Elizabeth (our cat) for the year that we’re gone. Everything is really coming together. The only things left on our to-do list before we leave is to cancel Netflix (which I’ll do right before we take off), and I need to change over all of my mailing info to Laura’s house (we’ve already put in a change of address at the post office, but I want to change things directly, too). Things are becoming more and more real all of the time. I’m a little bit in shock that this is actually going to happen. Steve and I are really about to leave for a year long trip around the world. It’s been a year of planning for a year of fun! But I think it’ll all be worth it and then some. I think the reality of the trip is really setting in now in part because we have more free time to read the Peru and Ecuador travel books that we bought. We’ve both been spending our evenings lying in bed with the kitty, reading the books and sharing information–dreaming and planning. We still plan on winging most of the trip with the help of the guidebooks and people we meet along the way. But we have to plan our bus route and where we’re going to stop from Lima to Cusco in order to arrive in time to get acclimatized before our Machu Picchu trek. So, that part of the trip is really coming together in terms of what we want to see and do and how long it’s going to take so that we make sure to arrive on time. But I’m not going to share our plans just yet–you’ll have to just check back in to see what adventures we’re having. Read the rest of this entry »

Steve’s sister Laura has graciously agreed to be our home contact (or Angel as one travel book called it) while we travel. She will be responsible for various tasks such as collecting our mail–opening important looking things and recycling all of our junk mail, paying our credit card bill, transferring money from our ING account to our bank accounts, holding a copy of our important documents and photos/receipts for our travel insurance, being our one main contact if something bad happens–she’ll contact the rest of Steve’s family and Gina’s family in case of an emergency, and various other things that I’m forgetting.

The main thing she’s going to help us with is the banking stuff. I’ve read that it’s unsafe to check bank accounts online at internet cafes while traveling because the internet cafe workers are bored and underpaid, a dangerous pairing that often leads to stolen information and money. So, just to be safe, we’re not going to check our bank accounts while we’re gone. We completely trust Laura with our information and our money (honesty and responsibility being the two most important characteristics for a home contact, I’d say).

A billion thanks to Laura. We’ll buy you something pretty along the way, and we’ll miss you and the family.

It was a difficult process trying to figure out travel insurance. On top of trying to decipher the legal-speak of the contracts it turns out that Steve and I have different ideas of what we think travel insurance should be for. I felt like I wanted the cheapest possible plan because in the end it’s money that could be spent doing something fun somewhere. I basically just wanted it to cover any medical expenses we might incur in case we get sick or break something. Steve, on the other hand, is more on the side of making sure that everything is taken care of–replacement of our stuff if it’s stolen, medical evacuation, etc, etc… It was just a difference in opinion. I’m going into this trip assuming that at some point I will get sick and might have to go to the hospital (or will at least spend a few miserable days getting acquainted with a less-than-sparkling squat toilet) and that something (or everything) will be lost, stolen, or irreparably broken. And I’m okay with that. Stuff happens. It sucks; you deal with it; you move on. We can always buy more stuff (I know what I’ve got and how much it cost me). But on the other hand, you can rack up a lot of medical debt in a really short period of time.We eventually talked out all of our opinions/preferences and settled on World Nomads travel insurance (which is recommended by the site that hosts my blog–bootsnall). We chose this plan for several reasons: Read the rest of this entry »

A few days ago Steve and I pulled out our packing lists and starting getting out all of the stuff we’ve acquired for the trip, checking off the items on our lists as we went. It was really a helpful exercise because we were able to accomplish several things at once: Read the rest of this entry »

Someone out there in internet-land asked a while back what we were going to do in terms of getting at our money while we’re traveling. We’ve done some research, and here’s our plan:
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We have been busy, busy, busy the last month trying to get all of our ducks in a row before we depart. Even though we have 42 days until we fly away to Peru (42 days! Wow!) there’s only (quick calculation…) 22 days until I fly to the East coast to visit my family and friends. We need to get everything figured out before then. That’s not a lot of time.

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We have been very busy recently with checking things off of our to-do list. Here’s the latest update on our plans:

• We’ve booked a 4-day/3-night trek along the Inka Trail to Machu Picchu through Liz’s Explorer. We leave June 21st from Cusco and get back on the 24th (the day of their Inka Festival where they pretend to sacrifice a llama…and other things I’m sure, but the fake llama sacrifice makes me smile).
• We’ve purchased a new Peru travel book. While the $0.25 Footprints book was a good deal, it turns out that we’re not really fond of it. Both of us read different sections and came back not feeling like we’d really learned anything useful. So, we bought a Moon Handbook for Peru, which so far has some great information and a lot of maps (plus no advertisements which was a big drawback for me with the Footprint guide). We also bought an Ecuador Rough Guides book, which we also like.
• Steve just got back from San Francisco where he picked up our brand new China visas! I got a little nervous when I realized we should’ve gotten the visas before buying the plane tickets, but it worked out okay (our contingency plan if we didn’t get the visas was just to fly from Beijing to somewhere else and never leave the airport!). They were a whopping $130 a piece. We went with the one year, multiple entry visa. This made the most sense for us since it’ll be roughly 6 months before we go to China and the time frame starts from the time you buy them, not the time you enter the country. Plus they were the same price no matter which kind you bought and this one gives us the most flexibility.
• Steve and I are also getting ready to take the GRE. This doesn’t have much to do with traveling, it’s just one more thing on the long list of to-dos before it’s time to leave. We’re trying to get all of our graduate school applications either sent or ready to send so that we don’t have to worry about it while we travel. I’m usually pretty good at standardized tests, but I think the Verbal portion of this one is going to kick my butt. We’ll see.

And I think that’s about it for updates. Grad school planning has definitely taken over recently, but that’s getting under control as well. We both need to take the test and write our Statements of Purpose and then we’re almost home free. We’ll just need to sell our stuff, pack, book a couple of hostels (one for the first night in Lima so we don’t have to worry about it, and one for the night we get back from Machu Picchu since it’s going to be crowded in Cusco), find someone to watch Elizabeth for a year, and then get on the plane in time.

I’m a little relieved that things are coming together so well. Machu Picchu and the China Visas were the last two things I was nervous about. But now we’re set. We’re sort of planning out our time from when we get to Lima until the trek just so we make sure to get to Cusco with enough time to acclimate to the high elevation. But after that it’s all just open to what sounds the best.

My very good friend Joe (yes that same handsome fellow who traveled with me through Europe when I met Steve) came to visit us last week. We had a good time running around San Francisco (we probably walked about 8 miles one day which is amazing in a city that is only 7 miles long and 7 miles wide) and going on a road trip down the coast to Santa Barbara (where we checked out the university and Joe jumped on a Greyhound bus to LA). I had lots of fun eating good food and visiting with Joe (whom I hadn’t seen for over a year). But I realized that seeing Joe was officially my first goodbye before the trip. He lives in Austin, TX so I won’t see him again before we leave. In honor of this milestone (and sort of just as an excuse), I’d like to introduce Steve’s dad’s smugmug account which he has graciously allowed us to use to post our photos during our trip. So, check out the photos of our goodbye trip with Joe at: http://muddyknees.smugmug.com/Travel/460891

And I’ll do my best to upload the hundreds (if not thousands) of pictures I’ll take over the next year of traveling. And you’ll have to excuse the fact that they probably won’t be at all edited (so bunches of pictures of the same thing) or most likely turned the right way. Thus is the internet cafe life, my friends.

We bought our one-way tickets to Beijing, China. They were $604 a piece through Vayama.com. We fly out from San Francisco on September 7, and we arrive in China on September 8 at around 2 in the afternoon. We’ll have enough time to make our way to our hostel, get some food and maybe walk around and stretch our legs a little before going to bed and hopefully not suffering from jet lag too bad.

We’re leaving a little later than I would have ideally liked, but we wanted some cushion between the trip back from Peru (September 2) and flying out to China just in case flights were late or delayed, and also to see Steve’s family and friends (and to call my family and friends). But in order to get the cheaper tickets you could only fly on certain days, so we’ll be back in the states for 5 days visiting and resting and probably taking very long hot showers (and I predict uploading and organizing photos and possibly catching up on blog posts).

It’s both very exciting and a little scary to buy one way tickets to such a faraway place. But I think we’ll really like China, and if we don’t, we can just move on since we won’t have to worry about our onward plane/train tickets.

On January 23, 2008 I became an Auntie! Auntie Gina (not to be confused with Aunt Gina, my great-aunt who recently passed away). My sister Cara had a beautiful, 11 lb 1 oz (thankfully a c-section) little girl named Sophia Lynn. Unfortunately I won’t get to officially meet her until Memorial Day weekend when I’m in Pennsylvania, but in the meantime she’s been sending me photos. Here’s a couple from the proud Auntie:

She looks just like my sister. Really. It’s uncanny.