The Plan B Adventure

Well, reality is finally sinking in!! Becca ended her very successful tenure with Alpha Phi on Thursday and Jeff said “Goodbye” at Harris on Friday. We are so thankful to have met so many great friends and colleagues during our adventures in Chicago. It is very, very hard to say goodbye yes as Robert Frost poetically waxed…….we have miles to go before we sleep……

Ok…..so now onto the RTW adventure. Last week we received our final immunizations. Whew!! my arms are sore….. We also received our prescriptions for Larium which we will use to protect us from malaria. A few quick notes on this malarial decision. Due to our expected travel in many of the warmer world regions where malaria exists we were posed a key question. Do we want to take daily pills when we expect to enter malaria-affected regions or take a weekly pill (Larium) for the whole time?? Although Larium is a bit more intense of a drug (can cause certain hallucinations) we decided on it so we wouldn’t have to worry about when and where to take the daily pill.

As an additional side note an African child dies every 30 seconds from malaria. The Gates Foundation is doing great work in developing new vaccines and distribution networks in sub-Saharan Africa. While we travel and educate ourselves I expect to share and broaden all your horizons as well. Don’t worry I’m (Jeff) not going to turn into some tree-hugging, stereotypical Pac Northwesterner.

Well last Friday we finally secured our RTW tickets. When we left you last we had narrowed down the countries and met Deborah at Airtreks. After three weeks of consistently changing cities, countries, and flight patterns we found a perfect fit. We decided to go with different legs on different airlines instead of a One World Alliance type ticket. This is a very personal decision and we welcome all long-term travellers to get comfortable with all their options. Our ticket uses 7 different airlines and, most importantly, controls change fees since we had to set specific departure dates for each leg.

We realize none of you know where we are going yet so how bout a little framework. We’ve listed the cities and departure dates on our ticket and later we will post a map with our expected overland routes so you can see what we are doing in between flights. (Dad, we listed the type of plane because we know you love that stuff)

Jan 18: Seattle-Vancouver-Hong Kong (Cathay Pacific Airbus A340-300)
Jan 30: Hong Kong – Bangkok, Thailand (Cathay Pacific Boeing 777-300)
May 10: Delhi, India – Istanbul, Turkey (Emirates Airbus A330-200)
May 15: Istanbul, Turkey – Amman, Jordan (Turkish Boeing 737-800)
Jun 03: Cairo, Egypt – (via Khartoum) Nairobi, Kenya (Kenya Air Boeing 737-700)
Jun 13: Nairobi, Kenya – Jo’burg, South Africa (Kenya Air Boeing 737-800)
Jun 23: Jo’burg – (via Dubai) Casablanca, Morocco (Emirates Boeing 777-300ER)
Jul 16: Lisbon, Portugal – Caracas, Venezuela (TAP Portugal Airbus A310-300)
Aug 29: Quito, Ecuador – Panama City, Panama (COPA Air Boeing 737-300)
Sep 17: Mexico City, Mexico – Seattle, Washington (Alaska Air Boeing 777-300)

Okay so we’ve got a framework for the countries we are going to visit. This allows us to get started on our much-needed immunizations. As we discovered we are fortunate to still live in a city like Chicago where Northwestern has its own speciality Travel Clinic. We met Gelie at the clinic and she provided us with a very thorough introduction. We will basically be hitting every major continent and splitting time between major cities and unknown villages. For that reason we will both need almost every immunization in the book. You can’t just get all the shots at once (i.e. 3 rabies shots must be separated by weeks) so Gelie took the time to build a schedule for us and walk through each of the immunizations and diseases they cover. In addition she printed us a dossier on each country we had told her might be included on our trip. These are priceless and so is her help!!

Ok….another item that would have been priceless….Blue Cross/Blue Shield. They are the only carrier that covers non-emergency immunizations. Jeff’s primary doctor saved us some money by helping with two rounds of Hep shots but everything else including Bec’s Hep shots will have to be covered out-of-pocket by us. You may be asking yourself what reasonable charge all of these immunizations are going for these days…drum roll please……..$1,500 per person. OUCH!! (Financially and physically, we could barely move our arms for the first 48 hours) Lesson here is change your insurance to Blue Cross/Blue Shield if you are thinking about travelling. HA! Thought we’d give everyone (parents especially) an idea of what shots we got so you would all understand how safe we are from many of the world’s diseases (except Bird Flu….damn those chickens!!).

Immunizations….Hep A and B, Rabies, Japanese Encephalitis, Polio, Tetanus, Yellow Fever, Meningitis. In addition we will be getting a supply of Malaria pills to take with us for the different strains throughout the world. We all must realize how lucky we are here in America when you look at the disease maps of the world and see the US as the only area exempt from almost every known disease.