Hitting the road (again)

Welcome to our trip blog…

Outdoor adventures and international travel have been a big part of our family life.  When Natalia and Isaiah were nine months old, we had them out in baby backpacks in Yosemite National Park. A year later—just after they had learned to walk—we did our first overnight backpacking trip in Tuolumne Meadows (also in Yosemite).  When they were three we moved to Ecuador for six months.  And since then, we’ve taken at least one big family adventure trip every year—cycling one summer in Quebec’s Laurentian mountains, and another summer in Europe from Vienna to Prague; kayaking in British Columbia (Canada), Baja Sur (Mexico), and the Exumas (Bahamas—tip: avoid hurricane season!); and taking long hikes in Glacier National Park, Rocky Mountain National Park, Washington State’s Cascades, the Gila Wilderness in New Mexico, Escalante Staircase in Utah, Pictured Rocks at Lake Superior, and this past summer in Alaska.

So while people have been surprised to hear that we’re taking off from work and school for five months to see the world, to us it feels like a logical extension of the life we’ve been living.

Our trips almost always involve a journey by foot, bike, or kayak from one interesting place to another.  We look at packaged adventure tours for inspiration, but do the trip planning ourselves.  What is different (and a bit overwhelming) about the trip we are about to head off on is that it strings together so many different adventures—biking in Bali, Turkey, Andalusia and the Italian Alps; kayaking in West Papua Indonesia and along the south coast of Crete; trekking and hiking in the Grand Canyon, Myanmar, and Bolivia…along with some fun city stops in Yangon, Bangkok, Istanbul, Athens, Rome, Barcelona, Paris, Venice, Prague, La Paz, and Cuzco, plus a month-long stay in Cochabamba, Bolivia.

Julia and I have been thinking about a big trip for the last few years.  But the idea of the kids leaving middle school at spring break and not coming back until high school begins in the fall first began to take shape while Natalia and I were cooking Thanksgiving dinner this past November.  We sat at the kitchen table searching the internet to find out whether it was possible to leave school to travel the world (it is!!).  Read more about vagabond schooling…

We began hammering out the “where” during our drive back and forth to Florida over December vacation.  We compressed what probably should have been a year of planning into two months.  You can see a map of our plans here and more details about where we are going here.

There are a million reasons to travel.  For us, much of the draw is nature. In the wilderness, we connect more fully with each other. Julia and I have made most of our most important life decisions—about where to live, where to study, where to work, and when to marry—while out in the back country.  When we leave cars, money, and communication devices behind, we find ourselves with the solitude and time to think about what really matters in life. We feel a kind of peacefulness, resourcefulness, and appreciation of nature—a sense of exhilaration from the constant exercise, accomplishment from climbing over mountain passes and crossing bodies of water, and astonishment at the breathtaking beauty.

There is also something powerful about leaving home and meeting people who view and experience the world differently.  Julia is a cultural anthropologist whose interests in understanding the world from others’ perspectives has driven her reading, writing, living, and traveling for decades, especially through long stays in South America.  Gordon is a community organizer for whom getting to know people from different walks of life through one-on-one conversations, telling his own story and listening to others’, and finding common cause in issues of racial and social justice have been his work for many years. That spirit of encountering difference and the reality of being linked together on a small planet under incredible stress is part of the inspiration for this trip.

We appreciate you reading our stories and following our travels!