Departure Eve

Wow.  This is it.  Tomorrow AM we depart Ouray for the first leg of our Round the World journey.  All international travel of any significance begins in Butte, Montana and we would be loathe to deviate from that time honored tradition.

We have a 14-hour drive to get to my brother Jeff's place in Butte.  Jeff and his wife Maria are going to be Nanda's caregivers over the next 9 months.  She will be in good hands.

We are likely not the first, but we are the next group of international travelers to begin their journey without passports. Ugh!  Our passports are in visa application purgatory at the Burma embassy in Washington DC.  The only visa that we had to get in advance and it is not going swimmingly, to say the least. We have the neighborhood watch program alerted to our front door step to watch out for a Fedex parcel in the next few days. Hopefully the passports catch up to us before we leave Portland on Dec 3.  Plan B is duplicate passports in Honolulu at the regional office the day prior to our flight to Bangkok.

10+ years in the making and the day has finally arrived.  Pretty surreal.  Had a great Turkey Day celebration with the Jackson's that included Don and Jan from Avon.  A nice send off from Ouray.

Bon Voyage Party

Our friends Jenny and Lindsay organized a going away Bon Voyage party in our honor.  Thank you!  We had a great time visiting with our Ouray extended family.  We will miss you all and wish you a prosperous and healthy 2013.  See you in August!

Audrey is psyched!

2 weeks out

Wow.  Two weeks to go.  Time marches on.  After years of planning, discussing, and dreaming of this trip we are truly on the door step.

Yesterday was spent in front of the computer doing prep work for next years tax return.  Lots of stuff like that to consider when you are going to be absent for many months.  Next week is the kids last week of school.

We met our winter tenants yesterday. They wanted to pay a visit to the house. They will be occupying the house starting December 1.  Our property manager arranged the meeting. When I answered the door I found my friend Andres and his girlfriend Annie.  What a nice surprise to know that we will have friends occupying our home for the winter.

Ethan finished processing our elk yesterday. It was a wonderful distraction to spend an hour packing it away in the deep freezer.  We were down to two pounds of sausage from the 2011 elk and it was great to close the door seeing all of those wonderful white butcher paper packages! Food for when we get home. We may (will?) be broke.

We Fedexed our passports and visa applications to the Myanmar embassy in Washington DC, yesterday.  I didn't like saying goodbye to our passports only two weeks out from departure.  However, the visa is only valid for 90 days from date of issue so we had to wait until November 7 to ship.  It'll work out fine, no doubt. Myanmar is the only country we are visiting that requires a visa in advance. All other visas we can get at the border.

That is a significant benefit to traveling on a USA passport.  Many countries are not afforded the same type of reciprocity and accumulating visas is a time consuming ordeal (and expensive!).

Every day we knock out tasks on the punch list.  It is fun to watch the list diminish.  Not long now.

Mike

Mackenzie's expectations

Hi! My name is Mackenzie Gibbs. I am thirteen years old. For those of you who don’t know, my family and I are going on a HUGE world trip. I am really excited for this trip; however, I am going to miss a lot of things about Ouray.

First off, I will really miss my friends. Although we will be able to email and Skype, they will still be thousands of miles away from me. Second of all, I will miss a life of luxury. When we are travelling, there will be a lot of situations where we will not be comfortable at all. Some examples are overnight flights, jet lag, temperature struggles (too hot or cold), and uncomfortable trains. One of the last major things that I will miss is American food. I know it sounds stupid but I grew up eating that kind of food. Ya, we have other types such as Mexican and Chinese, but it was still made in the good ol’ USA. When you have to part with that kind of sentimental attachment to something (13 years of sentimental build-up), it can be very sad. I mean, you gotta love mac-n’-cheese, hamburgers, and potato chips?!?! They are American heritage! So I conclude that American food is very important to our culture.

Along with the longing for friends, luxury, and American food, I also have some expectations. One of the main things I expect to happen on this trip is to meet new people. One can always use more friends, right!?! I would looove to have a new friend from each country we go to. Would that be cool or what?!?! By the time I get back, I’ll have so many friends, I won’t remember my peeps back home. Just Kidding!  Anyways. Oh right.

Anyways, another expectation that should happen in order to make this a fine trip is awesome food (I know, a tiny bit obsessed with it)! I already love all the different foods we have at home; but it will taste even better at the place it started from. The final extreme hope for this wonderful experience is the fun of it. If we spent nine months travelling around the world and didn’t have any fun, what would be the point!?! If we don’t have a ton of fun on this trip, I think I’ll live the rest of my life regretting it. I feel like I should put some sort of conclusion here, but I can’t think of one so... be sure to follow the Gibbs family:D!

Rock's expectations

The  first thing I think of about this trip is that I will miss my friends. And I am hopeful to not die. We saw a movie on Myanmar and a little girl had TB and it scared me. I really don't want that. I would like to see the gold Buddhas in Myanmar. I want to see a car being trampled by elephants............ but NOT ours!!! I want to see rhinos fighting. I am curious if there will be noodles anywhere, because noodles are my favorite food!

Audrey's expectations

I expect that we will have bad times and good times, and times we want to stay forever, times when we will be homesick!  I am very excited for this trip!  Experiences I would like to happen are...in Paris get my very own loaf of Baguette bread.  In Africa I would like to see lion cubs, giraffe, rhinos, elephants and basically every other animal there is!  What I would like to do is go to the Dead Sea which is located in Israel.  I hear that there is so much salt  that salt castles form!  Also, there are no fish or coral. There might be some living algae, though!  I would also like to eat gelato in Italy.  It is a type of ice cream.

This trip is going to be a good educational experience, but I bet I will be glad to be home!

30 day countdown

I am sitting in the dining room listening to the wind howl outside as I ponder this blog entry.  My day was spent out in the high country of the San Juan's battling this same wind on a long day of elk hunting. No elk in the freezer yet this season, but several days still remain.  Optimism is still high!

Pretty sobering to think we will be getting in the car to drive Nanda to Uncle Jeff's and Aunt Maria's in Montana in 30 days time.  That is our send-off from Ouray and the beginning of this adventure.  There is a lot left to be done in those 30 days. Yikes!  Some days pass comfortably with thoughts such as, "what will be will be, just don't forget the passports on the way to the airport."  Other days are rife with feelings of suffocation, "Heellllpppppp!!  There are way too many tasks left to be accomplished!"

Today is one of the easy days.  Probably coincides with many hours and miles in solitary thought toting around a rifle in the mountains.

This adventure really began even before Joanie and I had children together.  We decided way back when, that if we did have children, we would definitely take a year off with them and travel the world.  Making that statement back then created the obligation.  I am a big fan of 'creating the obligation'. Go ahead - jump into the deep end of the pool. What's the worse that could happen?  If nothing else, you'll have a good story to tell.

World travel has been in our blood for a long time.  Joanie and I created a travel legacy for ourselves in our 20s by rejecting conventional wisdom and choosing travel and adventure over careers and upward mobility. Whatever that means.  That commitment to travel and lifestyle created where we live, who we are, how we spend our days, and what we believe.  We expect our children to be similarly empowered by the magic of choice.

The first trip of significant magnitude that I took was Europe for 3 1/2 months in 1989. Right after college.  I still have the card my parents gave me just prior to embarkation.  It has a simple pastel drawing of a sail boat on the cover.  Open the card and it reads, "Bon Voyage...living well is the best revenge."  I love that line. It suits my personality as I suspect my parents knew when they selected the card.

Life is not a dress rehearsal.   Time is short.  Go and and GET SOME while you are here.