Once you decide to put your life on hold and travel the world for a year, it feels like you could go anywhere… But in reality, the world is a REALLY big place, and a year is only 365 days. The original concept for our gap year was to select 4 locations that we would live in for 3 months each. Colored by our extraordinary experience living in an apartment in the old quarter of Hanoi for several months when we adopted Tuck and Jones, we thought it would be great to absorb a smaller set of destinations and live as dedicated tourists, if not locals. It seemed good on paper, but once we started horse-trading on a minuscule four locations, and looked at all the enticing, exotic destinations that surrounded each of them, we realized we were going to have to broaden the list.
Once we expanded our horizons so to speak, I had a brief obsession with the symmetry of the seven of us traveling to the seven continents. How cool would THAT be?! Alas, those dreams were quickly dashed after seemingly countless hours and many phone calls researching how we would get to Antartica. To state the obvious, this is a VERY hard place to get to! Not just the expense, but when you have kids under the age of 11, your choices are extremely limited. In the end, it was the expense that killed this particular dream… The least expensive option I could find for our family of 7 was $90,000!! Yes, ninety… thousand… dollars! Lisa and I quickly realized this would be a great empty nest trip in our retirement years – sorry kids – and we’d find another way to teach global warming and the social behaviors of penguins.
We landed, at least at this point, on 13 countries, averaging about a month in each nation, with the shortest stay being a little over a week to the longest stay lasting 2 months. If you include North America as the starting place for the trip, we end up on 6 out of 7 continents, which seems pretty awesome to us! Factoring into the list of what countries included the following factors / criteria / mandates:
- Each of us got a sacred cow destination to start
- We wanted to connect and revisit our other “home” countries of China and Vietnam, so they both had to be on the list
- Bali and Greece are not optional on any itinerary draft
- Erin Jones and her husband Nayay, who is a Masai from Tanzania, created a personal connection to Tanzania, and agreed to accompany us on that part of our journey
- Myanmar has recently opened up, and we LOVE Southeast Asia
- Wescott and Otto know a little Spanish
- The Heads of Easter Island have been a bit of an obsession for a while
- French Polynesia happens to be a mandatory stop over if you’re heading to Easter Island
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There were many other factors, but the bulk of the trip came together pretty quickly for us. Sequencing, optimizing for weather and finding the best times to visit given places helped the rubrik’s cube fall into place. Unfortunately, not everyone’s sacred cows made the final cut. For example, Otto had chosen Madagascar, but it happens to be one of the more remote spots on the planet to get to, so it fell victim to the budget. In the end, however, we’re feeling good about balancing the desire to not move around too much with the opportunity to be in so many amazing regions of the globe.
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