I’ve been meaning to update the Postcard Valet FAQ for a long time; lots of people keep asking us what our favorite place was and now I have something to point to!  This’ll go up on it’s own page, too, but I realized it serves as good summary of certain parts of our trip and thought I might make a post about it as well.

If you have a question that’s not on here, let me know.  Be happy to add something to the list.

Post Travels FAQ

Index of questions:

Q: How long did you end up traveling?

Q: Where are you now?

Q: What are your plans for the future?

Q: What was your favorite place/tour/country/thing out of all your travels?

Q: What was the craziest/most disgusting thing you ate?

Q: Which countries did you visit?

Q: Which country was your favorite?

Q: What was your least favorite country?

Q: What was the most dangerous thing you did?

Q: Did you have any trouble while traveling?  Was anything stolen?

Q: How much did you spend?  Were you able to stick to your $100/day budget?

Q: Did you ever get sick on the trip?

Q: Are you still married?  How has being together 24/7 for 18 months affected your relationship?

Q: Do you miss it?  Does life seem boring now that you’ve slowed down?  Did you burn out on travel?

Answers:

Q: How long did you end up traveling?

A: Almost exactly 18 months.

Although… that answer doesn’t really tell the whole story.  In our minds, there are three or four distinct parts to our time away from home:  Crossing the US and Canada, staying with family, active travel, and living in Australia.  (more…)

Last year, on November 10^th, our flight from Miami to Quito kicked off our trip around the world.  Since then, we’ve traveled tens-of-thousands of miles across five continents, seen amazing sites, and met amazing people.  One year later, to the day, we’re still going strong.  We just arrived in a new city, Thailand’s Chiang Mai, and because of a fantastic coincidence, we happened to arrive during their Festival of Lights (Loi Krathong.)  We pretended the whole city was turning out to give us a huge anniversary party!

Originally, our year of travel was supposed to begin on July 1, 2010.  We’d budgeted $100/day for the entire year, setting aside a whopping $36,500 for our trip.  But we had setbacks and delays in the States which eventually delayed our trip by three months.  By the time November 10^th rolled around, we had already been gone from home 140 days.  Assuming we’d stuck to our travel budget, that was $14,000 already spent.  We discussed it and made the tough decision to start again at zero – time-wise and money-wise – when we flew to Ecuador.

We did fairly well in South America (aside from spending too big a chunk on the Galapagos Islands), but Africa pitted our travel budget spreadsheet against us.  We regained some ground when we stayed with friends and family in Europe and Russia, saving on housing, but the transportation costs caught us again.  By September 12^th, we had exhausted the $36,500 we’d set and realized that any remaining travel costs would be coming out of our savings.  We had fallen 58 day – almost two months – short of our goal.

(more…)

One year ago today, we left our home in Juneau, Alaska, and started our trip around the world.  If everything had gone according to plan, we would be returning to work after the Fourth of July weekend.  Thank goodness things didn’t go as planned!

A quick recap:

• Our trip started with a road trip through the Canada and the United States.  13,000 miles later, we’d visited Seattle, the Redwoods, San Francisco, Las Vegas, the Outer Banks, Key West, Manhattan, and Niagara Falls.
• An unexpected family emergency delayed our plans and we stayed with my grandparents from mid-August to early November.
• On November 10^th, what we considered to be our “real” start date, we flew to Quito, Ecuador, and met five friends for a week-long trip through the Galapagos Islands.
• From the end of November, 2010, to May 1^st, 2011, we worked our way through South America, exploring Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay.
• We rented an apartment in Buenos Aires for a month and played the role of ex-pats for a time.
• May found us in Africa, a first for both of us.  We have since worked our way north from Capetown, South Africa, through Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Tanzania.  We’re in Dar es Salaam right now, bound for the island of Zanzibar for a week or two of relaxation.

In all, over the course of a year, we’ve passed through 15 countries.  That may sound like a lot, but I expected to be much further along by now.

(more…)

When I originally wrote this, I was just venting.  Something actually came of it.  Be sure to read the follow-up!

ACS is pissing me off.

Hey, that’s a good opening line, isn’t it?  Probably got you interested.  That’s great, but honestly I wrote it in the hope I’d eventually see a change in Google’s search results.

My wife and I have been loyal ACS customers for over five years.  Of the local carriers in Juneau, they have the best wireless cellphone service, at least in terms of coverage.  Oh, sure, we’ve had our gripes.  ACS’s plans are more expensive and their cellphone selection is rather poor.  But what good are extra Cellular One or Alaska Digitel minutes if you’ve got no bars?  Besides, my wife and I comfortably share 330 minutes and we don’t use our phones as cameras. 

So what’s the big deal?  It’s their “Retail Services” department.

A few months ago, we received a letter in the mail stating that ACS was upgrading their cellular network from TDMA to CDMA.  The reasons for the network switch weren’t exactly clear.  Except for the FCC-mandated “emergency safetly feature” (i.e., 911), we could expect “crystal-clear voice quality, the fewest dropped calls, advanced wireless features, higher security, and much more!”  I could break those down into bullet points and explain why each of them say nothing, but I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.  They were willing to offer us a new phone; well, they’d have to since our old phones wouldn’t work on their new network.  The letter told us we could stop by our local ACS office and pick up one of three, free* CDMA models:  “An Audiovox 8615, Koycera SE 44, or the new Motorola RAZR V3c.”  After checking them out online, it appeared that this new network could finally allow us to do some web browsing, picture sending, and other stuff that Alaska’s backwater service hasn’t offered yet.  Cool.

(more…)

My grandfather once told me that it doesn’t matter how well you plan things out, there will always be unexpected events to trip you up.

Of course, we were talking about finances, but I think that his lesson applies equally well to life in general.

Oksana and I have been looking forward to going on a vacation together since last December. Finances are really no longer a problem as we can save up vacation money fairly easily, but getting the time off from work is an entirely different matter. I have the university calendar year to plan around, while Oksana has to give consideration to her job at the Mendenhall Auto Center.

Fortunately, we knew far ahead of time what we wanted to do. There was a family reunion (on my father’s side) scheduled for late June in Daytona Beach, and we also wanted to visit my mom parents on the beach in N.C. We asked our respective bosses early and were lucky enough to find two weeks in June that we could both afford to be gone.

Even though we had such advance warning, Oksana and I made a mistake. Instead of booking our tickets as soon as we’d received permission from work, we procrastinated. We thought it would be okay since we still had more than six weeks to go V-day, but we underestimated the number of people who go on vacation in June. The flights weren’t full yet, but we lost our opportunity to purchase a “saver” ticket with our accumulated miles.

Further complicating matters, we needed to take a roundabout flight path. Alaska Airlines (where we have a mileage plan) only flies to a handful of cities on the East Coast, so in order to spend a week in both North Carolina and Florida, we decided to fly round-trip to Orlando and purchase another ticket to Norfolk, VA, on the side. We could have done all that by cashing in 40,000 miles and paying $144 each on airfare.

Instead, we ending up cashing in 73,000 miles, paid $175 to purchase 7,000 extra miles, and spent $250 each on the additional FL-to-VA tickets. Lesson learned.

(more…)