The Beginning!

“Chasing Summer”

After a few requests from family, friends and fellow travelers I have decided to write a blog. Mostly I am amazed that anyone might be interested in reading about this year of travel and have thus far posted very few and very short notes on facebook about this year. I feel sure that if anyone was actually interested in the adventure it is because of their relation to one of us, our mothers for example. But I suppose the stories of our adventures will be relayed to our mothers through my verbal recantations next year and this blog will therefore serve as a daily (perhaps weekly) version of our very long summer.

And so to catch you up…..

About two years ago my friend Buffy and I decided that we would take a year off and travel. The first version of our plans went something like this: take off a year and travel. Over the last 24 months the plans were revised, exaggerated and periodically abandoned. About 9 months ago we finally decided that we would go to Europe for a while and then we would jet off to South America and attempt to live in a developing country for a few months. Now to understand the enormity of this decision you must understand the complexity of our differing personalities. I had no desire whatsoever to actually make plans and Buffy wanted plans and lots of them. We thought, initially, that we could spend an entire year in a developing nation with very little money and so were sure that was the way to go. Then I became aware that my friend Buffy was going to have something like 70 days of paid time off just about the time we wanted to head off. Buffy was going to get out of the U.S Air Force in October but was going on leave from August until the end of her commitment in October. So Buffy would continue to receive a pay check for two entire months and so I suggested we go to Europe. The surprising thing was that she actually agreed. So we started talking about going to Europe and I started scheming about how to get there. Buffy was still in the military and so could get a free ride on a military flight, which left me to get to Europe on my own and I wanted to make it interesting. Flying was simply not interesting enough so I started looking at sailing across the Atlantic from Boston to England. However, this did not work out at all I could not find a ride being an inexperienced deck hand that really just wanted an interesting ride. But the idea led to me to look at sailing to South America. And so I started to talk to Buffy about the possibility of sailing from southern California to Mexico and beyond. Around May we had our plans we would fly (separately) to Europe and stay there for two months and then come back to the United States and go to southern California to catch a ride to Central America.

At first Liz wanted to know when and where we were going and how long we would spend In each location and how we would get to each location and where we would stay and so on. However, very quickly she realized that I would not be travelling on a plan and so she adjusted for this and I agreed to commit to our destination countries. In Europe we ended up spending about 5 days (each) in Prague, Vienna and Budapest getting us to Turkey in time to meet my friend Claire. Two weeks in Turkey and a few days in the Greek Islands landed us in Athens in mid September so we trained it up to Macedonia and spent our last ten days spread between Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia and Slovenia. On October 4^th I left returned to Prague and spent my last night in Europe alone in a youth hostel before heading back to Phoenix where I sadly forgot to tell my dad when I was coming back and so spent the night in the Airport. But anyways, Buffy flew on an Air Force cargo plane to Seattle and we met up again in Boulder Creek California where my uncle lives.