Stuffed in a box

This morning Matt and I finished stuffing everything we own into a Packrat Pod with no serious injuries, crying, or throwing of appliances. I like to think I have some serious moving skills. This is my 3rd move this year, and doing archaeology is really just a sequence of moving stuff out of dirt into boxes and then between labs and museums. Matt's superpower is the Tetris of fitting oddly-shaped objects into square spaces. But. Moving is hard and we are tired. And we wonder things like, "What is that weird plastic thing in the storage closet?" "Are our hangers procreating?" and "Where did all of those baby spiders go that we noticed in the kitchen the other day?

Also, how would you store all of your worldly possessions without your friends? Thank you so much to Southy and Diane for all of those great boxes, Brian and Emily for babysitting skis and beer collections, and Shelby and Ross for pretty much everything else that is keeping us sane these days.

Travel Planning

Our trip is nigh, in 1 week we'll be in Hanoi. As we meet with people for what might be the last time before we hit the road, we're buffeted with more "When are you leaving?"s and "Where are you going"s than we can shake a stick at (I tried shaking a stick at some of them, but it didn't help). We've tried to keep our travel planning fairly flexible by design. Outside of our intercontinental flights and a hotel in Hanoi and Cairo, we have no concrete reservations. With that said, we've given a good amount of thought to the cities and sites we'd like to try to visit while we are traveling. Our flight plans gave us some structure that has allowed us to narrow down our itinerary without making it seem completely rigid.

I've gotten most of my inspiration for travel from just talking to friends. Some are prolific bloggers, like Jeremy who writes for Gadling (you can read his articles here), and another who while I don't think is currently writing but kept a substantial blog during a year long trip in 2008 through southeast Asia and New Zealand. Anyone who has visited any part of a country on our agenda has been more than forthcoming about sharing details about places to visit. We certainly won't lack for recommendations.

Email Scams while traveling

I know this is old news for many but I just wanted to remind people of a common email scam, and one that is all the more believable when you know people who are traveling:

Friend Mugged at Knife Point — or Just a Scam

Just remember that we won't be asking for money over email; if you receive an email from us asking for money you should ignore it.

Trip Itinerary

We booked some flights back in September to give our trip some structure. Here's how the itinerary currently looks:

Fly into Hanoi, January 6 (LAX via Taipei)

travel overland through:
Vietnam
Cambodia
Thailand

Fly from Bangkok to Cairo on February 1 (via Kuwait)

travel overland through:
Egypt
Jordan
Israel

Fly from Tel Aviv to Istanbul on March 1 (via Athens)

travel overland through:
Turkey
Greece

Fly from Athens to Seattle on March 17 (via London and Reykjavik)

So we're looking at seeing 8 countries in about 10 weeks (not including stopover countries). Outside of the flights that we have booked, we currently have no other reservations of any sort made.

more on purpose

I've traveled for multiple reasons before, but this is the most unstructured trip upon which I've embarked. Traveling with purpose is great if I can clearly define it before I leave. On this trip, I want to keep things simple - the purpose is to see new places, new people, and to see what is similar and different about these places and people from those with which I am already familiar. I hope we avoid the trap of having a more specific purpose, not entirely finding it through the course of our trip, and then coming home having the feeling that we've missed something.

29 November 2010

On the plane last night on our way back from Thanksgiving in Chicago, I was watching a terrible movie about a woman who travels around the world to learn about love. And herself? And relationships. I nudged Matt, who chose wisely to become absorbed in Infinite Jest rather than letting his brain get sucked out by the tv, and asked if our trip needed a larger goal. He replied something like, “We have a goal, we’re going to interesting places. To see people. And the things they do.” I protested for a minute and then realized he was right. We’re just going to see some more of the world, because the timing was good right now, and we chose places we thought would be interesting. If the trip has a larger goal, it will find us.

We’re leaving in early January, but the trip really begins at the end of December when we leave Seattle to see my family in New York, and then travel down to California with a van full of artifacts (tune in later in December if you want to know what that is all about). So we’re coming down the home stretch now in facing the practicalities of storing our worldly possessions and planning the first leg of our trip. I’m excited to fit everything into a little storage pod and walk away from it.

Coming soon - content!

Amanda and I have set a September 9 deadline to get things rolling for the trip. I'm on the cusp of booking some airfare to get us roughly where we're going. Once I get that settled, I'll post our rough outline of an itinerary and the real planning can begin.

Placeholder in place!

This will be the blog for Amanda and Matt's travels in 2011.