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.