We end the two year Round the World (RTW) trip with visits to families and friends in Los Angeles, Chicago, Waterloo/Kitchener, Toronto and Calgary. Friends and family wrote to us, many came to meet us (Mom in Argentina and Australia, Mona in Brazil, Melanie in China, Sean in India and Allison in Australia), others took care of our cats and business (Jeff and Libby with sending medicine and stuff we needed from Chicago; Melanie with cats Mijo and Mija in L.A.; Allison with cat Babe in Chicago; Audrey and Rich with our personal business affairs in L.A., David with our finances in L.A.), many, many people wrote to tell us they enjoyed our blog and to keep us up to date with what was happening in their lives. We thank all of you for helping make this trip possible.
What’s next for us, you may ask. May and June 2008 will be spent visiting family and friends in the United States and Canada. In July, we’ll be in Costa Rica where Jacob will be studying how to teach English as a foreign language while I work on my travel book. We move to Guanajuato, Mexico in August (and expect to be there until February 2009) to assist a women’s rights organization, write books (Doris) and teach English (Jacob). After that, our plans get rather vague. We would like to return to the baboon sanctuary in South Africa for two to three months, travel through Eastern Europe in the summer of ’09 and then move to wherever Jacob has obtained a contract to teach (preferences are for Mexico and South East Asia).
We hope to continue travelling the world until our health becomes too great a barrier: climbing Mount Kilimanjaro in a wheelchair is not advisable. We hope that you will join us either physically or by reading accounts of our travels in my books.
Round the World Wrap Up:
In two years, we:
- travelled thousands of miles (we don't know exactly how many)
- visited 40 countries
- posted 273 blog entries, on average one per three days
- posted almost 2,000 photos, on average three per day of travel
- filled up 55 pages – with four blogs each – of the Travelpost.com blog site
- took over 26,000 photos – all stored electronically, thank goodness
- tried new activities: scuba diving, snorkeling, helmet diving, riding weird animals (see below)
- used new animals of transportation: mule, elephant, camel, yak
- used new modes of transportation: outrigger canoe, bamboo raft, tuk tuks
- ate and drank new foods including: weird fruits and veggies for which we can’t remember names, tarantula (Jacob only), pigeon (Doris only), gnu, zebra, alpaca, kangaroo and a whole bunch of fish
- and fell in love all over again.