Day 1 (Mar 5, 2013): Into the Abyss

Follow me on Twitter at @adonaldson1214

Hi Everyone.  Welcome to my blog, Global Moorings. This forum will document my travels, starting with the ~4 month journey around the world that begins today.  There will be more pictures than words (I promise!), so I hope you will join me often to share in my experience and perhaps get some ideas for your own next adventure.

But first, let me introduce my travel partner.  This is Carrie…

 

…and that’s her stuff.  Believe it or not, that’s all beef jerky and Sprite in the bag (she keeps to an extremely specific diet).  I would say this trip is only happening because of her, but she would get mad at me and say that I was giving her too much credit.  But, just between you and me, it’s the truth.  Which makes me extremely grateful for her.  She is at this moment, with a few notable exceptions, the only other known character in this story.  But we hope there will be many new friends in the weeks and months ahead.

So how did I get here?!?  It started, as most crazy ideas do, with a joke.  One day last Spring, after listening to me describe yet another stressful day at work, Carrie said “we should just quit our jobs and travel the world.”  We both chuckled with the familiar “yeah right” that everyone understands to mean “wouldn’t THAT be nice” and then went about our lives.  Months came and went, but the idea stayed with us.  No matter how hard we tried to dismiss it from our minds, by the time December came around we both accepted that our fate had seemingly been decided.  We planned to wait until the beginning of 2013, quit our jobs, and begin our journey.

When January came around – and with it our time to act – we executed our plan with the boldness of John Glenn and the precision of Seal Team Six.  Actually, that’s a lie.  In reality, when January came around, we both freaked out like Khloe Kardashian being forced to shop at Target.  In the span of 3 weeks in January, the trip was called off and reconstituted no less than 15 times.  What was supposed to be a close-to-New Year’s booking with the airlines turned into a last-week-in-January booking with the airlines, and that occurred only after numerous assurances that we could back out with little penalty.  Change, it seems, is a process fraught with perils for even the most determined.  Fortunately, Carrie and I never lost our nerve at the same time, so one was always able to assuage the other into staying the course.

And so here we are: both newly unemployed and, for the next four months, travelers of the world.  As I write this I am in LAX, on layover from our flight from New York City before heading over to Sydney.  After ~12 hours in Sydney, we will fly to Auckland, New Zealand and then to Christchurch, which is our first official stop.  By my calculation, it will take us ~57.5 hours to get from Brooklyn to Christchurch.  We will spend ~2 weeks on the South Island of New Zealand before continuing our left turn around the world.

A brief description of our itinerary (as we know it today) is below.  If you like what you see and want to come join us for a bit, we’d love visitors!  If you can’t come visit, check back here on this blog and/or follow me on Twitter at @adonaldson1214.  You can also follow Carrie’s blog here: bigwanderings.tumblr.com (she promises to have a special section devoted to all of the faces I make, which will be interesting since I don’t make faces….ever) and follow her on Twitter at @carolynbigda.

The Plan:

Mar 7 – Mar 21: New Zealand (South Island)

Mar 21 – Mar 24: Singapore

Mar 25 – Apr 12: Bali (volunteering as English teachers at a grade school in a village near Denpasar)

Apr 13 – Mid May: Southeast Asia (Malaysia, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Philippines)

Mid May: Dubai, Oman

End May to End June: Train travel through Europe (starting in Rome, and hitting Venice, Croatia, Budapest, Krakow, Prague, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and London)

End June – Mid July: London

Mid July: Back to US!