360 Degrees Longitude (51 page)

But you'll never know until you take a bite.

I wore my Tevas all the time when we were traveling. My first day back at school I was playing on the playground and one of the yard duty teachers said I couldn't stay on the playground because I was wearing sandals. She said I might stub my toe because they were open-toed shoes. What's up with that? I wanted to tell her that I had worn these shoes to search for lions in Africa and look for anacondas in the Amazon. But I thought that might be rude, so I didn't say anything.

I mostly don't talk about the trip to my friends because they don't really know where all of the places are. Sometimes when school gets a little bit boring I sit at my desk and remember things like feeding the alligator or riding on the elephant and I get a big smile on my face. When I get home I talk to Katrina about it and we laugh like we have a big secret!

When I came home I was nervous about going back to school, since all we covered during our year away was math. But when I talked to my friends about it, they said I shouldn't worry because they didn't really learn anything in the sixth grade. At first it was difficult to adjust to all the homework we got in the seventh grade, but I found I wasn't behind my friends and they had to adjust to the homework, too.

Whenever adults ask me about how our trip changed me, I don't know how to answer. It is part of who I am. How would I know if I would be different if we hadn't gone? But I find myself thinking about our trip every single day, even though we've been home for over a year now. While Dad worked on his book he read us the chapters and I would remember things I hadn't thought of for a long time, like how a howler monkey would get kicked out of its family if it fell from a tree. Sometimes things he read didn't agree with how I remembered them.

One of the most memorable parts of the trip for me was reading books about people and places and then visiting those places. I'll never forget how bad I felt for the Japanese who were left in Korea at the end of World War II when I read
So Far from the Bamboo Grove
. But then reading the story of how badly the Japanese treated the Koreans in
Year of Impossible Goodbyes
made me realize that there can always be more to a story.

I want to take my own kids on an around-the-world trip.

Now that we're home, holding onto the feelings of togetherness that we experienced on our trip has been like holding sand in our cupped hands. As we've gone about our suburban lives—registering the kids for school, moving back into our house, going back to work—some of that sand is slipping through our fingers. To counter that, we are now more careful about what individual activities we do so that we can continue to have time together as a family. It's a challenge. There are so many things competing for our family time—homework, church activities, sports, music lessons—that it takes constant prioritizing to make sure we carve out enough time to simply be together.

When we walked into our house for the first time, the kids exclaimed, “The house is way too big!” After spending twelve months rarely more than two feet from one another, even our small, three-bedroom house seemed like more space than anyone would ever need. The kids refused to sleep in separate bedrooms for several weeks. For me, I now delight more in simple things. I love my washer and dryer. I run out to my garden every morning to see if anything new has sprouted.

Many of our friends never expected to see us again. The consensus was that we would find some nice part of the world and just stay there. When we actually did return, our friends predicted that we would be too restless to endure suburban existence for long. The idea for the next big thing would materialize and we would vanish.

Tempting as it was to “just keep going,” the reality was that our bank account had run dry. And beyond that, we had a reason to return home. Two reasons, actually: Katrina and Jordan.

Countless Sunday dinner conversations have been devoted to the topic of living an alternative lifestyle somewhere outside of the United States. The four of us agree that traveling the world enriched our lives so much and that we see the world through different eyes now than we did before we stepped on that first plane to Iceland. John and I agree that while there may be a place in our future for adventure and a romantic lifestyle on an island away from it all, that shouldn't be our focus. First we need to turn two kids into responsible adults who contribute to society. Along the way we want to find a way to make a contribution to the world that has given us so much.

We'll surely keep traveling. We still need to see huge chunks of the world—India, Australia, Russia, the Himalayas—but we'll have to squeeze future trips into the short spaces of time when the kids aren't in school. In the meantime, we're enjoying the things we missed while we were on the road—friends, extended family, neighborhood parties, refrigerators, supermarkets. As long as we can be together, life is mighty good.

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For a more detailed cost breakdown, go to
www.360degreeslongitude.com

S
o. You think you would like to do a year around the world with your family, but don't know where to start. You've come to the right place.

That said, no one book or person can tell you how to plan and execute a trip of this magnitude. Further, there is no way you can plan a trip like this in detail as you might a two-week vacation. Get used to the idea that trying to find accommodations at your next destination is your full-time job.

As with almost everything, the more you know about something, the more there is to know. By far the best advice is simply, “Don't panic.”

The number one question people have, but are often afraid to ask is, “How much does it cost to go around the world?” The quick and easy answer is that I don't see how twelve months on the road can be done for less than $30,000 per person.

Our
total
cash outlay was $121,275.89 for four people. Okay, so I'm a bit obsessive about numbers. Of that amount, $29,971.60 was spent before we even set a toe on a plane. Wow! That sure is a lot of money to spend before you even start! That's what we thought, too, but we had to take care of several up-front costs, such as plane tickets, equipment, clothing, vaccinations, storage, and medical insurance.

Thirty-thousand dollars per person per year seems like a lot of money, too. It is, but there is very little “air” that can be squeezed out of those figures. For example, we spent less than $100 on souvenir shopping for the entire year. For souvenirs we let the kids each get one item per continent, and collect every kind of coin they could find.

Methods to reduce costs would include:

• Reduce the number of countries visited, as getting from point A to point B was one of the biggest line items in our budget.

• Travel by bicycle for the same reason.

• Limit your itinerary to the developing world, as places like Switzerland are far more expensive than, say, Thailand.

We were very thrifty when it came to food and accommodations. Unless you can eat just bread and peanut butter and sleep outdoors full-time, it isn't possible to travel much cheaper than we did.

We were less thrifty when it came to activities; endeavors ranging from Wild Wadi to the Inca Trail do not come free. Our philosophy is, “Why travel at all if you can't partake of the local attractions?”

There are a lot of equipment list suggestions available online. Some are okay, others less than helpful. I read one packing list online that boasted you could travel the world with only ten pounds of gear. The first entry at the top of that list was a three-pound computer. Rubbish.

In the weeks prior to our leaving, I think we became our local REI's favorite customers. The best investments by far were a new lightweight tent, tropical-weight sleeping bags, and silk sleep sacks. Even though they took up a lot of space in our luggage, we sure were glad we had them. When we were no longer camping, the sleeping bags and silk sleep sacks were still worth their weight in gold so we wouldn't have to sleep in fifty years of dust, as you might find in some of the bedding in less-than-elegant hostels.

Every time we considered purchasing something for our trip, we asked ourselves, “How would we feel if this were stolen?” We were careful not to overspend, because the reality of travel is that many people do have their backpacks or suitcases disappear. This was one reason we brought only a very small camera, no laptop, no GPS, and no satellite phone. On the Christmas before we left, I bought September a plain gold wedding band with the words World-the-Round Trip engraved inside so that she could leave her diamond ring at home. Remarkably, we never had a single thing stolen on our entire trip, but that was not the case with many of the people we met on the road.

Before we left I had a long list of “stuff” that we had to buy that I thought I couldn't live without. When we were finally packing “for real” a lot of it got edited out and even more got left behind in various campgrounds during our first few weeks on the road. By the end of the year, other than some simple clothes, my silk sleep sack, and tropical-weight sleeping bag, the only thing I found that I was hoarding in my suitcase were my plastic eating utensils.

The lesson is you can get by with very little, and what you absolutely need, you can usually get on the road. And if you can't get what you absolutely need on the road, you will find you can do without that, too.

Guidebooks are the single most important thing you will need to make your travel go smoothly. The problem is, you don't want to have to carry a year's worth of guidebooks with you all the time. They are really, really heavy! In many cases, we were able to find guidebooks along the way. Most big cities have at least one bookstore with a few books in English. In other cases, we had guidebooks sent to us from the United States along with our monthly shipment of books for the kids.

Typical guidebooks like
Lonely Planet
and
The Rough Guide
are good sources of information for a specific geographic region, but have no information for planning an expedition. One great source of practical information is
The Traveler's Handbook
(Globe Pequot Press). Now in its ninth edition, it has over nine hundred pages of information on topics ranging from how to respect local customs, to how to anticipate probable repairs for an overturned vehicle, to how to meet entry requirements for every country in the world. Some of the best information is about relative safety and general weather patterns per country.

If you will be traveling with children, and if your children like to read, keep in mind that there is
nothing
available in English for them overseas outside of a few obvious places, such as England, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. I take that back. You can find the
Harry Potter
series in English nearly everywhere, as it is popular among those trying to learn to read English. Other than that, you might be able to find
Moby Dick
in a bookstore in China, but trust me, your kids won't like it. Buy all of your children's and young adult literature before you go and arrange to have someone ship it to you. The good news is that nearly all juvenile literature is printed on cheap, porous paper, which happens to be fairly lightweight.

September purchased hundreds of dollars' worth of books for the kids before we left. She did a mountain of research and found historical fiction and other genres of literature that was set in the areas we were planning to visit. She separated the books into twelve piles, one pile for each month, roughly corresponding to the places we hoped we would be. Approximately once a month, we would send an e-mail to September's mother letting her know where we would be in a few days, and she would FedEx a package of books to us. Sometimes we would have her send the books to a friend of a friend who was living in a city we were planning to visit, and other times we would have the books sent to a hostel or campground where we were going to be staying. It was always complicated trying to figure out where we were going to be a few days in the future, but getting the package of books was always worth it.

I will say all the effort and money required to purchase and ship all those books was always worth the trouble. The impact on each of us from reading
Red Scarf Girl
, about the Chinese Cultural Revolution, was much greater when read in China than it would have been if read at home in Silicon Valley. As there can be l-o-o-o-ng stretches with nothing to do when traveling, I can't imagine going on such a trip with kids who couldn't entertain themselves with a good book.