WanderLustin' - Travel Log

Welcome to WanderLustin’ – the travel blog of wandering Lustin! We had every intention of launching this blog before we left home, but our seemingly insurmountable list of pre-trip to-do’s never let us get to it. So here we are, writing from an internet cafe in Auckland, New Zealand, trying to ignore the extremely loud Italian couple next to us who is Skype video chatting with some poor soul in the mother country who surely must be plugging his ears as they shout at him.

But we digress. Before we launch into our daily updates, we wanted to say a few things about why we’re doing this blog and what we hope to do with it:

First and foremost, we’re writing this blog for our moms, to alleviate their fears that their children are lying in a ditch somewhere in a country that smells like burning trash, feverish with H1N1 as some guy with a patch on his eye is stealing their passports and a tsunami approaches on the horizon.

For everyone else who is not our moms, we’re hoping you will keep in touch with us via the blog by commenting on our posts, checking our itinerary to tell us when you’re coming to meet us on the road, and generally just staying in our lives electronically so that we don’t get homesick and miss you too much.

There are few things we don’t want this blog to be. We definitely don’t want it to be one of those nausea-inducing blogs that seem to exist only to make everyone back home feel jealous and envious. You know, the kind that are like, “Look at us! Today we went surfing in the crystal blue water surrounded by mermaids, and tonight we’re going to this amazing party with the Dalai Lama, and tomorrow we will enjoy another day surrounded by rainbows and unicorns!” Nobody wants to read that kind of stuff – and that’s not the kind of blog we want to write, nor is it the kind of trip we want to have. Instead, we promise to put the good, the bad, and the ugly here – to show the underbelly of traveling around the world for a year whenever it emerges and not just the pretty Technicolor highlight reel.

This entry notwithstanding, our goal for the blog is to write shorter, more frequent updates rather than occasional long multi-paragraph entries. This goal will of course hinge on the availablity of wireless internet, something which we’ve already found to be a bit of a challenge even in New Zealand. (Our modest hotel room, for example, offers wired DSL [no wireless] for a whopping NZ$33/day with a 100MB bandwidth limit [which ain’t much], and after that, the internet slows down approximately to the speed of dial-up AOL circa 1997.)

We also plan to write entries as “Laura” and “Dustin” and not as one monovocal “Lustin” unit, in part because we don’t want to risk getting the same kind of flak we got when we posted identical status updates on Facebook once (yes, Katie Rodger, Nathan Fisher, and Bill Moliski, we’re talking to you!). So expect different voices, different perspectives, and different obsessions on the blog depending on the author. (Dustin, for example, has already pointed out every single Audi he’s seen since arriving in NZ. There may be a blog entry in the future with further details on this exciting topic if you’re lucky! :)

And finally, this will be the place where we post our best pictures and video from the trip. With two cameras, two iPhones, and one Flip Video, we have plenty of ways to document the trip, and hopefully the pictures will tell an even better story of this year than we ever could.

That’s the plan at least. As every traveler knows, the best laid plans are always the first to fall victim to a missed train, a lost passport, or a bad case of Delhi belly. In other words, we actually don’t know what this blog will end up being like because we don’t really know what this trip is going to be like. But we hope you’ll stick with us and enjoy the ride as we wander around the globe. This trip is a lifelong dream for both of us, and more than anything else, we’re so excited to finally be on our way…