The First 100(ish) Days – DF Edition
Dustin Frazier on Friday, May 14, 2010 at 10:54PM Now that Laura and I have been traveling for almost four months (which is hard for us to believe!), we thought it might be interesting to write a bit about how we’re doing living life on the road — the joys, the challenges, the surprises, and what we may have learned about ourselves and each other. We each have a somewhat different perspective on the trip so far (obviously), so we decided it would be best to subject you to not one, but two “state of the traveling union” blog posts. We flipped a coin, and I won (or lost, I can’t remember), so I’m first up.
Highlights
If you’ve been reading this blog regularly, I hope it goes without saying that we’ve had some amazing experiences already, and we feel so blessed to have the opportunity to take an entire year and explore this world of ours. We’ve sailed under bright blue skies in the Bay of Islands and scrambled up a glacier in New Zealand. We’ve seen the Australian Outback in lush shades of green after they received more rain than they’d seen in decades. We’ve scuba dived the Great Barrier Reef. We’ve wined and dined in the shadow of the Sydney Opera house (although we just missed being a part of the mass nude photo shoot). We’ve seen human land diving and a very active volcano up close and personal in Vanuatu. We’ve trekked to the base camp of Chomolhari in Bhutan and seen ancient Buddhist temples built into the side of cliffs. We’ve even seen the political unrest and (so far) peaceful protests of the Maoists in Nepal shut down an entire country. We’ve experienced all that and more, and we’ve tried our best to share the images and stories from these highlights with you.
What we haven’t spent much time talking about, and what this post is mostly about, is what it’s really been like living life on the road for the last few months. It’s not always glamorous (or even fun), but I think the challenges and the surprises are, in a way, more interesting than the obvious sightseeing highlights. I mention the highlights above not to make you all insanely jealous, but to remind everyone that, despite the challenges and setbacks, we haven’t forgotten that we’re on an amazing adventure, and we wouldn’t want it any other way. End caveat. :)
The Travel Train
Although we haven’t written much about it in this blog, Laura and I talked a lot before we left back in January about our personal goals for our trip. Why would we want to leave a very comfortable, happy life, in an amazing place with culture and natural beauty, with great jobs working for a respected non-profit, surrounded by so many great friends and family that we love, to live out of suitcases for an entire year? We’d both had the travel itch for a while, but dreaming about taking a year off to travel and actually do it are very different things. We both wanted our experience to be meaningful, something more than just a year-long vacation. Adventure travel with a purpose.
My goals included getting “off the beaten path” and seeing the natural beauty of other countries; pushing myself physically with some hard-core trekking, hiking, climbing, biking, etc.; making an effort to experience the traditional music of the countries we’re visiting, by listening, learning, or even playing; and connecting with local people as much as possible in hopes of getting a stronger sense of how their lives are different than our own. I was also thinking a lot about what I want to do with my life (professionally, that is) once we get back. I already know there’s a lot of need out there, as well as a lot of opportunities to do interesting and meaningful work, but I started this trip (naively, perhaps) hoping for a little inspiration for what comes next.
What I didn’t count on was just how much time it takes to keep a trip like this on track! By design and necessity, we didn’t have every detail of our entire year planned out before we left home, and that has been both an advantage (when things like cyclones and nationwide general strikes force us to change our plans at the last minute) and somewhat of a disadvantage (planning takes time). I’d estimate that we spend about one day per-week (or more) just making plans for our next few destinations. Making changes to our around-the-world tickets, planning other local flights, booking our lodging, researching tours and excursions, and coordinating with friends and family all take time, and that time eats into the time we have to actually experience the places we’re going! We’re getting a lot better at managing the logistics, but it definitely took a few weeks to get into that groove and get comfortable with spending the time it takes to keep laying the track in front of our travel train.
Another surprise for me is how quickly our time seems to have flown by in each of the countries where we’ve visited. When we were planning our trip, we really tried to keep the number of stops to a minimum — quality over quantity — and I think we did a pretty good job, but it’s still hard not to feel like we’ve only scratched the surface after spending a few weeks or a month in a country like Australia, which is HUGE, or Bhutan, which has so much culture, history, and epic natural beauty to explore. I’m not complaining (we’ll have to count how many times Laura and I write that phrase after our year is up!), but it does sometimes feel like “drive-by” tourism, I mean, travel. :)
Honeymoon
Lest you forget, we’ve only been married for a little less than five months, and we haven’t even reached our two-year dating anniversary! You might think that spending nearly every waking minute with your new spouse for weeks or months on end would be a bad idea (and some of you told us as much, in a nice way), but so far it’s been nothing short of amazing! Of course we have our moments where we drive each other a little crazy, but so far the good times (great times) have far outnumbered the difficult ones. We’re learning so much about each other (occasionally too much), we’ve both been so thankful to have the other person with us as we experience new places and cultures, and we’re getting better at giving each other the space we need to keep our sanity.
One thing that has caught me off guard is how much of an “issue” (let’s just call it an “issue”) technology has been for us. Maybe it shouldn’t have come as a surprise at all, given that I’m the anal “tech guy” and Laura is the free-wheeling “English nerd”, but technology has consistently been the one (and really the only) thing we seem to bicker about.
Early on, it mostly centered around sharing a single laptop. It sounds easy enough, but trust me, it isn’t. It took us some time to find a groove where I wasn’t hogging the computer. I would just so naturally go into “IT mode” when we arrived at a new place — fire up the laptop, find internet, check email, kick off online backups, all that good stuff — that I had to consciously force myself to give Laura the first crack at getting online, checking email, Facebook, etc. After a few “discussions” about it, I think we’ve found our groove, but we really do have a ton of stuff to do that requires the computer — travel planning, blogging, sorting/uploading/captioning photos, keeping in touch with friends and family, planning our 2011 wedding — and we still sometimes end up using our laptop and another computer (usually in hotel business centers) at the same time to get everything done.
Laura also seems to be unflappable when technology troubles crop up, but I have a much harder time letting it go. I’m still learning to live more of my daily life “off the grid” and connect only occasionally, but it’s definitely a major lifestyle change. And also probably a good lesson for geek boy to learn. :)
Other Challenges
There are other things that have surprised me about the trip. I definitely wasn’t prepared for how hard it would be to be away from friends and family and “out of the loop” on their (your) daily lives. Despite having Laura as my constant travel companion and the blog, email, and Facebook to stay connected, it still gets lonely out here. We knew the first part of our trip would be hardest in that respect, since we were on our own until we saw Stephanie and Jayson in Nepal. The middle of our trip includes a lot of meet-ups with family and friends, and for me, it will come just in time.
The other big adjustment has been living in a mode where we feel like we need to document every moment of our traveling lives. We mostly enjoy it, but it can also be exhausting! Neither of us were bloggers before this trip, so we’re still finding the right balance between keeping our audience happy with frequent posts (ahem, Amanda, Bill, Patrick), and not feeling like the blog is a chore (hopefully it doesn’t read that way). I’m also still working on letting go of the “tyranny of the to-do list”, but it’s not always easy to step out of GSD mode and just live. I’m working on it.
My last challenge has been finding something for my engineering brain to do out here! It’s hilarious the number of times I’ve invented little projects for myself, found some goofy excuse to write a piece of Ruby script, and how completely over-engineered our travel planning documents are on the computer (at some point, I should share the “World Travel Dashboard” I created to track our schedule, flights, beds, costs, to do lists, gear, etc.). I’ve also played an embarrassing number of games of Scrabble on my iPhone — I’m way past memorizing the two-letter words and have moved on to the high-value three letter words. I am such a geek.
Final Thoughts
There are other challenges, like not getting regular exercise, dealing with heat, humidity, sickness (sometimes both of us at the same time), political unrest, and the occasional travel blues, but overall, living life on the road, and getting to do it with the woman I love, has been a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I wouldn’t trade for, well, the world.
health, technology in General
Reader Comments (6)
Hey, Dustin & Laura, I've been keeping tabs on you and your travels. Thanks for the effort you're putting into this. I'm eager for the next installment to find out what happened in Bhutan and how you dealt with the flu. At the same time I appreciate the time and effort it takes to document everything and to plan the next steps and how those very activities can pull you out of what you're trying to do.
Go, enjoy! Stop reading this! Turn off the computer!
Best wishes,
Jean
Oh, my goodness! We appreciate all your efforts too, and admire everything that it has taken to keep the trip going as well as the blog. I've really missed those days that youare out of touch, and then find myself thinking about how YOU feel about being out of touch with home for those long periods.
Did watch almost an entire week of Vanuatu on Travel channel last week, so you guys were posted in the very frontal brain as I watched them build the diving bridge (although had seen that before), having their celebrations and hoping you got to experience one of those also, etc. Keep up the good work and stay healthy.
Thanks for the posts! I have been enjoying them. I know it takes a lot of time, but it keeps me in the loop.
Cheers
Three week countdown, bizzes! Our grand plan is to alleviate any homesickness you may be feeling mid-year by making you spend so much time with Gur family members that you'll be relieved when you're on your own again :) :) :).
Ok..I'll stop bothering you for updates. I'll just make up stories of your exploits and amuse myself with them
You two rock. I have no time to read an article in People Magazine let alone play iphone scrabble. That alone sounds relaxing. And after reading the Highlights paragraph I am insanely jealous! Thanks for keeping us in the loop and can't wait to see you next June. Courtney