You Can Go Home Again

Hard to believe, but I’m writing this update from our living room in San Francisco, with our cat Nutmeg purring next to me on the couch and the faint aroma of sport celebrity still lingering in the air. (Barry, if you’re out there, couldn’t you have at least left us a signed baseball or something?!?) After a series of delayed/cancelled flights out of Lima to Miami, we finally arrived in Florida a few days ago, where we enjoyed a relaxing visit with my family that included my parents’ amazing homemade lasagna, welcome home cupcakes & balloons, marinated elk steaks, and of course, a few heated political “discussions” with my Dad. (It’s nice to have Dustin around to fight the liberal fight with me after having to go it alone against Dad all these years!) :)

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Torres Stories

When I was 9-years-old, I bought a beta fish with my allowance money and set up a small aquarium for my new little friend in my bedroom. Since this was the first pet I was allowed to name by myself, I spent a long time trying to come up with the perfect name for him. I finally decided on “Patagonia,” a place I had probably heard about in my social studies class or possibly in an issue of National Geographic lying around the house. I didn’t actually know anything about Patagonia – I’m not even sure I knew it was in South America – but the word “Patagonia” conjured up all kinds of romantic images of faraway exotic places in my little third-grader brain, and that was reason enough to name a fish for me. Twenty-four years later, I finally got to see the place that had inspired the name of my wispy little fish friend. Partly because of my childhood fascination with Patagonia and, more recently, because of the stories our friends Tanya & Eric and Courtney & Patrick and had told us about their adventures there, Patagonia was one of the few places that Dustin and I had resolved we had to see on this trip. When Dustin’s appendicitis struck in Spain and we seriously considered coming home early, more than anything it was the prospect of missing out on Patagonia that spurred us to keep going.

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Patagonia, Or How Lustin Got Their (Exercise) Groove Back

After a month of full English breakfasts in the UK, nearly two months of eating mostly pasta, pizzas (SO many pizzas), wine, and gelato in Italy, a month in Spain downing pinxtos and tapas left and right (they were so small!, but none of them seemed to incorporate anything resembling greens), and my unexpected hiatus from exercise due to a pesky appendectomy, Laura and I were starting to feel a bit soft in early December. Actually, that’s an understatement; we were starting to feel like the Pillsbury Doughboy, aka Poppin’ Fresh (which would be a great name for a rapper, by the way) and his portly but adorable wife (Mary Poppin’ Fresh?). Anyway, my point is: we needed some exercise, and we needed it bad. Atacama in northern Chile wasn’t the most active start to our two months in South America, and a week of wine tasting in Mendoza – which shockingly also involved some serious consumption of red meat – didn’t exactly scream “back on the exercise wagon”. It was time for some serious outdoor inspiration: hello, Patagonia!

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Flashback: Diving the Red Sea

Before diving in (sorry) to the story of the week we spent scuba diving in Sharm el-Sheikh, we just wanted to say how thrilled we are for the people of Egypt now that Mubarak has officially stepped down. There was a strong sense of resignation and apathy when we were there – a feeling of “What’s the point?” that pervaded the few political conversations we had with locals. I remember our guide Mohammed saying that things were never going to change because the corrupt government made all the rules. The contrast behind that defeatism and the images and stories we’re seeing out of Cairo today could not be more stark. We wish them all the best.

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Flashback: Jewels of the Nile

Given the current political unrest there, Egypt seems like an appropriate place to begin writing about some of the places we didn’t have time to cover during our world tour last year. As we learned during our travels there, and as we’re now reading in the news on a daily basis, Egypt (and the Middle East in general) is filled with complexity, contradiction, corruption, and confusion. It’s a difficult place to wrap your head around, especially as a westerner, and we left feeling like we never got a true sense of what the day-to-day life of the average Egyptian is really like. We did, however, see some of the most impressive, ancient monuments and art we’ve seen anywhere in the world, and we got to share the experience with my big brother Dirk, which made the trip all the more memorable.

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A Banner Year

Crazy as it may seem, we’re still actively working on posts and photos from the parts of our trip we didn’t get a chance to blog about from the road, and we still want to write some closing thoughts on what it was like traveling around the world for an entire year. Blog entries and photos from Patagonia will be up this week, but in the mean time, we wanted to collect and share all of the banner photos we created and used at the top of this website throughout the year. When we started our trip, our goal was to create a new banner photo for each country we visited. We didn’t quite manage that – noticeably absent are banners from Thailand, Jordan, Israel, and Spain – but we came pretty close to having a banner for each country. The new Banners page captures all of the images we created and makes for a concise overview of our year on the road. Enjoy!

New Years 2011: A Tango Odyssey

Hi folks! Another quick update as we head off on our final adventure before heading home (!) in less than two weeks. We’re in Guayaquil, Ecuador right now, and tomorrow we’ll be heading out to the Galapagos Islands for eight days (that is, assuming Laura’s appendix doesn’t stage a last-minute coup as mine did right before we were originally supposed to hit the Galapagos in November). We’ll be totally offline for the next week, but we’re planning to post a full report on our three amazing weeks in Patagonia as soon as we get back. With more than 1,800 photos to sort through (good lord) and so many great hikes and adventures to write about, it’s proving to be a slightly bigger job than we initially anticipated.

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