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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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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Feliz Navidad!

Feliz Navidad from Buenos Aires! It’s in the 90’s down here and there’s not a Christmas tree in sight, but we’re managing to make the most of our holiday away from home. I made my great-grandmother’s meatballs and homemade sauce for Christmas Eve dinner last night, and we invited Kate and James, two British friends we met in Torres del Paine, to join us for dinner in the apartment we’re staying in here in BA.

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Felicitaciones, Clara y Eric!

We’ve been offline a few weeks due to a medical emergency here in Spain (not to worry, everything is fine now… we’ll post a full report here later today), but we’re back online and wanted to say “Congratulations!” to our friends and fellow globetrotters Clara and Eric, who just got engaged on Sunday. Quite randomly, we’ve now had the good fortune of meeting up with them four times in the last couple of months (in Cinque Terre and on a farm stay in Dozza, Italy, and in Sevilla and Granada in Spain), and we’ve really enjoyed swapping travel stories and hearing about their amazing adventures.

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Guest Bloggers: Israeli Sausage Toast

There will be (guest) blog. (Man that line never gets old.) Ilan and Sarah reporting for duty. We must say that we’re honored to be here, albeit a bit intimidated. As people whose names combine to the altogether unappealing “Slan” or “Iarah,” we really can’t compete with the smooth machinery that is “Lustin.” Alas, we will do our best.

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Will There Be Blog?

Almost six months ago, Laura kicked off our world travel blog with her sublimely titled There Will Be Blog entry. Given that it’s been more than six weeks since we flew from Thailand to Egypt to meet my brother for our Jewels of the Nile tour (also known as the Total Temple Torture Tour), and given that you, our patient readers, haven’t read word one about anything that’s happened on our trip since then (except for us surprising Ginny and Mark at their wedding in Currituck, NC), a reasonable question might be: will there be blog?

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CurriNups

We’re back in London now, but we wanted to post some pictures of Gin and Mark’s wonderful wedding in Currituck, North Carolina (nicknamed “CurriNups” — as in Currituck nuptials — by Ginny). Our photo album Ginny & Mark’s Wedding includes pictures of the rehearsal dinner (think: pig) and the big day (think: hot). It was a fantastic weekend from start to finish — totally worth the 10,079 miles we traveled to be there. :)

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Wedding Crashers!

We interrupt our regularly scheduled (and recently grossly neglected) international travel blog programming to announce that we’re back in the US of A! But only for a week — we decided to make a quick detour back so we could surprise our friends, Ginny and Mark, at their wedding in teeny, tiny Currituck, NC.

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K-K-K-K-K-K-Kathmandu

First, we want to apologize for the radio silence during our last two-plus weeks on the road. We’ve had some serious travel challenges to contend with — multiple illnesses, volcanic ash over Europe (yes, it impacted us even in Asia), developing world chaos, the near-complete shutdown of the entire country of Nepal, and now a serious lack of reliable internet in our hotel in Thailand — but we’re back in our (mostly) happy place and trying to catch up on catching you up on our travels.

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