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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Viva la Venezia!

Laura and I have been in Italy for exactly one month today, so we’re long overdue for an update. We have a legitimate excuse: we’ve spent the last three weeks on the Maestrelli/Frazier “bullet train” of family tourism – one week with Laura’s parents, sister, and uncle in Tuscany; then a week on the Amalfi coast with my parents added to the mix; then a final week with just my parents in Sicily – and we were on the go pretty much non-stop. Our Moms did an incredible job planning our time together, and I swear my Mom would make an amazing tour guide… you would get your money’s worth of site-seeing, that’s for sure! :) Laura and I found ourselves quoting National Lampoon’s European Vacation more than once during those three weeks, with an Italian flare, of course: “Look kids! Pompei! The Duomo!”. We’ll have a lot more to share about our travels with our families in a future blog post (and they may chime in with a guest blog entry or two, ahem).

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Bye Bye Britain

Before our UK road trip gets too far behind us, we wanted to wrap up with some final thoughts about our adventures in Scotland. Our Isle of Skye album is up, as are all of the rest of our UK albums on our UK photo gallery page.

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Into Thin Air (Finally!)

After a rough start to our precious two weeks in Bhutan, Laura and I were finally feeling better and were eager to get out and do some trekking in the Himalayas. Geographic Expeditions and Yangphel (their local partner in Bhutan) had worked a minor miracle and lined up a completely separate, somewhat abbreviated trek for the two of us that would still get us up to the Chomolhari base camp and back to Paro in the seven days we had to work with.

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Vanu-where??

When we started planning our big trip last year, we had a rough idea of most of the countries we wanted to visit, but there were a few holes in our itinerary that we figured we’d fill in along the way. One of those holes was the South Pacific. We knew we wanted to visit some islands in the South Pacific after our time in Australia, but we weren’t sure which ones. I’d already been to Fiji six years ago, and while it was lovely, I was eager to visit a new country. We’d heard good things about the Cook Islands, but they were farther east than even Fiji, and we were hoping to find some place closer to Australia if possible. After doing more research, we narrowed the list down to Samoa, American Samoa, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and Tonga. In the end, we decided that Vanuatu had everything we were looking for…

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Roadtrippin' With Dr. Spacevan

What do you do when you learn that a Category 4 tropical cyclone is headed directly for the set of islands where you are planning to do a 3-day sailing trip? If you are Lustin — and especially if you are Lustin after just spending three days on a heaving, tossing ocean — you aren’t all that eager to tempt your fate with the seasickness gods again. Nor are you especially excited about sailing around normally sun-soaked tropical islands in the pouring rain. So, you do what any rational person would do — you change the entire itinerary for the remainder of your time in Australia less than 12 hours before your next flight is supposed to take off.

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John, Paul, Gorge and Dingo

It’s a bit easier to write about our Outback experience now that the constant, maddening (infuriating!) buzz of the flies in our faces is more of a fading memory than the recurring nightmare that it was in the moment. It’s really hard to describe how challenging it was dealing with the flies, the heat, sleep depravation, the flies… I kept thinking it was a lot like the game of golf: you endure many, many frustrating moments where you swear you’ll never play the game again, but you have *just* enough long, straight drives and sweet putts to make it all worthwhile (with the help of some selective memory). Despite our frustrations with the flies, sleeping on the ground exposed to the elements and creepy crawlies, and a few insanely early wake-up calls, we really did have a once-in-a-lifetime experience in the Red Center (although we both agree that we probably wouldn’t go back for more).

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Sweet As

Greetings from a freakishly soggy Alice Springs! We arrived to gray skies this morning and learned that it’s been pouring here for the last 5 days. Everything is flooded and the normally 100+ degree temps have been in the 60’s. We’re about to head off on a 5-day 4WD tour of the “Red Center,” but before we go totally offline we wanted to close out with a few final thoughts on our month in New Zealand.

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Milf(j)ord Sound

For a portion of our New Zealand tour that we almost skipped (the “deep south”), the southern loop turned out to be one of our favorite parts of the trip! There weren’t a heck of a lot of funny backpacker stories to share, just some incredible scenery, a few more million sandflies, and some looooong days of riding on the Stray bus.

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