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: 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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Last Night I Dreamt of San Pedro (de Atacama)

It’s hard to believe it, but Laura and I have finally arrived in the sixth and final continent on our year-long adventure! (Sorry Jayson, no trip to Antarctica for us this time.) We still can’t quite wrap our heads around the fact that we’ll be home in a couple of months, but I have to admit it’s been fun making plans to see our family and friends at home in late January. We’re not quite ready to think about the practical realities we’ll have to deal with when we get back back – getting resettled at home (including re-introducing Nutmeg to chilly San Francisco), buying (or borrowing… hint, hint) a car, updating billing addresses and dealing with the piles of mail our parents have held for us, collecting and unpacking all the crap we’ve shipped home this year (scattered across three states), finding jobs (yikes!) – but I think we’ll be ready for real life again once January 19th rolls around.

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Pano-palooza #3 – The Italian Job

We’re still working on our last few photo albums from Italy – our little medical emergency in Spain was an annoying detour that threw us off our game a bit – and we still have some final thoughts and impressions to share about the eight weeks we spent eating and drinking our way through bell’Italia. In the meantime, I thought I’d share the latest batch of panoramic photos I stitched together.

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Nobody Expects the Spanish Appendectomy!

Updated on Sunday, November 21, 2010 at 1:26PM by Dustin Frazier

We interrupt this already irregularly scheduled program for an even more irregular update. As you might be able to guess from the title of this entry, I had the distinct “pleasure” of having my appendix removed while Laura and I were traveling in southern Spain. It was a painful, stressful, frustrating, confusing, and at times downright scary experience, especially given that we don’t speak a lick of Spanish. As it turns out, though, it was also one of the most real experiences we’ve had while traveling this year, and it reminded us a thing or two about the unpredictability of life and importance of going with the flow, about the benefits of having an amazing travel companion, and most importantly, about the universal kindness of strangers. It was quite the detour on our year-long adventure.

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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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Pizza Slut(s)

In case you haven’t noticed, Laura and I (but mostly I) like keeping track of data. We list some arguably interesting statistics about our trip in the Fun Facts sidebar of this blog, and one of the stats that’s been there for a long time is “Feet of Subway sandwiches consumed”. During the first few months of our trip, it seemed like Subways were everywhere, and a Subway sandwich was often just the little taste of home that we craved. It was also a reasonably healthy (and cheap) option for a quick lunch or dinner in some places where salad wasn’t all that easy to find. Don’t get Laura started about the lack of mustard in the UK Subway shops, but overall, we heart Subway.

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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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