Posts from — November 2007

There was no longer any doubt, my body had begun to break down.

Chronic back pain. Weight gain. Shortness of breath climbing stairs. No one approaching fifty could consider these “positive indicators.” Soon I began to understand the main culprit behind my decline. My desk. Or more accurately, the eight hours or so I spent hunched over a keyboard, staring at a monitor each working day.

My body could no longer do the things I imagined, like delivering a burst of speed in a touch football game or tracking down a fly ball playing softball. I was beginning to walk stooped over; I had lost all flexibility; I felt unsteady and brittle.

I thought of the story told about travel writer Bruce Chatwin. Chatwin had been a highly regarded expert on Impressionist art when his eyesight began to suffer. A doctor determined a latent squint was impairing his vision; the close analysis of artwork demanded by his job caused it.

Chatwin’s doctor recommended a sabbatical – preferably one that involved looking at distant horizons. So Chatwin went to Sudan, and later, famously, to Patagonia.

One day I stumbled on a video, written and produced by Erik Trinidad, in which he poses a simple question. If you’ve ever questioned the idea of living your life chained to a desk, take a look at Erik’s video “Would You?”

When I was in college, if a student wanted to work on a computer, he or she would gather their punch cards and head off to the math building. (Not that I actually went to the math building, mind you, but I was told that’s where computer science classes were held.)

A few years later, I was living in Washington, D. C., and desperate for a job. I went to work for a company that ran an online news and information service for the energy industry. Nothing particularly interesting about this, except it was 1985, before the launch of Windows, AOL, and a little thing I like to call “the World Wide Web.”

If my bosses at Information, Inc., were ahead of their time, they certainly didn’t know how to capitalize on it, and the business soon disappeared. Nonetheless, it was a formative experience for me, and I developed what has been a life-long interest in communications technologies.

When we began preparing for this trip, we knew we wanted to document our travels and make the production of a web site central to our children’s year of “roadschooling.” I had work experience with web-based projects, but always from the content side. Technology was something others did.

As I thought about a blog to document our trip, I wasn’t sure I could build the kind of web site I pictured in my mind’s eye.

Then I found WordPress.

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Matt Harding has become an Internet phenomenon for dancing badly in amazing places. And no wonder – the videos he produced documenting his travels (and dancing) are oddly compelling. In what undoubtedly began as a lark, Matt captured something special about the joy of travel.

So, once you’ve decided to take your family on a trip around the world, what’s your next move? It’s great when you think the universe is talking to you – but it’s not like you’re getting specific instructions from a travel planner.

In a situation like this, there’s only one place to turn.

Google.

Surely we weren’t the first family to think of this. Not by a long shot, as it turns out.

Google “Family RTW” or “Family Trip Around the World.” It’s amazing how many families have done it, are doing it, are planning it.

First we found the Canadian Carlsons, David Carlson, Sarah James and their three kids aged 13, 10 and 8. They left on their trip on August 11, 2001. They kept a web-based account of their trip long before blogging was ubiquitous.

More searching led us to Grooms Globe Trek, Carlton and Deborah Grooms’ trip around the world with their two kids. The Grooms are professional photographers, and as a result of their trip, they are producing a book, Portraits of our World. The Grooms have pledged to use the profits from their book to support children’s causes worldwide.

The more we looked, the more families we found.

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The fortune cookie was the final sign.

Months earlier I had casually raised the subject with my wife over lunch at a local Latin American restaurant. “Would you think I was crazy if I said we should take a year off, pull the kids out of school, and travel around the world?”

I couldn’t tell if Dani was humoring me or if she really meant it when she said: “Sounds interesting. Could we really do it?”

Once I voiced what I had been thinking, the signs began to appear.

It started with my son. One day, out of the blue, he said to me, “Dad, I know what I want to do when I grow up.”

“What’s that?”

“I want to travel around the world, talk to people, listen to their stories, then use what they tell me to make up new stories.”

Conor was ten.

Weeks later, I brought up the possibility of a trip around the world at dinner. I was sure my daughter, Caroline, would object. She has never enjoyed change. Years earlier, when we were thinking about moving to a new house in the same community, she’d objected so strongly I thought she would have a meltdown at the mere thought of moving less than a mile away.

But she didn’t object. She wanted to hear more. What exactly was I talking about?

Weeks passed and we continued to talk about it in pairs, threesomes, and when we all gathered for dinner.

It began to feel like it was all we talked about. It was our family secret – we were sworn to talk about it only to each other. The idea seemed so crazy, we didn’t dare tell anyone else.

One night we got Chinese take-out. Over dinner I asked Caroline how she felt about the idea of the trip now. She would be heading into high school, and it would probably impact her more than any one else.

She said: “Dad, I’ve thought a lot about this. And the way I feel right now, I’m scared to go. But I also know I’ll be really disappointed if we don’t go.”

Then Caroline broke open her fortune cookie. It said: “You will step on the soil of many countries.”

And that, for me, was the final sign.

After my son had, at age ten, expressed my childhood dream in a more direct, articulate way than I could have. After my daughter pinpointed the emotions I felt, and put her finger on the fear of the unknown that had stopped me in the past.

After my wife had said to me, in so many words, I’m up for an adventure with you.

We passed the fortune around the table. I called for a family vote: “All in favor of taking a year off to travel around the world, raise your hand.”

Four hands shot up.