Posts from — March 2008

A Day In Pictures
Fifth Avenue, Manhattan, NYC

On Easter Sunday Fifth Avenue was closed between 57th and 49th Streets for an “Easter Parade” of sorts.

Hundreds of people came out in their finest Easter Bonnets (below), and we enjoyed a scenic stroll from the south end of Central Park to the Empire State Building.

We ducked into FAO Schwartz, the David Rockwell-designed toy store featured in the Tom Hanks movie Big. After a few minutes taking in the scene, Caroline said: “This store is every parent’s nightmare.”

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We’ve been looking for an opportunity to do a “dry run” trip to test traveling with our packs, to experience a sample RTW week on the road and to work on a few editorial ideas for the blog.

In the back of our minds we have been targeting the kids’ Spring Break week for a trip that would test our road-worthiness.

When our friends offered us the use of their Brooklyn brownstone while they were on a ski vacation, we jumped at the chance. What better place to test ourselves than New York City?

Rumor has it, if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.

We’ve got our Lonely Planet guide book and intend to spend the week seeing the sights (some off the beaten path). We’re going to try to live on a “road budget” (OK, the way high end of our RTW daily allowance – it is New York after all). And we want to experiment with a few different types of blog posts – the kind we hope to be publishing regularly on the road.

Over the next several weeks we’ll post the content we develop in New York.  Hopefully this will give us a better sense of what works and what doesn’t. Constructive criticism will be necessary and welcome.

OK, so get this. I am going to travel around the world for 365 days. Kind of like the movie, except not. I am totally psyched to do it, and who wouldn’t be? (Other than my sister…)

A bit about me:

• I love cheetas.
• I can’t wait to go to Japan.
• I’m looking forward to living on a boat for ten days while we’re in the Galapagos.
• Once our trip starts, I’ll be writing a story as we go (chapters to be posted every week).

I am looking forward most to swimming with sea lions, going on a giant zip line in Peru, zorbing and street luging in New Zealand and visiting Machu Picchu.

Some fears that keep floating in the back of my mind are that you can’t go a year without crying or getting hurt, and it’s harder to deal with being sad when you are away from home. Hopefully I won’t have many sad moments.

I promise my posts will get more interesting when the trip starts and I hope you will want to read them.

Some days it feels as though the world is working against you; other days the breaks seem to fall your way. And sometimes, if you can both quiet and open your mind, providence appears.

Just as I had begun fretting about the trip again (obsessing, really), an email from Dan Clements arrived in my inbox. I didn’t know Dan, but he had found this web site and decided to send me a note of encouragement.

Dan also shared with me a copy of his book, Escape 101: Sabbaticals Made Simple.

I have to admit that when it arrived in my inbox, I was skeptical. Few things in life feel simple these days, least of all sabbaticals.

But I set aside my skepticism and read the book’s prologue. I was hooked. In his book, Dan organized and articulated many of the fleeting thoughts I’d had over the past year as I had tried to prepare mentally for this trip.

When his book arrived, I had been caught in a vicious cycle of plan-worry- plan-worry and was digging myself a pretty deep rut. I found myself trying to plan for every contingency – in some cases for things that would happen more than a year from now.

I was beginning to question my own sanity for thinking we could do this.

Then I read this passage:

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A year or so ago I participated in a conference call with several different organizations working together on a project. An everyday occurrence for me and millions of other “consultants.” But there was something memorable about this call.

The host of the call was on vacation. In China. On a Yangtze River cruise near the Three Gorges Dam. Other participants called in from four different U.S. states, all on mobile phones.

Forget the difficulty coordinating time zones – think about the technology involved in that call. Yet nowadays, we take it for granted.

A similar experience: Last summer, I had to reach a client on a fairly urgent matter. I dialed his regular U.S.-based cell phone number and was connected immediately. Again, nothing unusual about that – except he was walking through the medieval quarter in Tallinn, Estonia, when he answered.

With these recent experiences as context, I was determined to find the best “phone solution” for our trip. My goal was simple. I wanted us to be able to make inexpensive local calls in each country we visited and make it easy for friends and family to reach us wherever we were traveling.

After months of research and some modest real-world testing, here’s what I learned.

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When my dad asked me if I would go around the world I said, “Sure.” Like we were ever going to do that!

The trip started out as a secret and something we could only talk about as a family – and with no one else. I never thought it would happen. I was sure it was just another one of my dad’s crazy ideas that would never be possible.

My dad would sit in his office all day researching and learning about other families who had done this before (I have no idea how he still earned a living while doing this).

I never really thought much about the trip until now, with less than five months till we leave.

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