Globetrotting Around the World

Roughly 2 and a half weeks ago, during warmups of a student vs. faculty basketball game, I jumped to shoot and a ball rolled under my left foot from behind me from the other side of the court. I hit the floor, looked at my rapidly swelling ankle and immediately asked myself, "Why hadn't I bought my traveller's insurance yet?" Nadine looked perplexed and asked, "what is it this time?" I was worried that I wouldn't be healthy for the beginning of our trip in Mid-June, and we wouldn't be able to leave on our scheduled date.

The result of this little ordeal was a severly sprained ankle, bruised ego, fractured ankle, and a walking cast to "boot" for 3 weeks. Fortunately, we will not have to postpone our date of departure. Nadine will begin her trip with a partner with two different sized legs, but who will definitely be leaving with her in June to the Cook Islands.

4 weeks from departure, we do not yet have everything in order. I am pretty sure we will be running around like chickens with our heads cut off a week before we leave. Which insurance do we finally want to go with? Who is taking the car? Storage, oh yeah, we need that too! All the joys of planning a trip of this magnitude. If our planning was all on Nadine's shoulders, everything would already be carefully planned out and secured. If our planning was all on my shoulders, we would dream for a year of the places that we are going to go, and the day before we leave, take care of the necessities. Good thing both of us are planning, Nadine the realistic and practical one, while I remain dreaming of our stay on the beach.

Nevertheless, it is an exciting time for us. We are going to have a solid 10 months to "be" and to travel without time constraints, other than catching the next flight. That's what is great about traveling, freedom to explore, seeing new places, people, customs, and languages on a daily basis, challenging one's self with directions, dialects, hand signals. As always, we require us to practice our ability to be patient, laugh at ourselves, and be flexible. It will be an interesting 10 months.

So we are about to leave a great situation where we have great jobs surrounded with great family, friends, students, and comfort. It will be tough to leave these people for the unknown, yet in order to have this great adventure and challenge ourselves, we have to remove ourselves from our comfort and hit the road.