Sixintheworld.com

The wise traveler seeks counsel from those who have gone before; so fancying myself wise, I consulted travelers far and wide before embarking on our journey in 2006. One of those who advice I particularly craved was billionaire Jim Rogers. I first emailed Jim in 2001 when I read about his 2-year round the world adventure in Fortune magazine. Oblivious to his standing in the financial world and assuming him to be a struggling writer like myself, I naively asked whether he had received sponsorships to help fund his travel. He immediately replied that he had not, but he encouraged me to pursue my dream of round the world travel by whatever means possible. I contacted Jim again in September 2006 when we were in Australia. We were only 1 month into our 11-month journey and starting to feel discouraged at the expense of the continent and our prospects for smooth travel in the coming year. Once again Jim replied instantly, encouraging us to never give up and reminding us that even if we failed in future months, at least we had had the courage to try–something most never muster. At the time he asked whose particular “madness” it was to embark on our trip, citing a certain mania as requisite for our type of travel.

Fortunately Tom and I shared the madness, which meant the ensuing months only got easier as we hit our rhythm and defined our complementary roles (in a nutshell: I planned, he executed). From country to country and continent to continent we met others who were subject to the same madness Rogers cited and had left their domestic lives behind to hit the road and explore the world. Now that we’re RTW veterans ourselves, we are frequently contacted by potential travelers seeking advice. We are always happy to offer it and hope we have inspired others to realize extended family travel is a possibility rather than a dream.

One unexpected benefit of of our trip, and our subsequent move to LA (an international gateway), is that we’ve heard from families not just dreaming of taking off but actually in the process of traversing the globe. Last week, the DeWilde family from Canada passed through our fair City of Angels while en route from Nicaragua to Australia. They’ve been traveling for 4 months and thought Election Day a fitting time for a US pit stop. Dad John contacted me a month or so before they arrived and we arranged to get together for an evening. I invited the family to our home and assumed they’d rent a car for their few days in LA. I realized just how removed from travel mode I’ve become when I was shocked to learn they planned on riding the bus around the city. I gave the DeWilde’s the number of the bus they could take to the the bottom of our neighborhood and figured they were masochists to brave LA traffic via public transport.

At 5:00 pm on the dot the doorbell rang and there stood this adorable family, looking particularly fit but a little thirsty after ascending the hill from the bus stop. The kids, Danielle and Simon, were happy to join Kieran and Asher on the Wii while parents, John and Pam, sat down to share stories with me. I learned about their adventures studying Spanish and volunteering in Nicaragua and what the kids considered to be a near death experience ascending a Canadian mountain in their van. I sighed with longing as they laid out the remainder of their itinerary for me: it includes extended service stints in such unusual locations as Bangladesh and Burkina Faso. We piled into my Yukon XL and met Tom at longtime family favorite Tito’s Tacos in Culver City. There we learned more about the DeWilde’s lifelong commitment to service and admirable activities on the road. One of Tom’s co-workers who happened to be checking out the famous burritos snapped a few pictures for us before I drove the DeWilde’s back to their airport hotel.

In August, we spent an evening with the Edmeads, a British family who were in the final days of a yearlong walkabout. Disneyland was the last stop in a trip that included an extended stay for SCUBA training in Thailand and their own Rolling Turd adventure in New Zealand. The Edmeads first contacted us in April when they stayed at one of our favorite hotels, the Elephant Crossing in Vang Vieng, Laos. They gave us the heads up that they would be passing through LA in August and true to their word, they appeared on our doorstep four months later. We ordered in Thai food, let the kids play Wii (all traveling kids seem to seize on this sedentary pursuit), and talked a lot about re-entry. Chris left a firm in the UK that actually had a garden dedicated to employees who had died at their desks. Overcome by a desire to never again subject himself to office-related stress, he and wife Rachel, explained their plans to open a small, family-friendly bed and breakfast in Spain, where Chris could make use of his new advanced SCUBA instructor certifications. As we have succumbed to a back-to-the-grind lifestyle, we sighed in understanding. I just checked their blog, http://fourgortw.travellerspoint.com/ and see that Chris made it only 23 days at home before jetting off to Honduras for more SCUBA training.

What we did, what others are doing, and what others plan to do to many seems madness. But to those who share it, it is far more sane than schlepping kids to a dozen lessons each week, waiting in line at the supermarket, or spending 10 hours a day behind a desk. To those who have returned to more ordinary existences, it is a badge of honor, the source of priceless memories and deep understanding. We proudly claim our mania and as Jim Rogers offered, hope to “meet some day and talk endlessly” about it.

I have been hesitant to write my next post. Mostly because I always think of it as my last Six in the World post, and there are so many things I want to say. I want to talk about what we learned, how the trip changed us, all the things I have come to understand in its wake. There are also so many people I want to thank for making our trip wonderful. But that post has to wait. I decided to take up the pen today because I am noticing how circular life can be.

When we returned to Georgia I wrote a post complaining about the lack of democracy in Georgia compared to California. Watch out what you wish for. I am now inundated with information, some true, some spurious, about ballot propositions, candidates, etc. Sifting through that in the upcoming weeks will be interesting. For those who may have missed it, I currently work at MySpace. I am in charge of their product management, which means I get involved in every project. I’ve have had a great time in the past 9 months helping make the site better and creating more tools and toys to connect people and conversations. One helpful new tool revolves around our presidential debates and I hope you all will check it out. The site is www.mydebates.org.

The second and much larger circular pattern I’ve noticed started three years ago. In the fall of 2005 I attended a conference called Google Zeitgeist. It is a small industry conference put on by Google and is filled with interesting people and stimulating speakers. It was three years ago at Zeitgeist that I first vocalized my desire to take my family away for a year and travel the world to a friend. At the time it wasn’t much more than a hope for future days, but the act of telling someone else was important and probably gave the trip ball more momentum as our lives hit some bumps in the ensuing months.

By the next Zeitgeist, we were in Australia or New Zealand. I would like to say I didn’t notice it was happening, but I did. As the conference went on and friends of mine got together, I had thoughts of being back at work. It may sound ungrateful, but there were times (this is the one that stands out along with Garry’s (my former CEO’s) passing), that I actually longed to be working. Then I would take the kids surfing, to a world heritage site, or just spend a quiet night helping with schoolwork, and it would pass. During last year’s Zeitgeist, I was still reeling from an unexpectedly rough reentry, namely my layoff from EarthLink. Since I was jobless, Google decided not to invite me. In many respects, and in true American form, it seems what I do is more important than who I am. (I don’t agree, but meet an American and within 20 seconds they’ll ask, “What do you do?” In other countries that is not the case. One of our key learnings from the trip.) My friends went off to hob nob and this time I really felt left out. Well, a lot has happened since then–a new job found me, we moved back to California, I am once again working with Google, and this morning is the start of this year’s Zeitgeist. I am glad to be on the guest list, but even on days like this, I think about climbing a giant sand dune, floating down the Mekong, or wandering a spooky cemetery in Buenos Aires.

I’ve now managed to go more than three months without posting. During my online absence I’ve traveled to Atlanta twice, where I supervised the loading of two separate trucks, one bound for our new home in California, the other for long-term storage in another state, and attended the closing on our house. Yes, we managed to do the impossible–sell a house in a crazy, rapidly declining market—and thus concluded yet another chapter in our lives. We didn’t expect upon ending our travels almost a year ago that we would face quite so many transitions in such a short time, but we’ve learned to expect and even relish change. It’s not always easy, but its in the transitions, when everything familiar and comfortable is stripped away, that our hearts are exposed and we discover what really matters to us. Our cross-country exodus has been stressful, chaotic, and exhilarating all at the same time and given us a unique opportunity to reflect on what we gained during our magical year.

One thing we’ve learned is that it cost a lot less than we originally planned. Including all our planning, preparation, gear, electronics, and travel, we spent a grand total of $86,875.52. That means if you break it down by person, we each got an 11-month, 6-continent adventure, including bungy jumps, elephant rides, and parasailing for $14,479.25! Now that’s a steal! If you strip away our laptops and cameras, you can get it down another $1000 or so per person.

For those looking to do things as inexpensively as possible, there are a few things to bear in mind:

1) We used frequent flyer miles for our RTW tickets. If we purchased these tickets, they would have cost in the neighborhood of $3000-6000 each, still keeping the number around $20,000 each.

2) We stayed for free or at discounted rates at Starwood Hotels using frequent guest points for a total of 45 nights. In some locations this saved us a bundle, in others just a little. In any event, our budget for lodging, which we rarely exceeded was $100/night. You could add $4500 back into the total to compensate for our freebies, but this would probably be more than we would have spent on our own dime.

3) You could go on a lot longer on a lot less if you moved more slowly than we did. There were many times we had to take an expensive plane or train in order to keep our schedule when we could have taken the slower, cheaper route by bus or donkey. Given that southern China and Vietnam cost us only about $75-100/day for 6 of us, we could have spent many months there and kept our expenses way down.

The big expense that some would argue should be included is the cost of keeping our house. We did spend a bundle paying the mortgage, homeowners’ dues, insurance, taxes, etc., but I don’t think it’s fair to make this a cost of travel. We could have rented it out or sold it–which in the wake of our employment situation and the current real estate crisis would have proven a wiser move–and had a lot more spending cash on the road. Both leaving and coming home would have been more difficult, however, and though our bank account holds it against us, we don’t regret doing things the way we did.

In a time when cars can easily cost $40,000 each and $87,000 won’t buy you a bedroom in most cities, we can’t think of a better way to have spent this sum. For $264/day, we gained an unparalleled closeness with our kids and each other, a lifetime of shared memories, and a wealth of experience and knowledge that will remain long after our cars have gone to the scrapheap and our house has been leveled to make room for a shopping mall.

We can’t wait to do it again.

It’s been two weeks now since we returned from our spring break jaunt to Puerto Rico. I’ve tried at least three times to encapsulate our experience in post format, but as seems to have become par for the course, I’m struggling in the process.

I was excited for this trip, our first real excursion since “the trip,” for more than a few reasons. First, it removed for just a moment the ever-looming reality that our new house is still empty, the old one full and unsold. Once again I could sit on someone else’s chairs, limit my wardrobe to a few key items, and push aside any and all concerns that had to do with purchasing, fixing, throwing out, or cleaning up “stuff.” Second, and more importantly, the family would be in motion again, recapturing a little of the spirit of our great adventure. Part of me thought that if we simply jumped on a plane, the months that have lapsed since our return would be erased and we could pretend, if even for a few days, that once again we were free from the obligations and rigors of our usual lives and engaged in something beyond the usual.

I was correct in my first assumption. Not once did I fret about credit markets, price drops, piano movers, shipping containers, or inflatable mattresses (which after two months we’ve learned are prone to leaking). I was however, mistaken about the second. As best I can figure, here’s why…

Travel is a complicated creature. We vacation to rejuvenate, to fill up our tanks before heading into the end of a school semester or the beginning of a fiscal year. We yearn to relax, unwind, and relieve our minds and bodies of their ordinary stress. We travel, however, for distinctly different reasons. The point is not so much to leave something behind as to discover something new, to experience something deeper. We hope to learn more about the world and ourselves by changing our surroundings and challenging our assumptions. This is what we both sought and achieved in taking the kids and “leaving it all behind” for 11 months. Though our days were full, even busy, no two were the same and each offered new insight. As the first weeks passed and we got comfortable with being away from home and around each other, we felt a strange, exhilarating release. It wasn’t just a freedom, that’s too simple a characterization. While we shelved our usual cares, we adopted new ones centered primarily on our relationships with each other and our collective relationship to the world. How could we strengthen and improve each other, and what promise could we offer the planet? As we got into our groove, we learned to savor each day (well, most of them) and understand that each offered the potential of something extraordinary. What valuable life lesson awaited us in the next town? Which inspiring role model were we destined to meet in the next country? What frightening or invigorating once-in-a-lifetime experience would befall us on the next continent? What new way could we find to tease Dad, who was always our good-natured problem solver, perspective bringer, and champion? While some people are able to find the magic in each day of a patterned existence, we are not so noble, and rightly or not, felt more alive, more connected, and more challenged as travelers than dwellers.

Somehow after our experience in extended travel, I assumed we had gained the unnatural ability to shed our domestic psyche at will, as if there were a switch we could simply flip on and off to change between normal life and travel modes. It turns out, at least for this seasoned crew, that one week is too tight a timeframe for such a feat. In the end, I think I deprived us of a vacation because I was trying to travel.

We stayed at a low-key beach resort, for free of course thanks to our Sheraton points. We spent a few days at the beach and by the pool but felt compelled to scour the island to partake of its artistic, historic, environmental, and culinary offerings. Each day in our minivan-powered quest turned out to be more disappointing than the last, but the fault was not Puerto Rico’s. With the three-hour time change, we could not seem to emerge from our hotel room before noon. Tom had phone calls, text messages, and emails to the office, I was frustrated we were so far from everything and everyone was sleeping so late, Dax would always rather have been at the beach, and McKane kept getting carsick. Kieran and Asher preferred the pool but thankfully were amenable to long days in the van.

Though I put a lot of pressure on trip it couldn’t fulfill, it reaffirmed the real reason we went around the world and the reason we will continue to seek opportunities to travel–strengthening our family. Though no one was thrilled with the itinerary, everyone got along and looked for ways to enjoy the time together. Dax gave Asher rides on his back in the pool on our resort days and shared musical insights and high school truisms with us on our driving days. McKane was bent on doing things unique to Puerto Rico, realizing this would probably be his only visit of the decade, and goodnaturedly encouraged us to make the most of the few days we had. The little kids chattered and made up games both in the room and the van, demonstrating their hard-earned skill of adapting to any situation, and were just as thrilled to frolic in a Puerto Rican pool as they are a Tunisian, Indian, Argentine, or Vietnamese one. Throughout, our shared memories of other places and times came crashing back…just as we want them to for the rest of our lives.

As I see it, the challenge is to avoid living in the past and pining for the road and to instead find the same enthusiasm and freedom within the parameters of domestic life. It can be done. We need to observe our surroundings with the same sense of wonder, prioritize the time we spend together as a family, and continue to think with newfound perspective. When I start getting lulled into passivity or overtaken by details, I will try to travel in my mind. When I just want a break, I’ll vacation. I’m going to test this one out and will let you know how it goes.

In the meantime, here are our Top 6 Observations About Puerto Rico:

1. Everywhere you go, the roads are filled with squished iguanas. I’m guessing there’s either an overpopulation problem or they’re on the verge of extinction due to motorized transport.

2. Though officially a US protectorate, the Puerto Ricans uphold a bizarre, hybrid standard of international measures. Distances are measured in kilometers, gas in liters, but speed limits are posted in miles. We didn’t think to ask how they measure height and weight. Gone are the days when we had to know our weight in kilos for bungy jumping, and in accordance, our memory of metrics has faded.

3. Here a K-mart, there a Wal-Mart, everywhere a Mart Mart. Everywhere we went there were strip malls replete with discount retailers and chain restaurants. I thought about checking things off my standing grocery/supplies list from home but realized I’d have trouble getting it all on the plane.

4. If it’s not fried, it’s not worth eating. Fritura dominates the menu as the Puerto Ricans seem motivated to deep fry anything animal, vegetable, or mineral. I’m sure at home they eat fresh foods, we just couldn’t find any at the traditional roadside stands.

5. Si, we have no bananas…only plantains. Plantains are tasty when fried, but don’t try ordering them in English. While Puerto Ricans learn English in school and fly the American flag beside the Puerto Rican banner, most we encountered preferred our broken Spanish to our fluent English. Amusing for them, humbling for us.

6. That’s some serious swell. The biggest waves since 1991’s famed Perfect Storm hit Puerto Rico’s north shore while we were there. We may live in Malibu, but our surfing skills aren’t that good yet!

Technorati Tags: Family Travel, Post travel adjustment, Puerto Rico, Round the world, Round-the-world, RTW

One day back in January, I was wandering the aisles of Barnes and Noble searching for a book for Dax, when I spotted something that grabbed my attention and wouldn’t let go: a cover of sky blue, let’s call it Indonesian blue as opposed to Tibetan blue (much lighter) or Californian blue (much brighter), broken by a dotted line charting the path of a paper airplane crafted from a world map. Without even deciphering the title from afar, I realized the book obviously had something to do with travel or at least geography, so I moved in for a closer look. When I reached the table, my heart skipped a beat: The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World. This was right up my alley. I’m fond of geography, love roaming the world, and have been known on many occasions to be a grump. The resonance didn’t end there though. I’m no slouch when it comes to happiness, having ghostwritten a few books on the subject. This was a book I had to read.

I’ve always had my own theories about places, their unique personalities, and their power to resonate with us as individuals. For many people, the places that speak to them, that they crave when they are away and can’t picture themselves ever leaving are the places they are born. Tom entered the mortal sphere in the shadow of the towering Rocky Mountains, and though he loves the ocean, he only feels truly at peace when surrounded by craggy peaks. I know easterners who can’t abide the southwest with its parched expanses and distinct lack of greenery. They find comfort in foliage, the same foliage that makes my desert dwelling friends claustrophobic. I believe many never realize this connection until they leave their homes and experience a feeling of dislocation, a spiritual separation from the landscape that gave them life.

Born in the Midwest, raised along the far reaches of the eastern seaboard–Annapolis, New Orleans, Schenectady–and educated in Durham and New Haven, I never bonded with my everchanging hometowns. It wasn’t until I made my way west of the Mississippi that my geographic sixth sense sat up and took notice. Utah was beautiful, with its endless open skies, commanding alpine peaks, and hypnotic redrock, but still had one major flaw as I saw it: the cold. I found the remedy in Los Angeles with the added soul-soothing feature that now defines me: water. My peace is in the sun-drenched, temperate shoreline. Does this spiritual connection to Southern Californian climate and terrain make me geographically shallow? After all, who doesn’t like sun and ocean? If I’m guilty of loving the easy or the obvious, condemn me, but after five years away from here, during which not a day went by that I didn’t long for the ocean with a few palm trees thrown in for good measure, I’ll stick by my theory.

Author Eric Weiner, a longtime NPR correspondent who’s covered some of the world’s most war-ravaged, disease-ridden regions, finds in his treatise that geography is only one component of a particular people’s collective happiness. Icelanders, subject to island isolation, six months of darkness annually, and almost constant cold, are some of the happiest people in the world. Money, family, trust, gratitude, and culture all factor in lending places their distinct identities and influencing people’s satisfaction. Maybe that’s why some of my favorite places don’t involve palm trees and some of my least favorite do. I found Hanoi infectious, Buenos Aires intoxicating, Southern Africa liberating, and Australia refreshing, while other places simply left me cold.

I’m back where I belong…for now. This place is a part of me. Yet everywhere I look, I find reminders of places we visited in our travels. When the fog rolls in and nestles in the foothills behind our house, I’m transported to the misty Andean peaks of Machu Picchu. The fruit trees at Pepperdine exploding in bursts of fluffy white blossoms deliver me back to Cappadoccia in spring, and the momentarily green flora enveloping the Malibu hillsides (which thanks to my friend Teri, I now know is called chaparral) fools me into thinking I’m back on the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, except there of course, it’s called fynbos. When I gaze westward across the vast Pacific, my imagination alights on the decks of the immense barges steaming in and out of the docks of San Pedro. I find myself dreaming of the exotic locales that await them, just as I did during our time on the Sunshine Coast in Australia. I smile to myself when I think that the places we experienced are a permanent part of my geographic memory, that I can invoke them at will, and even better, that they’ll spring up when I least expect them, forever connecting me to the most meaningful of years and inspiring of places.

Weiner is reluctant to draw many conclusions from his travels other than happiness is complicated and travel gives you many windows into it. For my part, I’ll say this: some places make us come alive, and for me, this is one of them.

The posts should start coming again, as we drink in our new surroundings, contemplate our future RTW travel (Kieran and Asher are already planning the itinerary for trip #2), and gear up for next week’s trip to the Caribbean. And for those interested, we’re still sleeping on air mattresses and haven’t really figured out when we’ll be moving the furniture out here. After all, life should be an adventure…right?

Technorati Tags: California, Family Travel, Malibu, Relocation, Round the world, Round-the-world, RTW

We made it! I’m afraid many of you think we’ve fallen off our beloved globe to be heard from no more. Though it’s true we had moments of simply wanting to run away rather than dealing with the logistics and finances of a 6-person cross country move, we persevered, and after an intense month of faxing, flying, and fretting, paperwork, planning, and persistence, we finally arrived on the West Coast last week. To say this move (which is still very much in process) has been the toughest thing we’ve ever done is an understatement. People marvel that we could take four children to the far reaches of the planet, yet 11-months of travel was cake compared to this. On the road we had nothing more than a bevy of backpacks, a few credit cards, and 2-3 days of transportation and lodging arrangements to deal with. On any given day our logistics were confined to what we could carry and where we wanted to go. Here we’ve got multiple households, legions of possessions, and a seemingly endless string of utility providers, real estate agents, and insurance companies vying for our too short supply of time and energy. We’re trying to keep our wits about us, but every now and then we pine for the simplicity of the road.

The most stressful issue, however, has nothing to do with matters material and everything to do with the emotional well-being of the Six. When Tom and I removed the kids from their American lives for one year, it was with the assurance that they would one day return to the familiarity of their home and their friends and their activities. Moving requires us to leave all that comfort and security behind and forge something completely new. When traveling each destination was temporary, so there was no pressure for it to be perfect, no need to find new best friends, no threat that it would replace the permanence of home. Home for us has now disappeared and we hope it will emerge once again in our new environs–new friends, new activities, new neighborhood. Tom and I are accustomed to such changes, but we do not presume that leaving everything familiar behind will be easy or painless for the kids.

January 2008 will forever be remembered as the hiatus between our Great Southern Adventure and our second West Coast Tour. Atlanta bid us farewell by posting our picture on the cover of the Atlanta Life magazine and adding thousands more new homes to an already weak real estate market. This latter fact presents an interesting contrast to the experience of the Cohen family of One Year Off fame, whom many of you have mentioned in your emails and comments. Before departing on their yearlong sojourn with 3 kids, they sold their home and put their furniture in storage only to find it more expensive to replace their house when they got back. Bummer for them. Trying to avoid their dilemma, we kept our house, assuming it would pay for itself in appreciation. Bigger bummer for us, as our timing couldn’t have been worse. We left a red hot, rapidly appreciating market and returned to find our house worth significantly less than when we had left it. Had we known Tom would return to no job, we might well have sold the house and traveled for two or three years and still come out ahead. I mention this not to gripe (ok, well maybe a little), but to highlight that in planning for an extended trip like ours (and the Cohens), there is no perfect formula or foolproof plan. You have to do what works at the time and know there will always be risk involved. That said, if anybody is looking for a house in suburban North Atlanta, drop us a line…

Our transitional home at Grandma and Grandpa’s in Utah filled our days with wintry fun and our nights with dreams of warmer climes. The boys snowboarded, Tom and I braved the bitter cold of Park City for a few MySpace concerts, and the entire extended family ripped up the “slopes” at a local park with innertubes and toboggans. McKane perfected a big air jump off a berm he built with his Uncle Scott, but lost his zeal when, in typical “it’s only fun until someone gets hurt” fashion, a hapless co-ed bit it hard and sprained her back on his primitive construction.

After dragging it out for as long as I possibly could, I finally broke down and bought my contribution to global warming, a used, seven-seater SUV, perfect for hauling kids and surfboards (Prius to follow in a few months). I loaded up four children (2 sick for the first time in a year and a half) and slogged through snow, salt, and ice to reach our rented piece of nirvana in Malibu and rejoin our now hardworking Tom. Everything we own is still in Atlanta, so we’re camping on air mattresses and eating off of paper plates. We might never have considered such discomfort before our trip, but after living out of compression sacks and sleeping in tents, busses, hostels, and airports for a year, no one has missed a beat, much less considered our new living arrangements odd. I’d like to think this is yet one more way the trip has transformed us and given us a new perspective on even the most mundane aspects of everyday life. Don’t get me wrong. There is nothing I relish about being bogged down in moving minutiae, nor do I enjoy threats from the Fulton County school district that I could go to prison for Dax’s continued absences (we did withdraw him–they just can’t seem to get the paperwork into the system). Having seen more, done more, and been away from it all for 11 months just helps me shrug it off a little quicker and gaze out at my new view with a little more appreciation….Sorry, Sheraton, what can I say but home….aaaaahhhhhh!

Technorati Tags: California, Moving, Relocation, Round the world, Round-the-world, RTW, sledding, Snow, Utah

To those of you who have followed us over the past 19 months, you know that silence means difficulty—picket lines, roadblocks, cancelled flights, exploding rental cars, and sleeping in bus stations. For the past few months, our relative lack of communication can be attributed not to the unpredictability of travel, but to the constancy of everyday life at home. As summer blended into autumn and autumn collapsed into winter, we slipped, not without protest, into a domestic reverie, too concerned with homework, job negotiations, and yard maintenance to ruminate on our bygone traveling days. Now that we’ve moved on and are once again removed from our Atlanta nest, we are bombarded with reminders of what we were doing this time last year and the very real fact that we are not doing it now. You might remember that last New Year’s Eve we were in Chiang Mai, Thailand, one of our favorite cities, lighting celebratory lanterns and wandering through Buddhist temples. This year we are in Tom’s hometown of Orem, Utah, a city not without its particular charms, watching the snow fall and wondering how we have come so far and experienced so much in such a short time.

It is confusing and unsettling that we are now five months removed from our travels. In some ways it feels like five years. It’s hard to imagine the Andrus family of today–tethered by the logistics of selling and buying domiciles, withdrawing from and enrolling in elementary, middle, and high schools, and coordinating the relocation of all our worldly goods–hopping on a brood of elephants or floating down a remote Southeast Asian river with not a care in the world other than what delicious $1 meal to enjoy that evening.

We are neither the first nor the last to experience the difficulties of re-entry. Tara Russell, founder of Three Month Visa, spends her days counseling clients first on how to take long-term travel sabbaticals and second on how to move forward with their lives once they’ve returned. Tara shared many valuable insights with me and validated my belief that re-entry is in many ways more difficult than departure. I will share her words of wisdom in a future post (since I’ve left all my notes in Atlanta) but in the meantime, feel free to visit her website.

There is no doubt we accomplished something extraordinary with our trip. While it is hard to imagine that any of the six of us, even little Asher, is not permanently changed by the experience, our challenge in the coming months and years will be to keep the experience alive. We don’t want it to become that one amazing year we cling to, the exception in an otherwise pedestrian existence. Rather we want it to become the impetus that sparks us to fill every year with extraordinary experiences—learning, investigating, exploring, and most importantly growing closer to one another. And as always, don’t rule out more extended travel in the near future. A look at our Christmas gifts and the images Tom’s mom displays around her home reveals that no matter how absorbed we’ve gotten in life in the US, part of us continues to dream of the world.

Technorati Tags: Family travel, Post travel adjustment, Round the world, Round-the-world, RTW, Utah

This isn’t easy. For the past four months we have pondered, prayed, and sometimes fretted over what we should do in the wake of our life-changing trip and Tom’s subsequent layoff. During this time we have approached our uncertain future with the same level of enthusiasm and hope that we did our RTW journey. We have tried to open our minds to new and unexpected directions and explored a myriad of options for moving forward.

When we asked you what we should do, most of you voted for us to keep traveling or to at least continue working on travel-related projects. A few thought we should settle down and simply enjoy what we have at home. Both options are enticing, but neither is the perfect fit for us right now. Once we got over our initial travel withdrawal (thankfully it will never go away completely), we realized immediate extended travel was out because the kids need time to process their experiences and spend time with friends and family. When we moved on and put our minds to ways of financing future meals and mortgage payments, we found settling down in Atlanta to be difficult. Tom has few job prospects here and we both left our hearts back west…he with the mountains and I with the ocean.

The last four months have been a unique time for our family. For the first time in 15 years of parenthood, Tom drove the kids to school, packed their lunches, and volunteered in their classrooms. He coached Asher’s soccer team, helped McKane make the middle school volleyball team, worked with Kieran to overcome his fear of writing, and let Dax beat him at Guitar Hero time and time again (maybe “let” is not the right word). For four delectable months, he didn’t have to hop on a plane, answer hundreds of emails, or leave before dawn to beat the traffic.

We thought this might be a permanent nirvana and when Tom wasn’t running someone’s forgotten homework to school or taking me to lunch, he was researching ways to change the world and apply some of his travel-inspired wisdom to the business world. He made some progress, but as word of his unemployment got out, potential employers came calling. One proved particularly compelling and we spent many weeks contemplating their offer. We thought long and hard about what it would mean to return to the corporate world. We weighed the pros and cons and decided that this new opportunity would serve a lot of our long-term goals, not the least of which is future RTW adventures.

And so, with a little bit of sadness but a groundswell of enthusiasm, we will be leaving Atlanta at Christmas and returning to our sunny SoCal home of Los Angeles. While Tom helps shape the future of the internet at MySpace in Beverly Hills, I will be shuttling kids to school and penning our travel tales from the seaside village of Pacific Palisades. Dax and McKane will continue the surfing they started in Australia, the little kids will get their first experience with California’s liberal recess policies, and I will derive constant energy and inspiration from the ocean I so adore. We will all embrace the mountains and beaches that surround us. They will tickle our memories and conjure images of faraway peaks we hold dear–Jiuzhaigou in China, Table Mountain in South Africa, the Altiplano in Bolivia–and golden strands we strolled on Australia’s Sunshine Coast, the banks of Vietnam’s South China Sea, and Tunisia’s ancient Mediterranean shoreline.

Life in California will help us realize some of the goals we had set before leaving it all behind 15 months ago. Downsizing our living space by 2/3 (gulp!) will require us to get rid of a lot of stuff. A smaller house, smaller driveway, tightly packed parking spaces, and heavily trafficked streets lend themselves to smaller cars. I still haven’t managed to replace the car I sold before leaving the US and now my indecision has proven wisdom rather than ineffectiveness. I was encouraged that every tenth car in LA seemed to be a Prius or other hybrid and will now opt for something that sucks down a lot less gas than my former SUV. I could have done this in Atlanta, but the wide open parking lots and suburban distances lure me to comfort rather than efficiency.

Though many of our books will be in boxes in the garage, the Rough Guides, Lonely Planets, and assorted travel tomes will sit shelved in plain view as fodder for planning our future travels. Perhaps one with my byline will join the ranks in the near future and the possibility of other travel projects will continue to percolate in the background (perk, perk, perk…I can hear them now). Tom will have a quick commute down Sunset Boulevard, travel rarely (in a good way), and charge his intellectual batteries in an office where he gets free smoothies…but I’ll let him reveal more about that in a future post.

Atlanta has been good to us, and we credit her sultry environs as the incubator for last year’s trip. Fellow Georgians have supported our travels and are currently reading about them in a 2-part article in Atlanta Life magazine (see pp. 58-62). Ironically the second part will not appear in print until after we have departed, but we want our former neighbors to know that Atlanta will remain in our hearts as we head west. After 5 years, we leave this fair city a little more mannered, a little more genteel, and a lot more traveled. Farewell, Atlanta, and hold on, LA, here come The Six!

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