Many of you at home have asked us to describe our “normal” day on the road. This is an impossible task, because there is no normal day. There isn’t even …

10 years younger than we are (as most of our fellow RTW’ers seem to be), Jon and Lisa sold their house and left jobs and befuddled friends behind. I must admit there are still days when my competitive, type-A side sweats the financial and career sacrifices we are making in order to do this, but Jon summed up the justification for our adventure succinctly: “Unlike many of the people here (in Vietnam), anything I had before, I can have again.” It might take a while and his new home might be smaller than his last, but he feels the experience he’s gaining now is more valuable than an extra bedroom or a year of career advancement.Since Jon and Lisa have been on the road for four months, they’ve met a lot of other travelers along the way…. Tom joked about doing this to say safe in a post before we left the States, but it was more a commentary on our nation’s unpopular foreign policy than an actual survival strategy.

The answer is there was a confluence of occurrences which drove home 3 very important lessons to me and made me push us to do something we have talked about for quite a while.The first happened about a year ago, when close friends of ours lost their 16 year old son to a car crash…. Luckily, we share a believe in an afterlife where we will see our loved ones again, but that doesn’t completely take away the pain they suffered as future graduations, marriages, grandchildren etc. disappeared in a single night…. Some restaurants were open, some people were back in their homes, we even stopped to get Beignets at Cafe du Monde after working all day on the first day. Then on the second day we were driving into the city to gut a house in the 9th ward and as we came round a bend on i I10 we could see the SuperDome with all it’s damage on the right but to the left was an equally impressive edifice.

I am writing and posting this short note from the airplane taking us from Brisbane to Seoul. After a month and a half of scrambling to find broadband throughout New Zealand and Australia, we have high hopes for a more connected Asia. We hope Boeing’s providing this free in-flight service for the moment is an omen that our Asian experience will be replete with bandwidth.Keeping our fingers crossed and our kids asleep.

In one year’s time we are circling the globe. In this short period we will visit many of the world’s countries, meet many of her people, learn many of her …

We woke at 3:20 am, an hour that gave us just enough time to rub our tired eyes, gather our fully loaded backpacks, and close up the campervan before our …

Our family struggles with punctuality. Individually, any one of us can be on time to anything, but put us all together and 15 minutes late seems to be the best …

For the past 10 years, I have taken the kids to Utah for summer vacation. We make our annual exodus to “Camp Grandma” for a number of reasons. The first …