Kindness of Strangers

For the past nine months I’ve volunteered with the Big Brothers Big Sisters program.  Being a Big Sister to an eleven-year-old girl has been a great experience, but for the past few months I’ve dreaded telling her about my trip.  The Program requires a year-long committment from its volunteers and participants because studies have shown that it takes about that length of time to make a lasting impression and form any sort of a genuine relationship.  Now that we’re nearing that point, I’m leaving her.  And that makes me feel terrible.

I was advised by my Support Specialist to not tell her too soon, lest our time left together be colored, but to not wait so long that she feels like the rug has been pulled out from under her.  On Saturday I determined that the time was right.  I waited until her grandparents and sister were all in the room.  I started off my saying that Maikael and I would be leaving Albuquerque for awhile, and that we’d have to stop meeting.  “Where are you going?” her grandpa asked.  “We’re taking a trip around the world.”  My Little Sister’s eyes grew big.  “You mean like on a vacation?” her grandpa asked.  “Well, yeah, basically.”  I had never thought of this trip as a vacation, per se, but if you define a vacation as the absence of work, then, yeah, I guess I’m going on a really long vacation.  “Are you going around the whole world?” my Little Sister asked.    “Well, we’re not going to visit every country, but we are going to go around the whole globe,” I said.  “Are you going to go to Laughlin?” her sister asked.  I laughed.  “No, we’re going a little further than Laughlin.

It occured to me that, for her, Laughlin is the end of the world.  It’s where their family goes on vacation every summer, and, when you’re an eight-year-old, it probably feels like the ends of the earth.  It was then that I realized this trip could be a real learning opportunity; a way to expand my Little Sister’s concept of The World.  I plan on sending her postcards from each country I visit.  We also discussed doing a scrapbooking project together.  Rather than “what I did on my summer vacation,” we’re each going to put together a book that addresses “what I did during the last eight months.”  My Little Sister is starting middle school in the fall, and I’m disappointed about missing the beginning of her big journey.  When I return she’ll be older, taller, smarter, and, as an almost-teenager, probably a little more jaded.  I wonder how I’ll seem different to her?

As a child, my father used to always tell me how he “works like a Mexican.”  It is true that he works hard, often rising before the crack of dawn, toiling tirelessly all day.  I am not what you would call an “early bird” (if my life depended on it, I’d never get the worm), and my father would often admonish me for my laziness, reminding me that he had already put in an entire day’s work before I had even woken.  Being half-Mexican, am I not living up to my heritage? 

Oftentimes I wake with a pitt in my stomach, my mind churning with all the tasks that await doing.  I spring out of bed to complete them anyway.  Having spent some of my formative years in Costa Rica, I’ve witnessed firsthand the benefits of work-life balance.  My high school had a surf club, and the cafe culture was thriving.  This is a country whose national motto is Pura Vida, which literally translates as “pure life.”  During this period, I was a regular mid-day napper, and I never felt guilty about it.  I love this pace of life, which is why I feel my everyday routine has worn thin.  Now that I’m ensconced in a career, I often find it hard to relax due to the all-encompassing nature of modern life.  Lately, even sleep is punctuated with thoughts of trip planning, work, or other minutae.  Life in the global economy seems so hectic; just when one task is completed, there is another to take its place.  It’s a little like Sisyphus pushing that rock up the hill. 

Like most of us, I sometimes bemoan the loss of childhood’s simplicity, the daydreaming of limitless possibilities.  But then I remember that adulthood brings the ability to enact our goals.   So I’ve decided to make finding true relaxation a personal goal of this RTW trip.  Before setting off on this quest, I’m unsure if, how, or where relaxation will manifest itself.  I’ve always imagined finding it in a remote, tropical beach locale, perhaps a palm tree-lined beach, devoid of any of the pressures of everyday life. 

I’m curious to hear what you think.  What does relaxation mean to you and what do you do to find it?

Maikael is chomping at the bit to see the new Indiana Jones movie, whose release date shares an unfortunate spot on the calendar with my 30th birthday.  Had it been any other day, I’m confident Maikael would have been the first in line to see the new flick.  Sure, we’ve heard all the jokes about Indiana Jones and the Walker of Doom, but Indy Fever is hitting our home full throttle. 

Last night we watched Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, which I hadn’t seen in years.  Because we’re going to Petra, Jordan, on our trip, which is portrayed as the site of the Holy Grail in the film, Maikael has been eager to watch this movie again.  This is just my speed of research.  I’d rather ooh and aah over the ancient city built into the pink cliffs (”Do you think we’ll get to walk through a crescent canyon to get there?” I asked Maikael) than meticulously research the top budget accomodations in the greater Petra area.  

This point of view may come as a surprise to many of you, who know me as the consumate planner.  But the fact is, I’m easily bored by details.  Planning the broad strokes and imagining the possibilities of our itinerary was much more interesting to me than researching individual countries.  Unfortunately, the latter is the stage we are at in the planning process, and I find I have very little energy for it.  In reviewing our itinerary, I’ve noticed that we’ve included a number of countries that I know very little about (most of what I currently know about Petra is derived from celluloid).  But rather than being scared, I find the prospect thrilling.  I’d rather go into most places without my impressions being colored by a guidebook, and make discoveries based on my own experiences. 

Maybe it is the sheer scope of this trip that has taken away some of my need for control.  It is impossible to plan the ins and outs of an eight-month trip, so why bother trying?   We are currently focusing on planning the first few legs of our trip; namely, Portugal, Italy, and Turkey.  There is a growing part of me that just wants to show up and see what happens.  And it’s a bit unfortunate that we’re landing in Europe in the throes of tourist season, where budget accomodations can be hard to come by without advanced reservations.  So I’ve accepted that some amount of advanced planning will be required.  But in the meantime, I think I’d like to curl up on the couch and read Under the Tuscan Sun. 

My parents used to worry that I’d be kidnapped. I once wandered away at a picnic and was found, a few panicked minutes later, having lunch and chatting amiably with a nearby family. Another time I got lost at Sea-Tea Mall and, after security personnel had shut down all the entrances, was discovered in the shoe department talking with a woman and ordering my size of sneakers. Needless to say, I’ve never had trouble meeting new people.

Sometimes this natural ability to network comes in handy. Last week I found myself striking up a conversation with a colleague of mine whom I had met once only briefly. The conversation quickly turned to my impending trip.  Coincidentally, my colleague has done quite a bit of world travel. She asked me if I was planning on “woofing it.” I wasn’t sure if this had anything to do with “hoofing it,” but I doubted it and said, “no.” She proceeded to tell me all about people who “woof” their way around the world. Much like the word “antique,” woofing is a noun-turned-verb: WWOOF stands for the World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms. Apparently, lots of budget traveler make their way around the world through woofing. In exchange for working on an organic farm, woofers are provided free room and board (read: delicious, local, organic fare), as well as an opportunity to hob nob with locals and learn a thing or two about organic farming.

I have always had an interest in organic farming. In fact, one of my dreams for the Italy portion of our trip has been to tour Tuscany by staying in agriturismos, which are an observation-based (and more expensive) version of WWOOFs. Here, guests pay to stay on a working farm, enjoying a room in the farm’s house and the fruits of the farm’s labors without the labor. But the WWOOFs really appeal to me. Not only would it provide an opportunity to keep our costs down in a very expensive country, but I would relish the chance to learn more about farming in a country that it known for its outstanding food production.  What better way to eat your way through a country than to enjoy the food you spent the day toiling over?

I went on WWOOF’s Italy website to investigate the list of participating farms, and was bowled over by the sheer variety. From hazelnut farms to olive oil farms, they seem to represent the best of Italy’s culinary landscape. Some farms speak English; others don’t. Some provide a room in the farmhouse; others are open to campers only.  You can choose to stay a few days or a few weeks, and are warned that the hours might be long during harvest season.  There truly seems to be something for every taste imaginable.  I can already taste the pecorino.

Things are finally starting to fall into place this week.  You may have noticed that the “Rent Our House!” tab has disappeared from our page.  Utilizing our “kindness of strangers” approach, we were able to secure a renter for the duration of our trip!  Our friends, John and Alicia, were able to refer a great tenant our way.  Our hope has always been to find a friend-of-a-friend to rent to, someone we can trust with our greatest asset.  So, thanks guys:  you’ve taken a real load off of our shoulders.

I’ve always said that once our tickets were purchashed and our house was rented, the rest was just details.  With those big items checked off our mounting to-do list, I am able to shift my focus to some of the smaller (and more interesting) things that need to be accomplished before July 13.  This week I began a photograph class.  People keep telling me to “take lots of great pictures” on our trip, which is a tall order.  I bought a nifty camera nearly a year ago, and thus far I’ve only mastered the automatic settings.  Realizing I need to learn how to operate the manual settings to do anything cool and artsy, I signed up for a photography class.  Once we hit the road we plan on creating photo galleries for each country we visit, so hopefully you’ll be able to witness the fruits of my labor.  I’m not the ideal photographer; it’s a technical craft for which I find I have very little patience (I still can’t, for the life of me, understand the concept of an f-stop and how it relates to aperture- and shutter-priority).  But a girl can dream!  We’re still trying to figure out the best way to store and back-up our photos from the road.  Our computer probably won’t store much, so we’ve considered buying an iPod to store photos.  We’ve also thought about buying a number of memory cards and storing photos that way; or, some combination of those two methods.  If any one has any brilliant ideas to this end, we’re all ears. 

We finished our final round of vaccinations this week, and are now guarded against nearly every disease that one can be vaccinated for.  We’ve spent so much time at the New Mexico Travel Health Clinic over the past two months that the nurse actually gave us a hug on the way out and asked us to send her a postcard.  I’m honestly not sure what I’ll do with my Friday mornings anymore.

In other news, my backpack that’s been on order from REI arrived this week!  I was excited to pick it up at the store and have it fitted on Thursday.  I still feel a little panicked when I see how small it is, but that’s just the way it’s gonna have to be.  I had an interesting conversation with the employee who fitted the bag for me, who had obviously done a great deal of extended international travel.  It’s fun to find a fellow soul who you can debate the relative pros and cons of bringing more than two pairs of shoes with.  We also discussed, at length, how to pack lightly without looking like a bum or about to embark on a safari.  One issue in which he had a definite opinion was the Eagle Creek packing folders and cubes.  The one commonality I’ve seen in all RTW packing lists is the addition of these flexible packing products.  They are supposed to make your backpack infinitely more organized and compact.  Stay tuned as The Mystery of How to Get Eight Months Worth of Stuff in One Bag continues…

I arrived home last Thursday evening to find a FedEx envelope propped against the front stoop.  I love getting mail — I have been known to drop whatever I’m doing to dash to the mailbox the moment the postman peels away from the curb – so getting a FedEx package is like hitting the mail jackpot.  The outside of the envelope stated that the sender was American Airlines.  Our plane tickets!  It’s been a few weeks since we ordered them, and I was beginning to get a little nervous that our credit card hadn’t been charged, and that we hadn’t received one iota of proof that we’d actually purchased said tickets.  Being able to hold the bundle of plane tickets in my hand was a huge relief.

I took the tickets out of their paper casing and began to flip through them like a stack of bills.  I was astonished.  The reservationist kept telling us that it would take awhile to generate the tickets because they had to be “written.”  This made no sense to me until I opened the tickets.  Instead of the computer-generated tickets that I am accustomed to seeing, I discovered that our tickets are literally handwritten.  That’s right:  some poor schmo had to go through and meticulously pen each of our nineteen legs.  The tickets don’t even look real.  It’s as if we decided to play the game Airplane — “I want to be the ticket agent!  Let ME write the tickets!” — and created our own tickets (paid for, no doubt, with Monopoly money).  During one of our many conversations with the folks at OneWorld, we learned that they will be phasing out these type of tickets over the next few months, and now we know why. 

As the proud owners of handwritten relics, I wonder what sideways glances we’ll get when we present our flight coupons to the various ticketing counters around the globe.  I was worried that we’d be denied admission until my friend, Lee, assured me that handwriting tickets is “old school.”  He grew up in Hawaii and, as a frequent island hopper in the 1980s, saw many a handwritten ticket.  So my mind is once again at ease, and I am excited to finally be able to hold our plane tickets in my hands…even if they don’t seem quite real.