The End Of The Road

Today we officially took our first steps in good ole' Boston in over 16 months. We almost had to follow the freedom trail in order to find our way around.

If you've spent most of the past year and a half wondering where we were, you're not alone. This collage should help a bit; it's all the places we've slept on our journey. Or at least all the places we remembered to take a photo.


We can't say thank you enough to all the people who have opened up their homes (and pantries) to us in every country - our current hosts included!. We love our tent Gusty, but it is good to get a shower occasionally. (If your house isn't in the collage, it means we were too bleary eyed when we left to get a photo and you need to send us one!)

We did a rough count of how many times we stayed in different locations:
Our tent (Gusty): 74 different sites (100+ nights)
Houses of friends and family: 28
Motels/hotels/B&Bs/hostels: 16
Huts: 15
Train: 1 (overnight from Sydney to Adelaide)
Boat: 1 (on Doubtful Sound)
Car: 1 (Under a bridge, down by a river. I'm not kidding, it was late, we were tired, and we didn't want to camp next to train tracks for another night.)

Not to fear though, being back in Boston does not mean we will stop having adventures. Stay tuned for more, maybe we'll even fill in some of the gaps while we're at it, you never know.

Homeless!

With the help of many hearty friends we have banished all of our worldly possessions into the safe keeping of friends and family. For the record, we have 55 labeled boxes, 10+ boxes I didn't bother to label, many plastic bags full of bedding and pillows, and the usual sets of furniture. We managed to give away about two car loads of old clothes and various other junk we used to treasure. It was a very cathartic experience that I highly recommend. Spending 3 days boxing up and moving all of our crap actually makes us want to just toss it into a big bonfire and incinerate everything. Perhaps we should do that when we return and have survived living a year without any of it.

After delivering much of this stuff to my parents house my Mom called me and had only one complaint: I had neglected to drop off our Roomba. Apparently the piles of stuff we left clogging the attic don't really matter as long as she gets to reacquire my Roomba (nickname: Roomy). Never fear Mom, once he is done cleaning our now empty apartment Roomy will be yours again.

Caleb and Elizabeth have taken us into their home for the week, and we have created a staging area in their upstairs bedroom where we are completing our final packing for the journey. Currently there are a dozen piles of possible things to bring with us: electronics, medical stuff, clothes, camping gear, etc. Somehow over these last few hectic days we'll whittle everything down to a manageable (and packable) set of traveling gear that can fit into our two backpacks.

Oh, and to finally quash the question from our parents: yes, we have completed buying health insurance.

It's Alive!

Well, we finally got our primary method of communication up and running for while we are abroad. Here you will be able to read stories from us, confirm that we still exist, and occasionally see a picture or two.

Our photo web site should still work (there is a link on this page) and eventually we should get around to actually uploading them.

We'll post some more trip details once we get the dates of things nailed down, until then though, I need to at least try and see how easy it is to post a picture, so let's start with this relatively recent one:


Karen, David, and Mekayla obviously felt I took too many pictures on our hike. Blasphemy!