Frequently Asked Questions

(This is from December 14)

It is now just over a month until Alisa and I leave on a trip that will take us, quite literally, around the world. We've noticed that when we tell friends, family, and strangers about what we're doing we get the same questions over and over, so we thought we would share them here and give you our best answers. (Spoiler alert: most of our answers are "we don't know")

#1: Where are you going?
We realize that it's hard to retain anything when we list about 20 countries as fast as we can. Here is a list of our destinations . . . though, we expect and hope that this list will change over the year!

In roughly this order:
Brazil
Bolivia
Peru
Panama
Costa Rica
Nicaragua
Honduras
Guatemala
El Salvador
South Africa
Botswana
Malawi
Ethiopia
Egypt
Jordan
Turkey
Iran
India
Nepal
Thailand
Laos
Cambodia
Philippines

I tried to make a map so you can see the plane tickets (black lines) that we've bought so far. We'll be buying the rest of our tickets later. The red lines show overland travel and I tried to outline the places we'll have more than a layover in.


#2: Why are you going to ***?/Why aren't you going to ***?
Long story short, we don't know. A couple years ago, Alisa told me we were going to travel for a year after I graduated. I said okay. A couple months ago we sat down with a blank piece of paper and a pen and said, okay, where should we go? We took about 10 minutes and wrote down a random list of countries we thought sounded interesting. We gave that list to our travel agent. There are places we're going because we have friends there (El Salvador, India), other places that just sounded interesting (Botswana, Laos), and still other places that happened to be the names on the scraps of paper thrown on the floor and chosen by Alisa's dog (Brazil, Bolivia). A lot of the places we really wanted to go to simply didn't make the cut due to issues of time and money.

All in all, we feel strongly that every part of the world is fascinating and wonderful if approached from the right angle, and we think we'll find out why we're there once we get there.

#3: But, what are you going to be doing?
No clue. Hopefully it will include a lot of exploring, adventuring, eating, dancing, seeing the sights, and making new friends. Probably it will include a lot of long rides on planes, trains, and buses, zillions of bug bites, and plenty of mysterious stomach and bowel problems.

We do have some specific projects in the works that we will try to share on the blog. Some of them involve getting our hair done in the fanciest local style, learning popular songs, going to worship, and collecting political propaganda. If you have more ideas of things we can do and questions we can ask, let us know!

#4: Can you afford that?
We have no idea. We've been saving up our money as best we can and we're just going to make it last as long as possible. To give you some idea of the cost, our plane tickets alone will cost about $6,000.

#5: What do your parents think?
They support us :)

P.S. You can expect special guest appearances from Cole Grube, Billie Parish, Megan Raimondi, Emory Lynch, Audrey Kim, Christian Terrett, Katy Lackey, Omid Faghiri, Ellis Ballard, Ted Power, the very special Ashlee Bright, and possibly Nicole Brand-Cousy and Katie Lent!

Also, we leave January 16.