California!

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I wrote this on the plane to Shanghai last Thursday, but due to internet limitations I’m am just now able to post.


We finished out our United States tour with a great visit to Las Angeles. We were able to spend time with our niece and took her to a 90 year old carousel. She didn’t enjoy the ride too much, but she really liked dancing to the old timey music. We then took a trip out into the desert to surprise our uncle for his birthday. Walking into his house we were surrounded with hundreds of hummingbirds! I couldn’t believe how many there were and how they were not timid – If you stood still you could be within inches of the feeding hummingbirds.


The next day we took a road trip up to Mammoth Lakes to visit family friends – what a wonderful town! On previous visits we only skied, but neither Sara or I wanted to risk getting hurt since the snow conditions were poor. Instead, we explored the area including “Mono Lake”. It’s one of the few lakes that doesn’t drain to the ocean. Because of this unique topography it is very salty and has large petrified springs rising out of the lake bed. Mono Lake and the surrounding Mammoth Lakes scenery was breathtaking!

The next day our mission was to find one of the local hot springs. After getting vague directions such as “turn down a dirt road and it is near a sandy hill” we set off on the hunt. After 45 minutes of trying different dirt roads near sandy hills (there were a lot!) we finally a suitable spring where we could soak and relax.

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Slowly getting there

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Officially on the road! Everything went into storage last Saturday after an exhausting week of packing. The process was extra grueling because it seemed necessary to have all items organized into single boxes and well labeled to simplify things upon our return. Thankfully we had help from the parents to move it all to storage. As we began towering everything into the 10×10 unit, we worried that not everything would fit and priced an adjacent unit. But mom came to the rescue with some amazing Tetris skills saving us the extra expense.

We are actually writing this during our first train trip (of many) to our second Christmas destination (can’t have too many presents!) We are on the scenic route across Pennsylvania, but could only enjoy the view for a little while before the sun set behind the mountains. Although the view was limited, we are enjoying the journey with the on-board happy hour and some relaxation after the stress of packing. It seems like organizing for the trip is never ending and we still have too much in tow – we even had to enlist dad’s help to sneak a few extra bags onto the train! Good thing we have a few more days to reorganize and better prepare for the trip.

We had a wonderful Christmas with everyone and hopefully they enjoyed our antics as well!

Can’t back out now!

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After 2 months of drafting, 6 days of coordinating, and 5 calls to American Airlines, our flights are finally ticketed! We booked an around-the-world ticket with Oneworld Global Explorer. The westward track is 14 segments with 11 flights. This itinerary will get us back to Pennsylvania in October and we’ll set up a separate itinerary for South America to finish out the year.

Planned itinerary around the world trip, Oneworld Global Explorer
We were surprised how long it took to finalize flights. During our research, it appeared that if we called American Airlines rather than booking the Oneworld Global Ecplorer online, we would be able to keep dates open-ended but found that to be untrue. We picked rough dates and confirmed that they could be changed without a change fee (although changing destinations will incur a fee). After the first lengthy call, we were told it would take 24 hours to price and that we would receive a call to establish payment. We actually never received that call or any other calls from American even after our credit card was declined twice while finalizing payment (happy to see fraud protection is active!). It was all resolved this morning and the tickets were finally issued. I should say, all the American Airlines reservation agents were very nice and helpful. We were just surprised they were not more proactive processing our Oneworld Global Explorer ticket.

Other progress updates:
We are both officially unemployed. By far, this was the hardest step! We both loved our jobs (except that they were located 800 miles apart) and leaving projects behind was difficult. But we still feel like this is the right decision and are hopeful our careers will continue to progress when we return.

This week, we’ll be moving our small apartment into storage. We are selling or donating some items (clothing, accessories, books, old electronics) but we plan on keeping almost all of our belongings. Our car and Jeep will be parked at our parents’ for safe keeping (thanks again!). We will be spending the holidays with family in Pennsylvania and Ohio before heading west on January 1st!