Connecting the Dots

It's not rocket science... it's tougher

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We thought we'd take advantage of this blog and try out a couple of pre-trip entries.  It may be interesting to share our pre-trip adventures considering neither of us have done a trip of this magnitude and are absolutely terrified (and excited of course).

Planning a round the world trip (affectionately shortened to RTW) is really like that high school math problem where you have to find the shortest distance between A and B through a bunch of dots.  At first, it looks pretty easy.  You just point to a bunch of countries and draw an imaginary line connecting them all.  But as we found out, when you factor in the limitations of a RTW ticket like mileage/zone restrictrions, one way direction of travel, timing, etc. it really becomes a Mensa-like math problem.

Which was why the nuclear engineer in this relationship cringed and cowered aside and we just closed our eyes and threw darts at the map.

As luck would have it, all the 14 darts hit every country we wanted to visit and none landed on East Des Moines, Iowa or Kurkuk, Iraq.  Go figure!  Here's a list of the places we plan to visit for our RTW trip.

• Spain
• Nepal
• Hong Kong
• Taiwan
• India
• Thailand
• Laos
• Cambodia
• Vietnam
• Australia
• New Zealand
• Cook Islands
• Los Angeles
• Costa Rica

The way the RTW ticket works is that you just have to confirm the first date of your departure.  Other subsequent dates are generally flexible and can be booked on the road.  As such, we only have a vague idea of dates aside from Spain which makes it difficult for all our friends trying to visit us along the way.  We promise to announce firmer dates soon so you guys can plan a visit and be our unsuspecting souvenir mules and take our extra crap home. 

Love you all and see you soon.