It has been many months since we last updated this, so we have a lot of catching up to do! We spent a lot of the early part of this year just educating ourselves on world travel and volunteering. We want to follow the good weather generally, as that makes packing easier, and we plan to have one wheeled backpack each so that doesn't leave room for any extras. So the first decisions had to be about a direction around the world, countries we want to visit, and how to connect with volunteer organization(s) in places like Africa, India, and South America. In this blog - I'll catch you up on the travel plans.
There are some online sites that you can go to and enter a tentative plan, and they'll come up with an estimate - then you call them to get flights reserved and booked. This is more complicated than it sounds, as you want to know how much to budget, but you can't know that until you have not only firmed up the itinerary, but settled on dates. So the original thought that we would stay really flexible wasn't practical, as we had to firm up some basic flight plans, and that meant firming up when and where we were going to volunteer, and then we needed to get Visa's for many of the countries. So ... we decided countries we wanted to see and work in, mapped out month by month our direction, put dates in and worked with a company called AirTreks to purchase our tickets. They were great to work with!
So here's the plan: Minneapolis to New Zealand, to Australia, to India, to Tanzania, to Istanbul, to Russia, to London, to Buenos Aires, to Patagonia, to the Mendoza region of Argentina, to Peru, to Bolivia, to Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands, and home again just in time for our beautiful Minnesota summer. In the next blog I'll give more specifics on the volunteering we'll be doing!
