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This website chronicles our trip around the world in 2006. It has lots of photos, videos and stories. We invite you to come in, relax and enjoy the scenery.

~Lee and Sachi LeFever


To see what we're up to now, check LeeLeFever.com or CommonCraft.com

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A Dispatch is a report from our trip. Browse via keywords or global map.

2006

By: leelefever on December 31, 2006 - 5:57pm

For now it's still here - we're living it for the last 5 hours of 2006 tonight.  Tonight is when the year, our year off, ends. What are we doing? Going to Redmond to spend the night with friends and eat a lot.  It's a perfect way to end the year.  On January 2nd our year of reality and restarting will begin. 

Take a deep breath with me, all the way in, and let it out slowly.  Ahhhhh thats better. 2007 - bring it on.



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The Great Purge of 2006

By: leelefever on December 31, 2006 - 12:40pm

One thing that we've gained since the trip is a little different perspective about our "stuff" - the things that build up on shelves, in drawers, hard drives, closets and corners that you forgot.  Before we left we may have been likely to let things linger.  Now, for a change, we've rounded the corner to purging.  It has nearly been a full time job to get all the crap that we've collected over the years out of our sight.

It's all about needs really - and our perspective has changed from valuing the things we need vs. the stuff that might be nice to have once or twice a year.  I don't think we need 7 different types of jellies and jams, that sweater from 1989 or the computer that died a year ago.  So it's all going.  We're both hoping to start 2007 leaner and meaner that we have any year before - when it comes to stuff.  Unfortunately, we still have some work to do on the ole body mass index.

   


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Goofy Signs and Menus from China and Japan

By: leelefever on December 29, 2006 - 2:54pm

I think the locals thought we were weird when taking pictures of signs and menus.  We were reminded how sensitive language is - replace a few words with synonyms and the results end up a tad off target and usually hilarious.

 This was just before boarding a cable car in China:

 

 Also in China, at the Three Gorges Dam.  Billions of dollars on the project and they couldn't hire a translator for the sign every tourist sees?  Welcome to China. The guy in this photo is Miles Hilton-Barber, Blind Adventurer.  Perhaps the most amazing person I've ever met. He didn't turn over.

 

Concern for the relics I get, but the railings? This is from the Summer Palace near Beijing.  The railings were not relics, by the way.

 

At Yellow Mountain in China, this is truly an earnest request.

 

Don't worry, I didn't take it as a compliment, really.  From a crappy state-run hotel in Guilin, China

 

Yes, China star-rates toilets.  Seriously - it was still not great.  This is inside the Forbidden City in Beijing.


 

Menus offered a near-daily source of laughter. This one is from a Dim-Sum menu in Hong Kong: Minced crap (I think they mean crab)

 

Yes, in fact, that is a cute potatoes with butter.  Japan.

 

I'm just not sure what this is supposed to say. Japan

 

Even when Japanese is not translated to English, it has a completely unique style.  This is from a hiking trail in Tsuwano, Japan.  See if you can decode it...

 

 This was my guess:

1. Scrape the bottom of your shoe

2. Place scraped matter in your hand

3. And smoke it?

 

I love the design of this Japanese subway sign, seriously.

 

Stop using rocket shoes.  From Osaka Buffaloes Baseball game.

 

Baseballs hurt. From Osaka Buffaloes Baseball game.

 

If I could do the trip over, I would build a catalog of crosswalk signs.  They exist in every country in different forms along the same lines.  This one obviously warns people to watch out for George Washington crossing with a devil child. Japan.

 

 

No one wants to see Pac Man drunk. Waka waka waka (hiccup).  Japan.

 And finally, if you're wondering what strategies Sachi and I will employ when we combine forces in 2007, this describes it perfectly:

Without yours, our trip would not have been then same- thanks.


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Goofy Photos from Our Trip Around the World (2006)

By: leelefever on December 29, 2006 - 1:42pm

 I'll be posting "best of" photos soon, but for now I wanted to share a few that are not necessarily best-of, but have made an impression on some readers.

 This guy in Vietnam with all the LIVE ducks on his motorcycle (next 2 photos) seemed to strike a chord with lots of readers.  I couldn't believe how calm they seemed, considering.

Speaking of motorcycles, this is how I look when I drive. 

 Speaking of ducks, Mongkol ate this one in Cambodia.  A little too, um, mature for me.

 Speaking of eating ducks, this century egg nearly made me barf on video.

The next two photos go together too.  As our friend Jeanine pointed out, they offer an interesting juxtaposition of Russia.  The second photo is inside a Moscow subway.

 This pier in Koh Lanta, Thailand was not built for this kind of surf and as the waves approached it became rideable. It broke into pieces overnight.

 Einstein is huge in Portugal.

 On and on in a crowded elevator.

 

 Purchased at the China/Mongolia border, Johnny Worker was nearly the downfall of a few Tran-Siberian travelers.

 This was just before I was decapitated at a hair salon in Shanghai. I recovered fully.

 Gender bending Costume Play Kids in Japan. Sometimes cute, but in this case quite scary.


 


Achieving Foreign-ness

By: leelefever on December 28, 2006 - 5:35pm

 Foreign-ness was a concept that became really important to me at the beginning of the trip.  I wrote this in March of 2006, just after perhaps the most foreign city/town we visited the whole trip: Negombo, Sri Lanka.


 I had a picture in my mind of what it would be like to see the world.  It included people of different races, driving funny three-wheeled cars, wearing draped clothing with unfamiliar music and language in the background.  We would wind our way through cities and towns being the only westerners for miles, in my mind.

Having traveled internationally for two months now, we have finally realized this vision.  It happened today in Negombo, Sri Lanka, and I think it was the first of many experiences that will give me much satisfaction.  Finally, I feel that we are undeniably away from all that is home to us – something that has been too long coming.

Looking back, I loved New Zealand.  It was our first stop and it was chocked full of things to see and do…with its white sand beaches, fjords and glaciers.  Being the first stop, it was easy to be excited and I was very interested.

Something was missing for me at our next stop – Queensland, Australia and I couldn’t put my finger on it at the time. Retrospectively, I mark it up to a few things with a lack of interestingness being the biggest factor.  Queensland was beautiful and the Great Barrier Reef is reason enough to go – but overall I was not all that interested. It was too much like home when I wanted something foreign.

Singapore was a step in the right direction, but still so western, so easy, so clean, so nice.  Singapore was not incredibly interesting to me.

Thinking again about that picture in my mind our trip, something becomes clearer.  I want, more than anything else, to be interested and I find few things more interesting than foreign-ness.  The satisfaction I derive from the trip is linked to how unlike home it is to me.

Arriving in Sri Lanka and traveling through India and Southeast Asia over the next couple of months, I have a renewed sense of what the trip will hold for us.  Gone are the days of easy access to the things we take for granted. Gone are the days of drinkable tap water and edible food.  Gone are the days of predictable traffic and English speaking people.  The days of ease and consistent comfort may be few and far between.  

We are now in a new realm of travel and our trip, one that will challenge us a little more and make us work for what we want to experience. It may be hard and it may see us get sick and long for home or some place like it.  But it will be foreign and it will be interesting and as long as that is true, I will be happy for a while.


The Peaks and Valleys of Travel

By: leelefever on December 28, 2006 - 3:01pm

 I wrote this pretty early in the trip - around the middle of March 2006, just as we were coming to terms with how extended travel actually works.  It sounds a little negative, but it's real. 

 


 

We’re learning every day, learning to be better travelers. For us, it’s about being able to find fulfillment in the bulk of the time between the absolutely fantastic and the miserably horrible experiences.  The continuum is long between the two and filled with mediocre and boring attempts to find excitement when none exists.

The idea of a year away from home, away from work, away from normal life was fascinating to us, as I think it would be to anyone.  One pictures a montage set to frantic music that displays a life of freedom, exotic locations, new people, interesting cultures, new experiences and drinks with umbrellas.  These things are all parts of extended world travel.  But, what one doesn’t imagine is the constant, constant fear of losing bags or passports or tickets.  Far from expectation is the feeling of running for a train in 95 degree heat only to miss the last train of the day.  No one looks forward to only having three pairs of underwear and having to wash them by hand in a sink every few days, along with every other piece of clothing.  Sweating yourself to sleep is not high on the list of people who look forward to travel.  In the list of reasons to see the world, being lost in a strange city late at night with all your belongings on your back does not rank high. Yet, these are all a very real part of the overall experience. The key, for us, is attitude and finding joy in the journey, or making your own joy.

It’s easy to get frustrated.  As you might expect, the world does not work as you’d prefer sometimes. Despite having spent a whole day to travel to a location, it is sometimes closed for renovation or doesn’t allow your type of shoes and you just have to deal with the fact that no one told you, or that you didn’t listen, or couldn’t understand.  You just have to suck it up and move on. Being able to move on and put it behind you is absolutely key, and something I’m currently working on.

Making up for the valleys are the peaks.  Unfortunately, it seems that the highest peaks are not something you can plan - they come unexpectedly.  It’s easy to get excited about the Great Wall of China or the Taj Mahal, but you expect that excitement and plan on it.  The expectations are so high sometimes that the reality cannot measure up and there are pangs of disappointment.  I battle this feeling often, perhaps because I’ve psyched myself to too high a level.

The peaks we find often arrive on the wings of chance, happenstance or the kindness of others.  The random person that gives us a bit of advice that saves us time and energy is reason for us to celebrate.  Finding a hotel at half the price we expected is cause for joy.  Sharing a meal with other travelers from other countries gives us a reason to be happy.  Capturing a scene with my camera in the way that I want gives me great pleasure. Having clean laundry, charged batteries, good health and tickets to our next destination is almost nirvana. 

More than anything else, we are most gratified by knowing that we are learning- learning to be smart travelers, learning about the people of the world, the history, the politics, and the quirkiness.  Museums and galleries are nice and we often visit- but they don’t often give us great joy.  We’ve found that the good stuff comes from the locals, the driver, the friend of a friend, the person who lives there and has an ear to the ground.  Given the choice, we’d spend 10 times more time drinking beer with a local than walking around a museum.  Though we’ve wanted more, connecting with locals have represented some of our highest peaks on the trip.

In the end, it’s a balance, a balance of expectations and reality, of fun and boredom, of frustration and success.  Joy in travel does not always come from the places you visit, the people you meet or the pictures you take – it comes from the little things that present themselves in the nick of time –  just in time to renew your excitement and remind you that travel is a wonderful and complex event and one that, more than anything else, is what you as an individual choose to make of it.


On Communism

By: leelefever on December 28, 2006 - 10:31am

I wrote this entry in September of 2006 from Helsinki, Finland just after arriving there from the Trans-Siberian Railway and a month in China.  For a while I was consumed by learning about Communism and needed to get it on paper, so to speak.


This post is a bit of a departure from the usual travel topics and I hope you’ll pardon its serious and dark nature. Having been to Cambodia, Vietnam, China, Russia, Germany and the Czech Republic, Communism seems to be a recurring theme and something to which I’ve devoted a lot of time reading and learning. I’ve developed a fascination for the subject, likely more than any other subject on the trip.

I figure that the root of my fascination is related to the fact that so many smart people believed in it so fervently and killed so many in an attempt to make it work – and the work continues to this day.  To me as an American entrepreneur, Communism is endlessly fascinating because it diverges so greatly from my world view.  The more I learn about it, the more baffled I become that so many could believe that it is a perfectly reasonable way to run a country.

I started the trip knowing very little about the Communist ideology, Marxism, Leninism or the history of the peoples’ revolution.  After reading a number of books, visiting museums, etc., I think I have a handle on some of the basics.  To test myself, I’d like to try to describe my layman's version for you as briefly and simply as possible.

Karl Marx was known as the father of Communism and the author of the Communist Manifesto – the first declaration of his theory in late 19th century. To Marx, capitalism (free markets, supply and demand, etc.) was evil and would eventually cause great misery to the people of the world. His goal was to stop it. 

To understand why he thought this, we must consider the lives of workers in the Industrial Revolution of the 1800s.  At the time he saw a world where people were either rich owners or exploited and unhappy workers.  Marx saw this as a great injustice that was getting worse through the growth of Capitalism.  He foresaw a future where Capitalism would create a small handful of rich people and a world of miserable people that would get more miserable over time. This would even be extended to a worldwide scale with the world eventually being run by a few rich industrialists. This was what some called Imperialism and it was the end game of Capitalism.

Marx was successful in convincing a lot of very smart and powerful people that his was the true vision of the world and his Communist ideology its savior.  He promoted the idea that the true power of a civilization lies within the working class and if properly motivated, the working class can rise up in revolution against the rich land owners. This was revolution and it was the first stage of building a Communist system which would be fair to everyone – a single class society that worked to provide what it needed for the whole society. The government owned everything and everyone worked toward a common goal of self-sufficiency.  In fact, according to the theory, there would be no need for government in the future – it would “whither away” as the Communist utopia was achieved. Everyone would be well fed, protected and happy as they worked together as one.

Of course, history shows that this is not the case.  Two contributing factors:

  • Marx got it wrong.  He did not predict the rapid rise of the middle class.  Before he died, he saw Capitalism creating opportunities for a new class that were neither the rich owner nor the exploited worker.
  • Marxism was just a theory:  It described how things should work and what should happen, but it never described *how* Communism or revolution should actually be managed.  It was a theory with no doctrine.

Of course in the 20th century there would be no shortage of world leaders to test the Marxist theory in the form of prompting a revolution and establishing a Communist government – supposedly freeing the working classes from Capitalist oppression.

The first serious revolutionary was Lenin in Russia. He put Marxist theory into practice and established the first Communist government in 1917 and in doing so created Leninism – the way a person goes about revolution and enacting Marxist principles.  This created what is known as Marxism/Leninism and became a complete package for people like Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh and Pol Pot in Asia.  They now had the idea (Marxism) and the practice (Leninism) for Communist Revolution.

What has happened since then is the subject of great debate. Most would agree that if there is a winner in the Cold War, it is Capitalism. Many questions remain about what went wrong with Communism.  I’ll let you research the myriad perspectives on what happened and leave you with my own admittedly half-baked answer.

I think there are two main reasons Communism failed.  The first is human nature.  Communism underestimated the human need for achievement, competition and recognition.  Making everyone the same reduced everyone to the lowest common denominator and bred more misery and frustration than it prevented.  The second reason is leadership.  Have you ever heard of the founder of a company having to hire a CEO?  It happens often because the people that start things are not often the best people to manage them.  Revolutionaries are great at revolution, but can be poor at administration and management.  The history of Communism is rife with stories of Mao, Stalin and Pol Pot making ludicrous decisions that caused the deaths of millions of their people.  They grew omnipotent through revolution but lacked the skills to use that power in any responsible manner.

My guess is that human history will show Communism as a destructive and deadly force in the world, not because of the idea or theory, but its implementation.  It enabled the centralization of absolute power that bred mass corruption and quickly became unmanageable.  To give you an idea of the level of destruction, consider the number of deaths in these countries in the Communist era:

  • China and Mao’s Great Leap Forward (1950’s)  - 30 million dead from starvation
  • Cambodia and Pol Pot’s Communist Revolution (1970’s) 7 million dead from starvation and executions (1 in 7 Cambodians)
  • Russia and Stalin’s Iron Rule (1920-50s) – 40 million dead from starvation and executions

… and this is not counting the unquantifiable misery wrought on families and individuals in these countries as secret police, hidden agendas and propaganda were a fact of life.  

Could a system of government that produced numbers like this be considered a positive force in the world?  I think not. Yet, the Communist Party is still a major player in world politics.  In Vietnam and Russia it has considerable power and of course in China, Cuba and North Korea it is the dominant force. How could this be? How could there still be demand for such a system?  The answer lies somewhere in the real world security and equality that Communism provides the working class.  Despite the horrific past, some people still yearn for a system where they can depend on the government for everything – they are ready to trade freedom for security.

Maybe the real root of my fascination with Communism is related to how it helps me to understand all the things I take for granted.  The more I learn, the more I wonder what my life would be like if I was a child of Communism.  With an entrepreneurial American worldview, I find it nearly unfathomable.

For more reading, check out the Wikipedia entries on:  Communism, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Karl Marx, Marxism, Capitalism, Dictatorship of the Proleteriat, Imperialism

 


Conflicts and Anxieties of Travel

By: leelefever on December 27, 2006 - 11:18am

 I wrote the entry below in June of 2006 but never posted it until now.  I went through a phase where I was way too concerned about our travel style and this reflects the issues on my mind at the time. I got over it, if you're curious.


Through this trip, whether I like it or not, I am coming to terms with some of the things about me that I cannot control, or find hard to control.  I am consistently conflicted regarding what I call “travel dilemmas” and I’m writing about it because it represents a minor but annoying problem for me and one that I hope to overcome.  I feel that I am needlessly pre-occupied with trying to find our answers to questions about our travel style. I am most concerned about the conflicts between:

  • Being a traveler vs. a backpacker
  • Being on vacation vs. traveling
  • Taking our time vs. rushing from place to place

Let me take these one by one to explain:

Being a Traveler vs. a Backpacker

Backpacking is a practice that has evolved its own culture.  This culture has a particular outlook, fashion, attitude and accessories.  I was a backpacker in 1996 when me and my (then) girlfriend spent two months in Europe and I was never conflicted- we were backpackers and our reality of flea-bag hostels, bad food and camaraderie with other backpackers was the only choice for us and it was a blast.  Fast-forward 10 years and I am now on a similar trip, except a few things are different.  I am now married, have had a career for some time and have the means to travel at a higher level of comfort than I did 10 years ago.  We have innumerable choices and can put our comfort first.  The source of this conflict is rooted in the anxiety that we are insulating ourselves from a part of travel that, while not comfortable, offers a higher level of cultural access and experience. Perhaps the $10 guesthouse is more fun, interesting and cultural than the $30 hotel, but lacks air conditioning. Perhaps the train ride takes longer than the plane, but offers better scenery.  Are we buying our way out of the best experiences?  Are the backpackers getting more from their experience than we are while spending less?  Or, would they travel as we do if they could? Should we forsake comfort for experience?

 

Being on Vacation vs. Traveling

When one thinks of a year off to travel, one of the first images that come to mind is not having to work- liberation from the daily grind.  This is certainly part of extended travel and one thing that I do not take for granted.  However, a year is really far too long to have a vacation and extended travel, for us, ends up being a little of both.  We’ve had periods where travel was like a job.  We had to be up at a certain time every morning and returned to the hotel later that evening, with pictures and experiences and exhaustion in hand.  This was the case in Sri Lanka and India when we had guides and drivers.  This experience is rewarding, but tiresome and not sustainable for months and months.  It does become a grind.  We followed India with Thailand and planned a vacation from travel.  For about a month, we did very little but move from beach to beach and it was nirvana. We learned how to do nothing in Thailand- how sleep all day and not listen to the devil (or angel) on your shoulder who tells you you’re being lazy. Having lived both sides of the travel spectrum, I find myself searching for balance these days.  Now that we’re recharged and back into the travel life, I have anxiety that we’re wasting time by relaxing in the hotel room when there are still things we want to see and do.  Are we still on vacation? When does vacation stop and travel begin? Does it matter?  Should we just enjoy the freedom and do things as they feel right?  Or, should we push ourselves to get out and do everything and then relax? 

 

Taking Our Time vs. Rushing from Place to Place

Perhaps the most consistent piece of advice we received from travelers who have done year-long trips is that you can’t do everything. They say that the best you can do is to find a place you like and stay there for a while, like a month or two. By doing this you can get a deeper understanding of the local culture.  While this advice is certainly good advice, it has been hard for us to implement.  We spent a month in Southern Thailand and a month in Japan, but never more than 7 days in any one town or city.  We’ve never stayed more than 10 days in one place. The grass is always greener I suppose and I think we’re in a habit of seeing what we want in a place and then moving on, essentially collecting experiences like baseball cards.  Maybe by the end of the trip, we figure, we’ll have a collection of which we’ll be proud. Stopping in one town for a month seems to have a high opportunity cost.  We have no idea how that month could be used in the future.  Would we trade a month in Osaka now for a month in Turkey in November?  How are we to comprehend the future value of spending a month in one town now? Are we neglecting an important aspect of the travel experience by moving quickly? The next new place always seems so much more appealing.

 

The Bottom Line For Me:

First, I realize that these are all comparatively good problems to have. I should feel lucky to have such problems and I do feel extremely fortunate.  I do not seek sympathy- just an outlet to talk.

All these conflicts, all the anxieties I have, all the thinking that I’ve done about this is all based on a simple question that I constantly ask myself:  Are we doing it right?  This simple question haunts me much more than it should. Logically, I know that there is no right way to travel- it is something that each person does in their own way and no two people experience travel in the same way. However, I want to know that we are doing our best to extract as much enjoyment, experience, learning and fun out of these 12 months and I wonder sometimes if all these conflicts and anxieties are only serving to detract from the experiences instead of help us add to them. Perhaps I would be better served by doing what feels good and remembering that there will be few times in my life when I will have such freedom and such wonderful opportunities. Maybe I just need a vacation from thinking about this too much.


The Home Experience After a Year

By: leelefever on December 26, 2006 - 8:05pm

I sometimes have to stop and think to myself that this is what it feels like. I mean right now in my life – like the phase I’m currently in, if you know what I mean.  It’s been a progression I suppose and I’m reminded that this phase, the return home, is one to be documented.  Seriously – like many times in the past year, I’m simply not gonna be in this situation often.  Coming home after a year around the world?  That’s a pretty unique place to be in life, so let’s get started.

Josh Berman reminded me to write and sent along a link to his description that involves a bucket of cold water to the face

Exciting, uncomfortable, inspiring, and totally discombobulating. Such is the experience of coming home from the World.

 

Newley also reminded me about his article about the at-home blues

As I began the process of re-settling – like finding a new apartment and gainful employment – I was overcome with restlessness; I didn't want to re-adjust. I'd managed to pick up and move to South AmericaAsia, yet now I was intimidated by the simple prospect of combing apartment listings and sending out resumes.

My personal experience in coming home has been smooth on the outside and a bit rough on the inside.  We were lucky to come back to our own home and have a couple of weeks to decompress.  Viewed from afar, it would appear quite easy and worry-free – and it was I suppose except for the voices in my head reminding me that the real world is coming – fast.  Am I prepared?  Do I really need to rest right now?  How do you rest?

Right now is a period of limbo before the next big thing and after the last big thing. The trip was something that we viewed as a project with a beginning and end.  By coming home in one piece, we celebrated the successful conclusion of the project.  For now, it is all about the next project, which refocuses attention that might otherwise be diverted to a longing for the road.  We’re in the process of making a clean break, which is how we started the trip.

This, of course, doesn’t preclude us from reverse culture shock. Whether we’ve chosen to recognize it or not, coming home has been a rollercoaster of emotion.  It’s a little like jet lag – you feel something off in your head, but until you connect the feeling to the event, it just seems like a mood swing.  We’ve just recently recognized our symptoms and all the little things that make home so strange.

 

I have personally had ups and downs in my own confidence or perception of my ideas – a newfound lack of confidence in our big plans for 2007, less confidence in being able to gather up all the balls that so swiftly rolled away in 2006 and less confidence in restarting.  It is like being on the road created a bubble where ideas and plans all sounded so perfect. Home then becomes the place where all the ideas are seen in the context of reality- often a reality that changed in the last year. After a few days on the low end, my confidence is growing again as reality sinks in.

Never have I valued small talk so much.  It gives me great joy to socialize and a big part of that, for me, is humor.  One of the big rules of travel is that jokes don’t travel well and for the most part, I couldn’t interact with strangers on trip in any light and humorous way.  I now value the ability to talk a little smack to someone in line, or with the barista, or with our neighbors.  They understand me and it feels so good to have the confidence that my words mean what I think they mean (most of the time). Fortunately they also understand that I’m illiterate when it comes to US pop culture.

As a short side note- one strange thing I’ve noticed too is that I’m not yet used to Asian people speaking English.  After so long in Asia, my mind made very distinct associations with race and language. 

The most wrenching experience for me was returning to our dog Amos who is 12 years old.  My experience with him has played with my mind more than any other thing.  Amos is not a young dog and his age nearly forced us to delay the trip for a few years.  We decided he would be fine for a year.  As it turned out, the year was not so kind to our beloved dog.  He is showing signs of arthritis and I’m now the guy waiting on his dog to walk through the park. He’s as sweet as ever, but just a different kind of dog.  He doesn’t play.  He doesn’t chase squirrels.  He sleeps a lot.  Thankfully he has recently shown improvement after switching to a new anti-inflammatory (remadyl) and his attitude is less mopey.  Plus, I think he's becoming my dog again.

Seattle greeted us with a set of historical extenuating circumstances. A storm blew through the Northwest within a couple of days of our arrival that made our first week cold, dark and overall very, very weird.  Of the first week at home, we spent the majority of our time in a home with no power or heat as temperatures hovered in the 30s.  80 hours of no power. During this period we chose to stay home as others stayed with friends and family who had power.  We both chalk it up to a little reverse culture shock – we were only ready to be home.  Venturing away from the home that welcomed us did not sound right at the time, so we dealt with the circumstances as they came.   

And in case these points may makes you think otherwise, home is good - very, very good for us right now.  In fact, we both feel liberated by the trip.  Now is a time for us to rebuild, to rethink, to re-imagine.  In a lot of ways, this is a whole new beginning for us both – few times in our life will we have such a perfect time wipe clean the slate, call off the old bets and take a fresh look.  Despite the ups and downs, we’re both convinced it’s all up from here.


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Loads of TwinF Goodness Coming Your Way

By: leelefever on December 26, 2006 - 7:40pm

We're coming up on a momentous occasion here on TwinF. We are getting close to our last posts and between now and then, we're going to be posting a lot of things that:

a) we wrote on the trip and never shared

b) sum up the year in as few words as possible

It's not completely clear when the last post will occur, but it will be close to New Years.  Once the last post is up, the site will exist forever in static form, frozen in time at the point where the trip ended.  Then it's on to our next adventure. We hope you'll come along.

 


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