[Seth] Where do you go first?

Where do you go first?  Is the first question I am asked when I tell people about what we are doing.  Actually, I guess it’s usually the second, the first question is some variation of “Are you kidding?” or “You are doing what?”

When we got serious about this trip it was always going to be heading west around the world.  It made sense to get the longest flight out of the way first. And when we realized that we would be starting in the winter in the Northern Hemisphere (or what passes for winter in Northern California — we got a severe weather warning last week because the temperatures were going to drop below freezing overnight) it just made sense to start in Australia and New Zealand.  So Thursday flew to the town of Christchurch on the South Island of New Zealand.  It took us 25 hours and a couple of layovers and we didn’t arrive for two calendar days but that is where the adventure starts.

The rest of the itinerary is roughly as follows:

•  New Zealand/Australia for 3 weeks
•  Singapore for 1 week
•  Southeast Asia (Thailand, Laos Vietnam, Cambodia) for 4 weeks
•  Nepal for 3 weeks
•  Dubai for 3 days
•  Africa (South Africa, Egypt, and Morocco) for 4 weeks
•  Paris for 3 weeks
•  Northern Europe (Scandinavia, Germany, Estonia, Russia and perhaps a few others) for 3 weeks

We have largely self-planned the trip but we did get help in places where we felt less comfortable — Southeast Asia and Northern Africa).  We are staying in a mix of AirBnBs and hotels – mostly AirBnB for longer stays and hotels for shorter.  We are trying to stay for at least a week in one place every month (Sydney, Singapore, Bangkok, Port Elizabeth, South Africa, Paris) to decompress.