Oh the places you’ll go

We had a Costa Rica family tripped planned with my parents and best friend for the first week of November so it made sense to start the Epic Trip once we got back (Election Day*), but where to go?  

Our overarching principles:

  • Warm weather – we’d be traveling in Nov and Dec and cold wouldn’t feel so much like a vaca, would it?
  • Relatively affordable – we wanted our dollar to stretch as far as possible
  • Unspoiled and unique – we wanted experiences that couldn’t be gotten anywhere else
  • Leo-friendly – traveling with a preschooler isn’t exactly effortless so this was a factor
  • Food – does this really require explanation?

Then we stumbled upon BBC’s Human Planet documenting the intersection of people and nature. The seventh episode on Rivers ended with an amazing segment on the living root bridges in the Khasi Hills of Meghalaya in Northeast India. Over generations, the villagers in this rainiest remote part of the world had woven the vines and roots of adjacent riverbank trees into sturdy living bridges to cross valley streams transformed into swollen monsoon torrents. Leo turned to Alex and said, “I want to go there”.  

So with that we had anchor destination and would build out our trip from this central nexus.  We would apply our above principles and try to stay in the same general vicinity. The plan was to go to India, Thailand, Myanmar and end in Vietnam.  We’d get an open jaw ticket, NYC to Delhi, India and back to NYC from Saigon, Vietnam, two months later. Everything in the middle we’d figure out as we go, allowing us maximum flexibility in case we liked one spot more than another.

We ruled out Bhutan (cost, weather, kid) despite the fact that it had an off the charts coolness factor.

  • Visa requirements for Americans are stiff as they are actively discouraging tourism – you must book through a government sponsored travel agency, so none of the independent travel we tended to prefer would be possible.  And though rates include all lodging, transfers, admissions and food there is a $125 per person, per day, minimum – ouch!
  • It’s friggin COLD in Bhutan – like base of the Himalayas/Everest cold.
  • And then there’s altitude.  We would have to worry about altitude sickness, especially for Leo, which would mean an even longer stay at base camps to get acclimated, which would cost us even more $$

Ultimately we decided this would have to wait until a few years later, sniff sniff.

We’d been to Vietnam before but figured we might want some comfort by trip’s end.  India, Myanmar and Thailand would be (exciting) unchartered territory. There was also the pre planned Costa Rica trip to contend with. This had been booked for the first week in November with my parents and bff, Winnie well before the insanity of this epic trip had materialized. This was going to be fun!

*More musings on traveling as an American in a later post, I promise.

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taking the big leap

I never was one who could easily jump headfirst into the pool – easing myself in, pinky toe first and then one step at a time just seemed to make so much more sense. I’d always been practical over dreamy; my life was that of a typical working mom. And yet somehow, Alex and I are now seriously contemplating 2 whole months of international travel… with tyke in tow.  I had lost my mind.

True to form, this particular fledgling had quite the nudge out of the nest.  I found myself laid off after a decade and a half  of pretty much contiguous professional work and I’ll admit it was pretty emotionally jarring. I was petrified. I spent the first couple of days letting it sink in, feeling panicked and ashamed and then switching to being practical about things like medical benefits and figuring out how to pay our rent. How long could we comfortably go while I looked for a new job? We had moved back to Manhattan and rented out our Brooklyn place for this job and still had a few months left on the lease. Oh god, how do you even look for jobs these days – it had been years since a job hadn’t come looking for me and I had no clue where to even start.  

Alex, on the other hand, was busy dreaming up an amazing scheme that in many ways has been my salvation. He always could manage to see only silver linings when all I could see were the darkest of storm clouds. Why don’t we just get out of town for a while, like waaay out of town and like a loooong while? He pitched it to me like this: Leo had just turned 4, so he’d get something substantive out of the trip and we wouldn’t really have to suffer the consequences of pulling him out of school. We’d already paid the last month’s rent on the apartment, so it was a sunk cost and we could move back to Brooklyn when we came home.  Why not look at this as an incredible opportunity – when would we ever have the chance again to have THIS MUCH UNINTERRUPTED TIME?

We all ask ourselves the, “What would you do if you won the lottery?” question.  And just like that, everything fell into place as I wrapped my brain around the ultimate luxury for me – travel.  We never had the means to do it when I was growing up so as soon as I could afford to, I made myself a promise that no matter what, I’d get at least one stamp in my passport, every year, for the rest of my life. Other than the year I was married and the year my son was born, I’ve made good on that resolution, so this epic trip sounded like perfect escapism.

We would use my severance package to travel, Alex would arrange 2 months of leave from work and the job search would figure itself out when we return. My job had been incredibly rewarding but also incredibly difficult and perhaps this was just the renewal and period of introspection I needed to figure out what I wanted the next step to look like anyway. So I suppose deciding to actually take the leap was the tough part.  Planning and executing would be fun and effortless by comparison. This was the stuff we were good at!

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