March 30, visa's and such

We did a one-day turnaround to El Paso to visit the passport agency yesterday. It seems that even though we checked and made sure that our passports don't expire for the next five years, we recently realized that we only have four pages open for visa stamps-that's eight entries and exits if they stamp between the lines, which they don't always do. Incidentally, one can get a second passport so one can visit a country, (like Israel), on one passport then go to a different country,(like Syria) on the other. We have to go back and pick up our old passports with new pages in them tomorrow, $150 lighter, each.

With over a month to go, we didn't think visa's would be an issue. Oops. Vietnam uses a service business that provides you with a letter of approval so you can get a visa stamp at the airport. No such thing as "visa on arrival". Paid $40 for that yesterday. Once we get our passports back, we need to send them to Thailand's Consular office in Houston to get 60 day visa's, you can get 15 day visas at the airport on arrival, but we need more. Turnaround on that is 2-4 days or 2 weeks, depending on how one does it. then when we get our passports back from them we can start working on the India visa. That is probably going to have to go in the next post.

March 17-St Paddy's Day

Whew! My credit card is smoking! We bought the air fare tickets this weekend after pricing several web pages that advertised RTW. Airtreks was the cheapest and even though they padded their bets with "depending on the dates you leave", it still came to pretty close to what they said it would be. Los Angles to Ho Chi Min City--overland on our own to Bangkok. By air to Kolkuta (used to be Calcutta), then Mumbai, (used to be Bombay) to Amman, Jordan. Overland to Rome for our cruise then somehow to Paris (haven't figured that part out yet) and then Paris to New York City. Four air legs for $2700 a piece. Then we paid for the cruise out of Rome, another $1836 each. Even talked to the Syrian Embassy yesterday and found out about Visas. Closer every day.

Feb. 18, 2011

I'm looking at health/travel insurance online today, do I need to include para sailing and extreme skiing, (or anything with the word "extreme" in it)? Me thinks not.

The malaria prophylaxis is still an issue. At $4-7 a pill/day we need to look at the actual time we're going to spend in high risk areas. The other thought is can we buy them cheaper in South East Asia? We tried that once before for Belize and couldn't find them in the pharmacies.

We did decide on a last day of work, May 7. Not as big a deal for us because we're travel nurses and we've only been on the job for a few months and everyone knows we will be leaving soon.

Feb. 12--3 months to go

List of things to think about:

Paying for the air fare when we figure out which countries we will fly out of

Finding a place to leave the 5th wheel and vehicles

Finding and paying for travelers health insurance

Cancel our current health insurance

Think about what to pack and what to pack it in

Cancelling the cell phone plan

Look for a debit card that doesn't charge fees for overseas

Pay for the cruise in Sept. out of Rome before May

Get more online guide books after we figure out for which countries we need guide books

Leave our masks and snorkels packed with a friend to bring to Thailand and Rome

Hand in our notice of resignation

Feb. 5,2011

This is the first post of our Round The World trip (RTW). How it got started:

Carol and I were looking at a dive trip to Thailand sponsored by our friends Steve and Kathy Van Holton that looked too good to pass up. Then we got an email from our friends Roger and Debby Francis inviting us on a Mediterranean cruise to celebrate their tenth wedding anniversary. We couldn't turn them down, even though I've never been on a cruise.

We work short term assignments as nurses so we figured we could plan it out to go on both of them, one mid-June and one in mid-Sept. So, fly from here to Thailand and back to the USA, try to get an assignment for three months, and then fly to Rome. Or, if we can't get an assignment, we'd have to hole up in our RV 5th wheeler somewhere for those three months and spend money in the good old USA. Hmmm- or we could save the money from the return-to-USA trips, and live cheap in Southeast Asia and sightsee, then travel to Rome for the cruise in September. And WOW, that would be an Around the World trip, something that we haven't done before. As Steve would say "Another New Adventure".

Strategy: There are companies that offer RTW air fare, valid for one year, based on how many stops you make and how many continents. So what we need to do is start deciding where we will take-off and land. At this point we want to fly to Vietnam, overland through Laos and Cambodia to Thailand where we'll do the dive trip and tour with Steve and Kathy and the ANA group. Then over or through Burma to India's east coast, through India, over the war counties, (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Iran) to Turkey, through Turkey to spend some time in Greece, and then on to Rome for the cruise with Roger and Debby. Pre-buying the air fare will allow us the option of jumping on a plane in whatever city we need to, based on running out of money, family emergencies, homesickness or any other unforeseen event.