Our Hearts Were Made to Discover the World

We’ve packed for four month-long trips (Fresh), then six months (Real) and even nine months (Heart) at one stretch. But we were definitely going for extra credit when packing in Portland for our Discover Tour with three different piles of stuff bound for five different continents and an anticipated duration of probably two years! We’ve been here and there over our 15 years traveling together but now we’ve got some bright ideas to explore some more far-flung destinations. Egypt, Easter Island, Crete and Nepal here we come!

The Fall of 2022 finds us gallivanting off to Thailand again for a couple months before the year-end holidays. We’ll see healers, old friends and for sure spend more time sitting quietly in Buddhist temples before strolling down the lanes of Chiang Mai, Pattaya, Phuket and Bangkok to find a bite to eat — hopefully, some nights with new friends we meet along the way.

We’ll do a necessary visa run tucked in there to Malaysia to see the sights of Kuala Lumpur, the tea-growing Cameron Highlands and Penang Island in the Straits of Malacca. We could not resist a return visit to Southeast Asia to begin this mighty excursion and may very well be back here full-circle later.

But first our commencing San Francisco departure will drop us in Singapore to nurse some jet lag and find some good Indian food!

We’ll spend Christmas with San Antonio family! Then another winter ‘23 in Mexico, Spring ‘23 in the northern Andes and Summer ‘23 in Europe and the eastern Mediterranean including up and down the Nile and see for ourselves the jaw-dropping recent discoveries of 9,500 BCE Gobekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey.

We will have to patiently wait for our first-time visit to Lake Titicaca and Patagonia and all good spots in between where we’ll finally spend Fall ‘23 in the central Andes and Winter ‘23 in Chile/Argentina (including Mendoza’s Sposato winery), ringing in the new year ‘24 on the beach in Uruguay — an imagined South American itinerary nixed by 2020’s Covid quarantine.

We’ll circle back a couple times to the homeland to do taxes, vote and see family including a new grandson in Berkeley and grand-nephew in Cleveland both due in our absence!

If we’re lucky, we hope to puddle jump Portland to southern Japan (Naoshima art island) with onward travel to Nepal and the very north of India (Ladakh) for spring/summer 2024. We imagine a summer stop at a few London museums before settling back to the banks of the rivers in Portland to re-group in late summer ‘24.

With an eye on the teetering climate, teetering worldwide political situation and teetering international banking system we’ll adjust our plans when needed!

Summer of ‘24 Paul will return to join Medicare and Rich will return still running circles around Paul stopping perhaps long enough to be serenaded on his 72nd birthday. And if we had to wager at this early juncture, we’ll be on the beach back in Thailand, hopefully naked, for New Year 2025. Wanna bet?

The pandemic is over (yes?). We got the memo!