Where are we now?

Jeff and I were in Mapleton last week visiting Dad and I was “interviewed” by the local paper about our Around the World trip. Mostly I just yakked. And yakked.

It’s funny because we’re almost a year out from the start of the first leg, and I could still talk the leg off a dog about all the neat things we saw. We’re still bumping into friends that we haven’t seen in ages and retelling those stories. I’m beginning to recognize the signs of desperation they show when they start to wonder how they can disengage from my non-stop talking. The eye shift over the shoulder, the subtle half-turn of the body, preparing to flee at the first distraction to break my monologue. So if you’re one of the unfortunate few to be caught in “the Rita trap,” rest assured, things are improving. If, however, you’re one of those quiet ones that prefers someone else do the talking, come see me sometime!

So one question we’ve been asked regularly is “what was your favorite place/thing?” We both agree that it’s impossible to narrow it down to a single place; although, if we had to choose just one place to return to, New Zealand would probably be it. We have been to so many beautiful places around the USA and other parts of the world. Often I have found myself watching a sunset, or listening to the sounds of the ocean or admiring the terrain of a particularly striking location and thought to myself “this must be the most beautiful place in the world.” And each time, it is. What made New Zealand so special for us is that it has so much of the beauty we have seen in so many different places… fjords, glaciers, rain forest, spectacular coastlines, snow-capped mountains, absolutely the coolest rocks ever, and fun, friendly people. So New Zealand is definitely high on our list of favorites.

But we had extraordinary experiences elsewhere too. Of those, two places really stand out – Wadi Rum (the desert) in Jordan and our safari in Serengeti National Park.

Wadi Rum was a surprise favorite. We’re water people. We SCUBA dive and swim and enjoy creeping to the edge of huge crashing waves and watching the sunlight dance on water. We don’t generally gravitate toward the desert. But this experience was amazing. It had as much to do with our timing as anything. In our two nights at our Bedouin camp, we were the only guests. It felt like we were the only people, other than our guide, in the entire desert. Sleeping under the millions of stars on our second night there really made us feel tiny and reinforced for us the vastness of our universe. The silence was beyond quiet. No trees, no birds, no running water, no sound of any kind – just my heart beating and my breath moving in and out. Truly a once in a lifetime experience.

Serengeti, of course, was spectacular. No surprise there. Being there during the annual migration, we were treated to the sight of endless lines of wildebeest and zebra, antelope and cape buffalo, giraffes and elephants. We got sunburned and filthy and bitten by tsetse flies and had to watch for lions/leopards/cheetah (pick your carnivore) when exiting the tent in the middle of the night for a potty break, but we loved it.

By the end of our travels, I had a “bucket list” with checkmarks next to all sorts of places I had previously only visited via National Geographic…
• Great Barrier Reef, Australia
• Angor Wat, Cambodia
• Halong Bay, Vietnam
• Jerusalem, Israel (and Nazareth, Bethlehem, Cana, Mount of Beatitudes)
• Petra, Jordan
• Karnak Temple, Luxor Egypt
• Treasures of King Tut’s tomb, Egyptian National Museum, Cairo, Egypt
• Victoria Falls, Zambia
• Serengeti National Park, Tanzania
• Zanzibar Island, Tanzania
• Haggia Sophia, Istanbul, Turkey
• Ephesus, Turkey
• Island of Crete, Greece

Whew! No wonder we were tired.

It was an incredible adventure. And there’s still South America….

p.s. the hookworm I picked up in Malawi was eventually vanquished. After 6 weeks of baffling the urgent care docs, I finally did what I should have done my first day back – visited the Infectious Disease doc at the travel clinic. He took one look at my foot and immediately knew what it was and how to treat it. I got a prescription for some meds with a pretty scary list of possible side effects, but it killed that bad boy in one day. After three months of scratching my foot in my sleep, I finally was able to forget the foot was there. So Ding Dong the itch is dead. Better living through pharmaceuticals.