The best laid plans…

This is our first post since we went public with this crazy plan.  Since that time, we have made a few significant changes to our travel itinerary.

I should start out by saying that my first piece of travel advice for a trip of this magnitude is I would strenuously advise creating a spreadsheet or other tracking tool for handing the travel visa requirements for each country.  Early on, I had casually spent time on the US State Department’s website (the hands down best source for easily obtaining current information in a standardized and good UI) evaluating the entry and exit requirements for the countries that we had never traveled to previously. More than half of the countries throughout our trip either don’t require an entry visa for US citizens or have a simple VOA (Visa on Arrival) system.  India, Australia and Turkey have simple online applications. Some, like Vietnam, do require copies of your passport to be mailed to their US Embassy offices prior to your departure, but this all seemed within the bounds of doable.  Where we hit a major bump in the road was with Brazil…

Having traveled to Brazil before, I had the hubris to believe I knew the process for obtaining a tourist visa for entry.  Insert laugh track…

Without getting into the gory details, Brazil’s visa requirements have changed significantly within the last few years.  At present, visas are rather expensive and must be obtained in person at the Consulate in San Francisco (for US Residents residing on the West Coast) with appointments available only months in advance – or you can pay handsomely for an expedition service with an agency. Faced with the fees to obtain expedited visas for four individuals, we were looking at forking over $1400 just to step foot into the country.  We began to consider it might be best to let Campbell preserve her innocence and believe that all girls her age still wear full coverage bikini bottoms…

And so Brazil was let go – which set up a series of chain reactions that ultimately led to our decision to re-book our entire trip and to jump down one pricing tier to the 34,000 mile ticket.  The final result is that have decided to leave South Africa and Madagascar for another trip when we can explore at a more optimal time of the year and stay for much longer than our original plans could permit.  Those days have now given us more time to explore in South East Asia, India and a few new days in Ethiopia. Likewise, with the fall of Brazil and ultimately Argentina (sniff sniff) we have been able to add ten full days to idle in the Azores (!!!), a few days in Columbia and more time in Peru and Ecuador.  The final result is a less hurried itinerary that we ultimately feel great about.

This entire reshuffling took some major mental processing. As I had mentioned in my first post – I had optimized our original itinerary to utilize 38,900+ of our 39,000 mile allowance.  But just because you can – doesn’t always mean that you should. Gunnar is incredibly disappointed he won’t be encountering King Julian in person right now – and we are all sad to see Argentina go.

But this is just the first experience in letting go – of what this trip will be and how it will unfold.