getting nervous...

Well I got some great encouragement yesterday with my first entry! So much so that I am writing again today!

Tonight is our good bye party. I will spend the evening (if I ever get to leave work) with my closest friends and family and probably cry most of the time. I am really going to miss everyone, everyone says that when we come home everything will be the same but I'm not sure about that. My closest friends are getting married and having babies, my baby nieces might not be babies anymore and even worse, they might not remember us! But this is why I will post blogs and make everyone read them.

I have not posted where we are going yet, so I think now would be a good time to do so.
We head out of Seattle and after a couple of stopovers in LA and El Salvador, we land on October 2nd in Lima Peru. Here we will be picked up and driven to volunteer at a clinic called Villa La Paz (http://www.villalapazfoundation.org/). We will be here for about a week, and then we have another week in Peru to be tourists and see Machu Picchu as well as other wonderful places in Peru (that means I'm not sure what else we are doing).
From Lima we fly to Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. We are there for 15 days and we have contacted a few people through http://www.couchsurfing.com/ and hope to meet up with them. As it stands I am not sure what to see and do in Brazil as there is soooo much to chose from. We will likely stay at a hostel there. Our goal is to volunteer part of our time in every country so that we are not going on a gluttonous greedy trip full of beaches and food. We want to give back to each community we visit in some way. This has not been set up in most places but we'll find something. I have contacted all the Bahai (http://www.bahai.org/) communities that we will be visiting and they will likely be able to offer us many options of ways to serve the community.
From Brazil we go to Buenos Aires Argentina for 15 days. Here we would like to go on a tour of the Amazon! I'm excited for this part. Also we have to spend a few days organizing our Indian visa here (puke!).
Next we go to San Jose, Costa Rica for 3 weeks, but we will be taking the Tika bus to Honduras and Panama (perhaps zip line over the Panama canal?). I want to see the Bahai temple in Panama and we have been told about some lovely Islands off of Honduras. San Jose was by far the cheapest place to fly in and out of so we decided to worry about overland transportation later.
Then we head back to LA (US) for 5 days. During this time our mothers were planning to come and see us there but then Tyson's mother had a great idea... instead of them flying out to LA, why don't Tyson and I fly to Vancouver for a couple days and see everyone. So they bought us tickets to fly home for 3 days in December! I am very excited about this because we can re-group and take what we have learned in the first 3 months and apply it to the rest of our trip.
Then back to LA where we head off to Australia with a quick stop in Fiji for 3 weeks. We land in Sydney, stay there for a few days then fly to Adelaide to see my friend that I met while volunteering at the Bahai center in Haifa Israel. We will drive with him to Melbourne where I have some lovely family that I get to spend some time with:) We may even take a trip to New Zealand depending on time and funds available.
Next we fly to Bali, Indonesia for 2 weeks
Then Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia for 2 weeks
Then we fly to Bangkok, Thailand for an undetermined amount of time. This is unsure because we do not have a confirmed connecting flight to Hong Kong where we fly out of 4 weeks later. So during this time we plan to see Vietnam, Cambodia, maybe the Philippines and the great wall of China (if we head into mainland China we need to get visas in Hong Kong first).
Then we fly out of Hong Kong into Mumbai, India! We are in India for 4 weeks and we travel overland around India during until we leave out of Dehli. We will also be seeing the Bahai temple here.
From India we fly to Muscat, Oman for 4 weeks. My uncle and his family live here so we will be staying with them. We will go into Dubai and some surrounding countries (Turkey) during our time here.
Our flights have only been purchased until this point, so the big thing on the to do list for today is to buy the rest of our ticket!
The plan is:
From Muscat we will be flying to Johannesburg Africa and we are still deciding where to fly out of. Some of our choices are Nairobi, Kenya and Cape Town....stay tuned to find out! Africa is one of the most expensive places to travel and the overland flights are very expensive!
From Africa we go to Tele Viv, Israel for 10 days where we will visit the Bahai center in Haifa for 3 days and head off to the Dead sea, Nazareth, Bethlehem and Ellat.
From Israel we fly to London, England and plan to take the Euro train to France, Greece, Scotland, Ireland (Tyson's Aunt and her family live here), Spain, Italy, Holland (my cousin lives here) and we leave from Switzerland (my uncle and his family live here) to HOME!!!
Wow, that took a long time to type out and I bet we end up going to many places that are not on this list as we talk to people and change our minds. Our flights cannot be changed but only our major flights are bought, our overland travel is very flexible.So now you can come with me on this journey and make suggestions!
Can't believe this is happening..
Now I'm off to change a dressing and think about where to fly out of in Africa.
7 more days