Preparation

Hello Everyone! I am not sure if anyone is reading this, but I have decided to start a blog to document the emotions and events of my one year trip around the world.
I will be going with my husband to about 25-30 countries in the next year. I have been planning this trip for my whole life. The lady who baby-sat me went on a similar trip and ever since she told me about it when I was 8 years old, I have wanted to do this! And now it is finally happening.
I have been planning full time since about December 2010. I'll be honest, there is an enormous amount of work to do before you can leave on a trip like this.
For example you have to set up everything that you are leaving behind. Life does not stop back home while you are gone. So the mundane events like taxes, mortgages, strata payments, MSP, cable and hydro bills etc all have to be paid. Luckily my husband and I have lovely families who are going above and beyond to help us out. They are willing to pay our bills and take care of our home. I have left them a (very) detailed list of everything I need done. I could write you a list of everything we had to prepare but this would be 10 pages and very boring to read.
Buying the ticket has been a huge ordeal in itself. We began speaking with our travel agent last year and still do not have everything done. We have bought our major flights but all the overland travel and our flight home has not been bought. This has definitely not been easy or cheap. It is hard to decide where you want to go when you haven't been anywhere. You are basically looking at a map and picking anywhere. Be careful of the seasons (you don't want to go during hurricane or tornado season).
We also had to get vaccinations done and with this type of trip, there are several! This can cost quite a bit if you do not have extended benefits. We did have benefits but we still had to pay over $300 (it would have been $600 without benefits). There are also prescription antibiotics and malaria pills that we have to buy.
Even though my husband and I are both Canadian citizens, we still needed visa for many countries and this was one of the hardest parts of planning. We finally got our visa to Brazil (this was NOT easy, they require many forms and documents). Our flight agent got our Australian visa done for us and there are many visas we can get at the borders but we still need our Chinese visa (which we are getting in Hong Kong). One barrier we came across is that many visas are only valid for a certain amount of time, for example an Indian visa is only valid for 6 months from the date of issue and we will not enter India for 6 month and 2 days!! So I had to research Indian visas at other embassies around the world. Many places will not allow you to get a visa if you are not a citizen of their country. Also we are not in any one place for very long and if we give up our passport to the visa people, we are risking not getting it back in time for our next flight. UGH, not fun! So I still haven't fully figured this out but as it stands, we will be getting our Indian visa in Argentina.
We have really slacked in the research department and there is LOTS to research. Overland travel, hostels, places we can volunteer, people we could stay with (long lost relatives), couchsurfing, tours, attractions, events etc.
There's also the budget (which has been redone ten thousand times). It has kind of gone out of control and we are spending more money than we thought.... Basically we still have to buy our way through Israel, Africa, 9 countries in Europe and home. This is costing over double what we budgetted! We also have to leave some money at home to cover our bills here. Then there are the daily costs while we are away (food, hotels, attractions, internet fees, transportation) and this is hard to budget. Additionally our overland travel will cost a lot because our flights land us in one area of a country or continent and we fly out of a completely different country. We have to connect the dots with busses, ferries, trains or any form of the cheapest transportation we can find.
We just bought a laptop to take with us for skype, uploading pics and surfing the Internet. We are not bringing phones with us.
We just started packing yesterday and our bags are HEAVY. We only have one backpack each and it is hard to pack for a year in a backpack.
I also had to start a blog....I guess that's done.
We exchanged some money into the currency of the first 4 countries we are going to and some American money. We also signed up for new credit cards that we could travel with and opened a checking account at HSBC. I will follow up with how the service fees for these cards are.
We are going out shopping tonight for shoes, yoga pants, light jacket etc to take with us.
Among all of this we are still working a lot as you can imagine because the harder we work now, the more we can do on our trip. Saving for something like this is NOT easy.
We both took one year LOA's from work, and luckily our work was ok with this.
We plan to volunteer in every country we visit, we want to leave something behind or give back to the communities we travel to. Our first stop is Peru and we plan to work one week in a medical orphanage where very ill children in poverty can stay and get treatment for their conditions. I am a registered nurse at home so I am very excited about this.
We also sold all our belongings at home in garage sales and on craigslist. We have stored a few things but everything else is gone including our vehicles. This made sense to us because we needed the money and we would save money on storage.
hmm what else can I tell you?
We had to pay our MSP for one year because our travel insurance is invalid without valid MSP @ home. We set up as many of our bills with auto-withdrawals as possible to make things easier.
If anyone has ANY suggestions for us PLEASE let me know! Also if you have any questions for me please feel free to ask as I would love to help someone out with their planning or curiosity if I can.
8 more days.....