Friday, July 29, 2011

Let it begin.

Talking to Ted

When we took Ben and Marley on a two-week whirlwind tour of Europe in Fall of 2010, we came home with a renewed sense of ourselves as a family unit, and a desire to take things to a different level.  After seeing our friend Betsy Dixon living so happily in Paris with her four kids, we began with the thought of living in Paris for a year.  I even enrolled in French classes at Alliance Francaise de Cincinnati to try to give one of us a leg up on understanding the French language.  About half-way into the course, Annie googled round-the-world trips and before long, that became our goal.  We launched into massive research, looking at several websites and checking out and buying several books, including Vagabonding by Rolf Potts and The Practical Nomad by Edward Hasbrouck which really got our brains spinning.  The Practical Nomad including a section on finding a ticket consolidator to help you get discounted airfares, and after a lengthy search, we found Ted Groat at Riverside Travel, who we are talking to on the phone in the photo above, doing the first planning of our trip.  We started with a vague outline of where we wanted to go, starting out by heading south and west, initially possibly to Hawaii and then to New Zealand and/or Australia.  Using Ted as a guide to get us where we wanted to go as affordably as possibly, we decided on a stop in Fiji, forgoing Hawaii because Ted said it would be cheaper to stop there before heading down under.