How do you pack for such a trip?

One of the more daunting parts of planning a trip around the world with a pair of 12-year olds is how do you pack for a trip of such a duration?  Back in 2009, I took a trip to NYC to meet a friend to see the U.S. Open at Bethpage Black, play some golf with him on Long Island as well as meet my cousin from Connecticut in Manhattan.  Knowing I didn't want to take golf clubs on the train or in a taxi into Manhattan, I decided I would rent clubs and just put everything I needed in a backpack suitcase, which worked great.  That carried over to our trip to Europe last fall, and is the blueprint for the trip we are about to take.

Vaccination Day

Since we really don't want to acquire a working knowledge of medical facilities in Phnom Penh or Xian or even the Gem City as we trek around the world, we went to Passport Health in Blue Ash to get the various vaccinations needed to stay as healthy as possible.  Eda, our RN, took great care to make sure we had what was necessary and didn't get anything we didn't need.  If the various potions pumped into our bodies work as advertised we will return to the states without Yellow Fever, Meningitis, Hepatitis, Typhoid, Diptheria, Mysteria, and Wikipedia. Thanks Eda!

Warding off evil spirits and bacteria at Passport Health

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.