Plans for our trip hit a serious speedbump on September 11th. In the ensuing weeks, we considered moving our wedding up from April to November, cancelling the trip altogether and generally worrying about the state of the world that we were planning to explore firsthand. A big part of reassuring us that yes, travel was still possible and no, the world wasn’t going to end, was reading the stories of other world travellers on the BootsAll website. After reading every government warning about every country in the world we could find on the web and reassuring our mothers that we were taking all necessary precautions for our safety, we approached our travel agent with a modified itinerary (one that skipped the Middle East and Indonesia) and began addressing wedding invitations for our original date in April.
Planning a 300-person Irish Catholic wedding is enough in itself. Preparing for a 7-month trip around the world, leaving the life you know behind (moving out of single apartments, planning a new life in a new country together, getting married…all that jazz) and more than this, actually BEING the people who are the focus of that huge wedding…it often seems impossible. Somehow it all happened and with tearful goodbyes we found ourselves with packed bags and tickets in hand at San Francisco International Airport, setting out for our first destination: Ireland.
Our trip will take us two weeks driving through western Ireland, two weeks in St. Petersburg, Russia, a short stop in London, two weeks in the Czech Republic and then two months exploring Europe. We’ll fly out of Athens, Greece for Bangkok, Thailand (where we’ll be for a week) before spending a week in both Cambodia and Vietnam, leaving us with two more weeks to make our way from Bangkok to Singapore. It’s a week in Australia, three weeks in New Zealand, a week in Fiji and two sweet weeks in California where we’ll get to spend that oh-so-short time saying hello and goodbye to family and friends and looking at our wedding photos before jetting off to Ireland to “begin” our lives together.
