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Author: Sean Keener

Casey – Around-the-World Traveler

  1. When do you leave?
    September 2004

  2. How long do you plan to be away?
    1-2 Years

  3. How much have you saved?
    $6,000 so far

  4. How old are you?
    26

  5. Nationality
    USA

  6. Where do you live now?
    Santa Barbara, California, USA

  7. Occupation
    Office Lacky

  8. Is this job one that you actually like, or are you only doing it to pay for the trip?
    It’s my career

  9. Have you traveled around the world before?
    No

  10. What is the route you plan to take/places you plan to visit?
    We (my husband and I) plan to go from Los Angeles to Samoa to New Zealand to Indonesia to Malaysia to Thailand to Vietnam to China to Japan to India to Moscow to Germany to Czech Republic to Switzerland to Greece to Home (where ever the heck that is).

  11. Why did you decide to take this trip? What got you into this type of travel, and/or influenced you to go?
    We have both traveled around Europe, the US, and assorted other places, so we have the bug. He’ll need a break from writing his dissertation; I just want to get out of “office space”. There are so many other reasons, those are just a few.

  12. What is your biggest fear about this trip?
    That he or I will get really really sick or injured and/or I’ll spend the entire trip sunburnt (I’m super super pale) and/or we’ll miss a very important (or tragic) event back home.

  13. Are your family, friends, co-workers, etc., supportive of you? What is their opinion of your going around the world?
    Pretty much supportive (though haven’t exactly showcased our trip at work yet – kinda waiting for quite a while to pull that rabbit out of my hat). My folks are a bit wary, but in the end they’ll be happy for us. They want us to use the money to buy a house instead (right, right, with a dog and picket fence too).

  14. How much planning and preparing have you done?
    To the Nth Degree

  15. What are you packing? What do you consider your most indispensable item(s)?
    Not even close to packing yet, but we will pack very light! I think that our most indispensable item will be my birth control pills (uh-huh).

  16. How do you think your round-the-world trip will change your life? How do you think it will affect and change you as a person?
    I think that we will become more patient and understanding people, and that it will greatly improve our abilities to negotiate challenges and physically taxing situations. Most of all, I think that it will strengthen (and test) our relationship.

  17. If you had to sum up your thoughts/feelings about your round-the-world trip in one sentence, what would it be?
    Totally stoked/borderline obsessed.

  18. Why do you think people should go on round-the-world trips? Why not just take a regular old one- or two-week vacation instead?
    I think that being gone for a long time in one stretch opens your mind up to a whole different framework. I don’t even think that one can mentally escape form the “daily grind” for at least 3 months. Plus, if you’re a budget traveler, it’s cheaper to just keep on a-goin’ instead of flying home all the time.

  19. What is the biggest myth that people have about round-the-world traveling?
    That it’s a vacation.

  20. Why do you like to travel?
    We like to check out cool stuff and see what we can see. Also, hopefully, to see arenas in which we can help out in this little world of ours. Like “where are our efforts most needed: at an orphanage in Thailand or a school in the Bronx?” kinda thing.

  21. What is your advice for people planning their own RTW trip?
    I think that the most important thing you can do is to research the hell out of your trip, learn facts and histories about all sorts of countries, get all planned and prepared, do budgets and what not, then start your trip, relax, have a beer, and let the journey guide you! I would also advise folks to try and avoid pre-purchasing all of their plane tickets before they even leave their home soil. From what I’ve heard, you totally pigeon-hole yourself and create a very inflexible itinerary that might bum you out later on.