Welcome to the TravelingTulleys.org blog.

I wanted to start the blog with a bit of explanation as to how we arrived at this adventure. So here goes… (Oh and if you scroll down far enough you will find the parts about the actual trip. Those of you who know us well have all heard this first part anyway)

As most of you know I just retired as a teacher from Corona del Mar High School. This is after twenty-one years at CdM and another nine previously in Northern California. Marna retired a few years earlier from marketing at Cisco, but she has been actively working by flipping houses and volunteering for OneOC, a non-profit aimed at helping non-profits with their businesses.

The why:   We decided that when I could retire we would travel. Both of us enjoy travelling and we are great companions. We both like to go go go and see things and make the most of our vacations. About five years ago we spent the month of August travelling around the Mediterranean and mostly Italy. We took a cruise from Barcelona to Venice, then traveled by slow train, fast train, bus, car, and foot around central Italy. It was then that we hatched our plan to travel extensively upon retiring. At first the plan was to find a place in Italy, buy it, fix it up, and live there for five years using the place as a hub to travel around Europe. We liked the long term idea because we did not like the fact that every time we went on vacation we spent a few days recuperating from the travel to the destination. Marna cannot sleep on a plane. I fall asleep before the plane taxis to the main runway. We spent a lot of our well-earned vacation money on getting there and did not want to waste a day sleeping to recover from the flight. Also it was such a stress loaded few days before vacation trying to pack, organize the trip, take care of bills and business so things would not fall apart while we were gone. So, the first day or two of a vacation was just trying to let go and relax. Doing the month long vacation was awesome. After a day or two of getting into the vacation the rest was so nice.

But wait. We kept thinking about the fact that we were paying mortgage on a house that we were not in. We were paying for cars and insurance that we were not using. Also cable TV and Internet and electricity and… you get the point. From there it was a small leap to “vacation for a month at a time” to “let’s make it a much longer time!” Five years seemed good. Just sell the house and the cars as they only caused us grief fixing this or that anyway. The kids were out of the house or soon to be. It would not cost us much more to travel than what we were paying now just to stay in one place. We could get a small place, big enough for guests to visit though! Use that place a “hub” to venture out around the somewhat local area to visit without the high travel costs and without the cattle-car flight and stress.

The plan defined: But why limit this idea to one place in Italy? Why not stay a year or so then move the hub to a new place, say when we exhausted our places to visit in that area? We then thought about where good hubs would be. Each continent seemed worthy of including. So next we come up with somewhere in northern South America, like Medellin, Colombia. Criteria for a hub would include access to an international airport, decent public transportation for travel, and good spots to go visit. Thus we came up with a list of candidates: Central Italy, Medellin, Cape Town SA, Bali, and then we got stuck. Medellin gets us Central America and the north part of South America. Cape Town gets us the better part of Africa. Bali allows travel to Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia and all the way up to China. So we decided to split the last year and include the tip and southern Argentina and Iceland, calling that the “poles.” Not sure how it would work out with visas or travel to and from, but that has been the plan for a while now. We very much understand that visas and political unrest could change plans at a moment’s notice.

Getting around: We also wanted to go from place to place without suffering the effects of jet lag, nor the constrictions of flight luggage rules. After all, at this point we would be traveling with everything we owned. We had planned that to be a suitcase, a carry-on, and a backpack for each. There was a great travel option which we had tried before: Cruise ship repositioning. The ships that do the Alaskan cruise have to leave when the winter makes cruising not so good an idea. They reposition to elsewhere in the world for better weather and come back next year. The prices are good and the travel is relaxing.

What we have done so far: Once the plan was hatched we knew there would have to be a lot of planning to make this work. Mind you, we were still several years out. Marna talked about this plan with her best friend Joyce with whom she went to University of Redlands with many moons ago. As sorority sisters of Delta Kappa Psi, they have always been close. Marna stayed with Joyce at times, Joyce stayed with Marna at times. In fact, they even flipped a house or two together. We thought it would be great to invite Joyce on the start of our trip. One it would be fun; two it would help to have someone else give us a check on reality.

The planning sessions begin: The three of us would meet once every two weeks to go over one aspect of the trip to get to Italy. We always wanted to do the Trans-Siberian Railway from China, through Mongolia, to St. Petersburg. Marna and Joyce always wanted to go back to Salzburg where they both went to “Semester Abroad.” They also wanted to be there during the Christmas Markets. So two parts of the trip were set. Train across Asia and Salzburg. But what a better way to see the Christmas Markets than to do a river cruise down the Danube from Nuremberg to Vienna? So the research was on for a cruise.

We found some repositioning cruises from Seattle/Vancouver to Japan and to Australia. Could not get the Japan one so got one to Sydney. Could not figure out how to get to Beijing without a long flight. Had all sorts of ideas of cruises up through Thailand, Vietnam, Bali, Japan but could not find something in the right time frame. Learned a lot about on-line searches though. Used Google for initial searches then Trip Advisor, Expedia, Trivago, and also went straight to the source. Prices and availability were wildly different. Joyce would be on the same site as Marna and get a completely different price or even availability. We learned to change browsers, change to incognito, clear cookies, and just try a different day.

One of the main problems was linking a good trip to the next one or the previous one. We could get to Hong Kong but then not to Beijing in time for the train, or too early. We ended up just booking the Christmas cruise first. It was the first one to likely book up first. Then we locked in the trip to Sydney from Seattle. We then used the MonkeyShrine travel agency to book the train through Asia. We found them through Seat61, a great site for railway travel around the world.

Visas: Marna had traveled a lot for business. Visas were handled by the company. Marna and Joyce traveled to China ten years earlier and the visas were much easier. This time we had to get our own visas and it was not so easy, nor inexpensive.

Australia was a breeze. Go online and apply. Pay the $20 and get an immediate reply. Done.

China was a bit more complicated. Printed out a form online, filled it out, get two passport pictures, passports, letter of invitation from a hotel that we had reservations from proving we had some place to stay, and then go to the Chinese Consulate in LA to turn it in. I did this on a Thursday. They reviewed it on the spot and accepted it and told me to come back on Tuesday. Showed up Tuesday. Paid the fees and got the visas and our passports. Cost was about $200 per person. Ouch. Of course, we could have had a service do that but that was another $100 per person.

Russia was different. First, the consulate is in San Francisco, if you live in Los Angeles or anywhere in the West. Second, the website says use a service. Do not do it yourself. Of course the service is run by a Russian company. Mmmm? The paper work MUST be filled out online. It is stored on the Russian servers so they have access to it. Then the passports, pictures, and letter of invitation (official invite from each and every place you are staying in Russia) is delivered to the service that delivers it to the consulate for review. Since that would have included TWO drives up to San Francisco, one to drop them off and one to pick them up (or to rely on mail which we did not have the time) we opted to go with one of the many visa services to do that for us. Turns out it was a good thing. We think. Not sure though. They said the invitation has to match EXACTLY what the visa requests so they said we had to pay the extra $20 each for them to arrange their own invitation that matched exactly the request. See, the request was for the ten-year visa, which is the best and cheapest option available, and any other option costs more and is less likely to be approved (according to the visa service and several websites). So we paid the extra, sent it off, and waited. A week later the Russian visas and our passports arrived.

The hardest part of getting ready for our trip: Getting rid of crap accumulated in a 3000+ square foot house with five bedrooms, three car garage with upstairs storage. We never considered ourselves hoarders. Not us. I just had camping gear, that’s backpack gear and car camping gear. And windsurfing gear, and diving gear, and rock climbing gear, and bicycling gear, and astronomy gear, and a badminton set, and tennis and fishing gear, both fly and spin. Did I mention a HO-gauge railroad set? But I also had tools for working on a car, and wood tools, and lots of tools for working on the house. Plumbing and tile and paint and roof and all sorts. I had acquired them as we needed them. If I didn’t know how to do something I would learn. It was more fun to learn how to do something than hire out the job. Then I could do it for the next time. Saved lots of money. But that is just my stuff. I left out a lot though. We had lots of games for the kids. Puzzles and more puzzles. Candyland and Risk and others. We had seven different Monopoly games. There was the original, but we also had Lord of the Rings, Twilight, and some I don’t even remember. Why? Just never got rid of them. Just shoved them in the cabinet to play some time or deal with some time. In the kitchen we had a tool for just about everything. We had several of each. We had a library of books too. Not just any books. We had whole collections of series. The kids liked to read. And we did encourage it. Korey had the entire series of the Apprentice books, Enders Game, Hunger Games, ———————-

So the problem with having so much is that we would spend oodles of time looking for something. More time spent looking for it than if we had driven down to the store to buy it, use it, and give it away. Oh well. Those days are over. We hope. We began going through our crap a year ago. Slowly looking through and deciding if we could give it to someone who could use it. It was so difficult to just throw something away. It seemed like such a waste. I was fine giving things to neighbors and relatives and friends. I knew, or at least convinced myself the item given would have a new life with its new owner. It could be games, books, kitchen items, whatever. The problem with this method was that it took way too much time. Time was running out. Fast.

We sold the house. We did not think it would sell for several months, maybe six months. But it sold in one weekend. Now what. We had to put all our effort into getting out of the house. Part of the sale allowed us to stay an extra month. That only prolonged the agony. In the end we were hauling crap in van loads to a house nearby that we were also fixing up. We were using that as our temporary storage facility. We justified that by telling ourselves that that was a fist pass and that we would then cull down more once we had time at the new place. That gave us another month. In reality that let us move our crap one more time before having to deal with it. Now it got down to serious decision making. Well, not really. We got rid of more stuff to more friends and to Goodwill/Salvation Army and some just trash. But we still had way too much. And then we moved it again. To Joyce’s garage for the last culling. We ran out of time. We had been getting up every day at 5am and working on flipping a house, finishing last details on another rental, selling a house, selling our cars, getting rid of our excess crap, and feebly attempting to plan a five-year mission to explore Earth and passing out at around midnight. We ran out of time.

We ended up storing what we could not get through at a rental and at a friend house (thanks Kathy and Greg). We will have to schedule a return trip for several months to come back and cull through. Maybe in a year or so.

USe this link to view additional photos on our Google Drive:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B_wyy48LLyhLaWVMd012aFE3OWM?usp=sharing

Try this