360 Degrees Longitude (2 page)

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Urban legend has it that rocket scientists are smart, but I can be pretty clueless. It was that cluelessness that led to my meeting September. After finishing graduate school I accepted a job offer in the San Francisco Bay Area from a commercial aerospace company. I moved far from my small-town roots and shared an apartment with a couple of other guys who were also relatively new in town. We set about the difficult task of meeting girls who would actually still talk to us after they found out we were engineers. Despite our geekiness we were able to build up a decent network of acquaintances, and so one day when I locked myself out of my apartment (see
clueless
above), I wasn't completely without options.

As my roommates wouldn't be home until late that evening, I searched my brain for phone numbers. I had gone out a couple of times with a girl named Biz, so I called her with hopes of spending some quality time with her, or at least helping myself to her bread and peanut butter.

Biz wasn't home. This was a solid decade before the blessed arrival of the personal digital assistant (aka electronic brain). For reasons I can't recall nearly two decades later, the only other phone number I remembered was for Biz's friend, September. But remembering those seven digits may be one of the most brilliant things I have ever done.

September not only provided bread and peanut butter; she had jelly, too. Plus, she was a smart blonde with a knockout figure and had a cool mountain bike. She must have seen some quality in me to counterbalance my cluelessness, because we soon became inseparable.

On the face of it, September and I were an unlikely match. Though I had a few nerdy interests, I owned one of those high-powered Japanese bullet-bikes that your mother warned you about. I wore racing leathers during my daily commute. At night I listened to Pink Floyd on speakers that were as tall as I was. September couldn't have picked Roger Waters from Johnny Carson in a lineup, and she played violin in a local symphony.

September hooked me with the gorgeous and smart thing, and after several trips to the symphony I grudgingly learned to distinguish a melody in a minor key (“bad guy music”) from a melody in a major one. She learned to appreciate tearing up mountain roads on the back of a motorcycle, and I pretended not to fall asleep during films with subtitles.

Before earning my graduate degree, I had spent a lot of time wandering the western United States on my motorcycle, while September had been doing a significant amount of wandering of her own. Shortly before we met she spent a month backpacking around West Africa. “Why Africa?” I asked.

She shrugged her shoulders, “Dunno. Sounded fun.”

September had also spent six months on the island of Tonga during her senior year of college, doing anthropology fieldwork. “I loved my experience in Tonga,” she explained to me. “I came home a changed person. The airlines lost my luggage, and I arrived with just a notebook, a camera, and the clothes on my back. Five months went by before I saw my luggage and in that time I learned that all I needed to be happy was something to eat, something to wear, and somewhere to sleep. But it wasn't all as romantic as it sounds. Not long before I came home island fever had set in, and I gradually came to realize that what I really wanted to do with my life was to go home and get a job in high-tech. That's how I got into computer software.”

I was in love. Here was a woman who was five years younger than me, and, despite the fact that she had a degree in anthropology, one of those “soft” disciplines that engineers love to diss, she was making more money than I was. I asked her to marry me.

We had been married two years when a career opportunity presented itself. My company was looking for someone with my exact qualifications to go to Japan for twelve months. I had 24 hours to make a decision, and we would have to leave for Japan in three weeks.

I called September at work. “How would you like to move to Japan in three weeks?” I asked. Her reaction was strong and without hesitation. “OKAY! Sounds like fun!” And although it wasn't actually per plan, it was in Japan that September and I started our family.

Our time in Japan was the genesis of the idea of traveling around the world with our kids, although we didn't recognize it as such then. Being away from everything we knew forced us to rely solely on each other, and brought us so close that we knew we wanted to recreate the experience with our kids—when we had them.

September returned to the United States when she was eight months pregnant with our daughter Katrina. One month later my yearlong contract in Japan was over and I flew home. September met me at baggage claim and said, “Can we go to the hospital after this? I think I'm in labor.” Katrina joined our family and when our son Jordan arrived three years later, we already knew that in eight or nine years we would leave the comforts of home in order to travel around the world with them.

In the interest of conditioning the children for our around-the-world trip, we started traveling with Katrina and Jordan when they were in diapers, visiting such varied destinations as Maui, Mexico, and New Zealand. Jordan was just learning to talk when he heard of our future yearlong trip. When referring to it, the words “World-the-Round Trip” came tumbling out of his mouth; the name stuck.

As the kids grew older, the abstract discussions about this future trip started to come into focus. Three years before we left we took an ambitious month-long test trip to the most expensive places we could think of, Switzerland and Austria. This was to help us gauge our budget, but it was also to test ourselves.

That trip cemented our resolve to execute the plan. Although we had been setting money aside for several years already, suddenly we put a rigid savings plan into place with a specific date in mind. We placed a gigantic map on a wall of our house. A favorite family pastime became placing Post-it notes near locations we would like to visit, describing activities there, climate patterns and so on. About a year before departure our research expanded to include airfares, equipment, online bill paying, and homeschooling Katrina and Jordan while on the road. The months remaining whittled down to weeks and the number of items on our to-do list seemed more numerous than the days remaining. We drew up our wills. We rented our house. September's parents offered to maintain our domestic affairs at home, like receiving our mail and managing the house. As our departure date neared, the tempo increased and so did our anxiety level.

What made us want to leave home, pull our kids out of school, then risk life, limb, and career to travel? September and I had learned how travel can shape one's thinking; we wanted to give this to our children. Living in an affluent country it is easy to think of luxuries such as a manicured lawn and flashy car as things we “need” and that all we have to do to obtain them is buy them. When we embarked on our adventure, Katrina was eleven, and Jordan was eight. Our plan was to help Katrina and Jordan distinguish between wants and needs and to experience first hand that all we really
need
is something to eat, something to wear, and somewhere to sleep.

We also realized there would be an additional benefit. Living in modern suburbia came with many well-intentioned interests, ranging from Little League to the PTA, all gnawing away at our family time. Our plan to get away from it all so that we could have quality family time while our kids were still young became such a priority that the casual observer would have thought that's all we were doing. Friends, family, and coworkers started a betting pool over whether or not we would ever return.

 

Katrina's Journal, June 1

In merely five hours me, my brother, my mom, and my dad leave for the airport for an adventure of a lifetime. This isn't your normal two-week trip; it's a full twelve months, 52 weeks, 365 days of freedom
.

Twelve years ago, a year before I was born, this very glorious idea found its way into my parents' heads while they were living in Japan: to travel for a whole year and see the world
.

Now, the world is a big place, and we can't see all of it. But we are seeing a pretty big portion of it in my mind. First we're going Iceland, but only for a couple days. Then we'll fly to London. Once there, my dad will put our bikes together, for they can be taken apart to be packed. From London we'll bike all over Europe on tandems, my mom and me on one, my brother and dad on the other. Our things will be packed in bike panniers. After five months we'll arrive in Istanbul, Turkey, ready to hop on a plane to Tanzania, where we'll go on an animal safari. Then we'll go to an island off the coast of Africa called Mauritius. From Mauritius we'll go to Singapore, then Japan, China, and Thailand, where we'll spend Christmas. Granny is going to visit us for Christmas. Our last stops will be in Central and South America
.

Getting on that first plane to Iceland was a lot like looking over the edge of a cliff, closing our eyes, and then jumping. We couldn't know it at the time, but every worry that kept us awake before we left home pretty much came to pass, from broken bones to being stranded in the middle of nowhere. In spite of (or because of) it all, we not only survived, we thrived. This is a story about coping with those challenges, but it's more than that. It is a story about discovering how people all over the world are similar, yet different in profoundly subtle ways, and how because of those very differences we were always able to find something to eat, something to wear, and somewhere to sleep.

June 1–June 4
Iceland

I
don't remember stepping off the plane in Iceland. After more than a decade of planning, we were finally on our way. My head was buzzing.

I do remember tumbling out of the airport. Our family of four hauled our four massive bicycle cases containing our two tandems plus eight bicycle panniers (special bags designed to attach to a bicycle) that contained all our gear. We were anything but inconspicuous with our small mountain of equipment. As we proceeded to our rental car, one person was compelled to inform us of the merits of traveling light.

“Why on earth would you need that much stuff on vacation?” our new friend asked. “Are you preparing for the end of the world?”

I live for moments like this. “We aren't on vacation. We are cycling from here to Istanbul,” I replied, “and then continuing on around the world. What you are looking at is our bicycles.”

I kept walking without breaking my stride, listening to his response trail off as the distance between us grew. “Cycling? From here? With two kids?”

Not really, but Mr. Smarty-Pants didn't need to know that. While we were planning on cycling from London to Istanbul, the remainder of our journey around the world was either going to be with or without our tandems, all depending on who you asked—me, or September. The funny thing is, despite what it looked like, we were traveling light. Sure we had two tandems, but we also had schoolbooks, first-aid supplies, a well-stocked bicycle tool-kit, and even a tent and sleeping bags. Personal items, such as clothes, seemed like an afterthought. And all of it had to fit into our panniers.

We also had September's treasured wilderness survival saw. We'd spent our last day in the United States trying to get everything in the “to take on the trip” box to fit in our bicycle panniers. Each of our piles of underwear and socks were reduced by 25 percent. Towels got cut in half with scissors. We agonized over whether we should bring just rectangular Band-Aids, or square ones, too. I removed the saw, but September was adamant.

“We might need that! Put it back!”

“What on earth are we going to do with a saw?”