Days 144-149: Los Angeles, USA

We stopped in LA for a few days on our way back to visit with my family for a bit. My sister Rachel and her husband Bruce graciously hosted us (in high style) for a few days and put up with us while we switched our sleep schedules around (raiding their kitchen at 4am!) and readjusted to being back in civilization. My parents joined us in LA and we were able to spend Mother’s Day with them, then the following day attended an awards ceremony for Rachel and Bruce honoring all their work with their temple and greater community. It was a great transition back to US, but also still felt like traveling a bit, since we were stilling living out of our backpacks. We’re excited about getting back to Philadelphia and being able to wear more than just the clothes we were able to fit into our two backpacks!

We’re going to do a couple last posts with epilogues, but this marks the end of the trip! It’s been wonderful, crazy, and entirely impossible to summarize. We’re really glad we wrote this blog, since it’s helped us remember what we’ve done! It’s amazing, but after five months of travel (nearly to the day) a lot of the trip blends together and it’s easy to transpose memories from one country to another. All of the photos have helped too, we’re really sad that the camera died towards the end, but at least we had it for most of the trip. Thanks for all the supportive comments about the blog, it’s been great to hear from people and get feedback about the writing and photos. We can’t wait to see you all!

We're off (almost)!

The trip has begun! We flew out of Philadelphia this morning (luckily not Boston!) and have now
arrived in LA, where we are laying-over for a tedious 8 hours before the next leg of our flight, onward to Melbourne, Australia. Luckily I found a cheap shuttle that took us to Westwood (near UCLA), where we've found good cheap sushi, free wireless, and a place to get some exercise; what more could some weary travelers want? We'll laze around here for a few more hours then head back to the airport.

For those of you for whom I haven't bored to death with talking about the trip, the itinerary is roughly as follows:

1. Australia
2. New Zealand
3. Indonesia
4. Singapore
5. Malaysia
6. Thailand
7. Cambodia
8. Vietnam
9. Hong Kong
10. China
11. Japan

We're trying to fit all of that into 6 months, at which time we'll be moving out here to LA. The trip isn't planned in much detail beyond New Zealand; we'll play it by ear starting then. I know we won't have nearly enough time in some (many) of the countries we'll be visiting, but we're hoping to at least get a pretty good introduction to all of them.

I don't know how often we'll be blogging, but I'm aiming for at least once a week. We'll see how that turns out!