Day 198: To Marry Well and Travel Much

This month, we have been running ragged with the traveling. There are many reasons for this, and most have to do with the more relaxed itinerary we kept for 6 months until realizing that China, Russia, Cairo and Kenya all had to be fit into one glorious month. Luckily all these countries are on the same continent. Go planning! We are embarrassed and saddened that these recent jaunts have been so short, but we are, as usual, lucky bastards to see the stuff and are loving it. So there's that. The excessive use of planes, trains and automobiles has made our daily posts a bit video-less of late. So if you need video fixes, go watch old ones or something and please understand that we, like you, miss seeing our smiling faces in bright lights.

There have been some Decisions and Reflections as of late that we think we should share, so that you have a better sense of where our lives and travels are going.

A. The original 8 month trip was supposed to end Dec. 1, when Lara and Claire meet their college buddies for a bachelorette party in Vegas. However, we do not want to stop and so are not going to. Over the holidays (December and January) you can read our blog as we travel around the USA for strange wedding type and holiday type events and also sit around twiddling our thumbs for Claire's Dad's Ninth Circuit Appeals Court Date. We have some interesting work based and fun based assignments stateside during this period that will surely prove as useless as whatever we have been doing this year in the larger world.

B. Then we GO OUT AGAIN! We are thrilled by this. Our 2007 itinerary is coming together nicely, largely based on the fact that a. Lara is (announcement coming...) *still* putting off medical school, b. Claire *still* wants to be a aimless writer, c. nice people like you read this blog, and d. our trust-fund-less selves are managing to make ends meet. And we're just having too much fun to stop. In 2007, we hope to do some of the following thigns:

1. Hang out with Bo and Holly Claire's Spiritual Mother in Claire's favorite place: San Miguel, Mexico
2. Go to an unmentionable country with Sister Court
3. Travel through Central America to use Lara's newly acquired Spanish to wow waiters the region over
4. Take French in Mauritius for some months while training for the Perth Marathon
5. Run said Perth, Australia Marathon and do other things Australian
6. Do some sub-saharan Africa for greater life knowledge and general "What country should Claire adopt her future children from" research purposes
7. Continue to follow Lara's Middle Eastern routes and take more pictures of houses and apartments the Little Lara lived in in (all in extremeley temperate countries like Saudi Arabia*)

In preparation of such an annoucement to the blogging world, we had a lovely breakfast today with two inspiring Colorado based globe trotters: John and Connie. These are the kind of people that get us excited to wake up in the mornings and discover more of this nutty world and the crazy things that can be experienced in it. Most recently, John and Connie spent 6 months as the first ever volunteers for the Jane Goodall Institute living in a hut in Uganda 42 km from their nearest neighbor. To get excited about what people can do in this world with time and energy, read some of the fascinating journal entries they wrote about their 6 months in the Bush. For ease of reading, they are divided into Daily Life, Education Program, Thoughts and Observations, and People.

All in the time before Lara got down to breakfast, Claire had already determined that she and Lara were going to spend four months working in Antartica as per John and Connie's recommendations. The list of things John and Connie have done in recent years will positively astound you, but we will not include it all here because it makes us personally feel like tiny people with limited imaginations. And we want to continue to be very impressive.

Claire and Lara spent most of the breakfast in speechless awe, and finally Claire asked how they these two miraculously managed to find and marry each other (underlying subtext being where can Claire find her own Connie/John). In response, Connie pulled the personal ad she put in a Colorado newspaper 13 years ago from her wallet. While reading it, we (Claire) shed a tiny tear. Lara would have, but she doesn't even cry at the very sad scenes in Armageddon, which we (Claire et. al.) do not understand.

So, the end of this post is to say that inspiring people doing interesting things both on the road and at home are the reasons behind this not-over-yet trip. And so we thank you all for being those people and reading about our encounters with them.

*it must be mentioned here that there is a famous Lara family video in which modest little Lara freaks out on a deserted Saudi Arabian playground because her mother suggests she wear a tank top in the infamously temperate Saudi Arabian summer heat, and NOT a turtleneck. "But, my shoulders....!" the shocked like Puritan retorts. It must also be said that this video makes Lara's mother weepy...not with nostalgia. But with regret that such standards of modesty no longer seem to apply to the same, but admittedly larger, Lara.