The Adventure Begins

Olive and I have always enjoyed traveling, in fact, many of our best memories and stories are travel-related. That’s why, when Olive started working on her doctorate and we discovered that she would be granted a year-long Sabbatical, we immediately started making plans that included travel.

The initial conversations involved doing some short term trips but then out of the blue we noticed an ad in our church bulletin from a couple looking to spend the next year in Calgary and preferring to rent a fully furnished house. Our conversations switched to the possibility of travelling for up to a year but that became an entirely different conversation and raised new questions  ... could we leave our kids for that long, could we leave our aging parents for that long, what about Dan’s work, what about our vehicles, what about our dog, what would we actually do for that long of a period away?

Now with less than a week before we leave Canada, we have found a solution (or come to terms with) each of those questions and are excited (and a bit anxious) to start our adventure. Through this travel blog, we hope to satisfy a couple of objectives; namely to record our experiences for personal purposes and simultaneously to inform our family and friends of our whereabouts and experiences.

Our checklists are mostly checked ...  new clothes for hot climates, new camera, inoculations/medications, voltage regulators/adapters, cell phones unlocked, lots of sunscreen/insect repellant, travel insurance, extra batteries, microfiber towels, mosquito nets; back-up debit and credit cards, wills up-to-date, power of attorney arranged, upstairs and downstairs rental agreements signed, one car sold the other one cared for by family, dog cared for lovingly in new home, the list goes on ... there is a lot of planning that has happened and will continue to happen.

Where to first? Those of you who are in touch with us on a regular basis will already know that our first destination is the Republic of the Congo. Christina, our daughter, recently established her own NGO (https://www.facebook.com/SterileProcessingEducationInDevelopingCountries#!/SterileProcessingEducationInDevelopingCountries) to promote sterile processing education in developing countries. Her organization is partnering with Mercy Ships (https://www.mercyships.org/) so for the next 6 weeks, we will join Chris in Pointe Noire (where the MS is currently berthed) as she assesses the sterile processing situation in several hospitals and looks for ways to work with these hospitals in an educational capacity. We are excited to become more involved in Chris’s vision and want to support her work.