The Vogels in Alaska, USA.

What could possess an otherwise perfectly sane family to take off to pedal bicycles 20,000 miles from one end of the earth to the other? I wish I knew…

We were just your ordinary, everyday, American family one day. And the next we were anything but. In May 2008 the four of us were living in a typical American home in Boise, Idaho. The boys attended fourth grade at a local elementary school. I taught Special Ed at a local high school. John was serving as our stay-at-home dad, fixing up the house and doing other assorted chores. In short – life was typical and predictable.

I was living the American Dream – and doesn’t everybody want the American Dream?

But a month later, the four of us were living a life very few can imagine. We arose every morning in our tent, packed our sleeping bags, strapped all our earthly belongings onto our bicycles, and pedaled away to face the adventures of the day – of which there were plenty!

How did that transformation happen?

I suppose I could give some trite answer here– we woke up one day and decided we wanted more… blah, blah, blah… But the reality is that I honestly don’t know how it all came to be.

What I do know is that I’ve always been adventurous and independent and (perhaps) a little foolhardy. My mom always told me stories of when I was little – of how I scared the pants off her with my antics. And I know that my wanderlust began in earnest when my parents took me to Mexico when I was sixteen – my eyes were opened to the fact that there’s a whole new world out there!

I’m sure my time in the Peace Corps in Honduras helped push me along. As did the two years I taught in Egypt with my husband. During our seven years in Ethiopia our twin boys were born, and they moved with us to Taiwan and then on to Malaysia.

So by the time we moved to my hometown of Boise, Idaho when the boys were seven, we had been around the world a time or two. We had also learned to thrive on the unexpected nature of travel in third world nations.

But yet – there was another side of us. That side that believed – truly believed – that to be a “proper” parent, one must do what’s expected. One must drop the kids off at daycare, work all day, pick the kids up, fix a quick dinner, take the kids to soccer practice, and then collapse into bed utterly exhausted. After all – that’s what society raised us to believe is right. That’s what we should want.

And so it was that I went about my daily routine. I taught all day dealing with unruly teenagers. By the time I got home, I was too tired to truly enjoy my own boys. But I didn’t question it because…well, I was living the American Dream – and doesn’t everybody want the American Dream?

Cycling across the treeless tundra of Alaska, USA.

And then came the day – a beautiful spring day in March of 2006. That day, John slumped into our house after a particularly rough day in the classroom (he’s a teacher too) and collapsed into his favorite chair by the window. His eyes glazed over and I knew he wasn’t looking at the lawn which desperately needed mowing or the barn which needed fixing. He was farther away. Much farther away.

Was this the way I wanted it to be? Was the American Dream the be-all and end-all?

“Nancy,” he said, “I can’t do this. I need to get away. I want to buy a triple bike and take off. Just me and the kids – out exploring the world. We’ll be the three musketeers. We’ll be Mr. Incredible and his children saving the world from destruction and injustice! We’ll be Superman and Spiderman and the Incredible Hulk rolled into one! Oh yeah – and you can tag along too.”

I started thinking about our life in Boise, Idaho and the American Dream? And I started to wonder about the real question: Was this the way I wanted it to be? Was the American Dream the be-all and end-all? Was it the path to enlightenment and roadway to happiness? Would I, could I, be content with a big house in the suburbs and some cars? Was that really what life was all about?

Within a few weeks we had made the decision to go for it. Life was too short to not go and besides – our boys would never be eight years old again. Two months later we headed out to see our country with our boys.

We spent one year on the road that time. Twelve months of being together, growing together, learning together. 365 days of taking on challenges together as a family and triumphing over them. In short – it was one year of magic.

And so – the decision to take off again came easily. We knew the challenges we would face. We knew the rewards. We knew the magic.

Now, we are nine months into a 20,000-mile trek from Alaska to Argentina. We’ve pedaled 7000 miles, camped on the side of the road about 200 nights, and consumed more granola bars than I can count. But we’ve also grown together as a family and forged a bond that cannot be broken. And for us – that’s what keeps us going.

© Gretchen Wilson-Kalav for TravelBlogs, 2009. | Why We Travel: Nancy Sathre-Vogel’s Story | 4 comments |
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Post tags: cycling, family travel, life-changing experiences, travel with kids, why we travel

Waiting for the rain. Timbuktu, Mali. Photo by Luis Dafos.

All it took was a nun.

The flight from New York City to Paris and on to Benin was about as uneventful as flights go; maybe half an hour of turbulence and two complimentary glasses of cognac rocked the entire sixteen hours of travel. Until I landed in Benin, the only thing eventful that had happened to me was that, despite my best efforts, I thoroughly and completely lost an armrest war to my left-hand neighbor, who seemed to consider that his window-seat ticket also bought him a controlling share in the adjacent aisle seat.

Given that he was approximately double my size (you will see…this promises to be a recurring theme), I’m surprised I lasted as long as I did—which, to be fair, was only about 27 minutes. I had little choice but to become intimately familiar with the contralateral armrest, and each passing, just-wide-enough-to-make-you-rue-elbows, duty-free-stocked beverage cart propelled by plastic smiles.

All this changed, though, on arrival at Cotonou’s Cadjehoun airport. Miles more developed than Monrovia’s airport, Cadjehoun has regimented lines with regimented passport agents sitting at actual, regimented desks behind actual, regimented plastic, with actual stamps, making actual, official, stamp-like sounds.

It’s a thin veneer.

Evidently passport confiscations are de rigeur here; my kindly, smiling, official-sounding passport agent conveniently “couldn’t find” my passport after she sent me aside to fill out an arrivals form (the first attempt being deemed subpar). She was sure she’d given it back to me. I must have just misplaced it.

My refusal to believe her led to a swift surrounding by three other very kindly and official-sounding passport agents, reminding me that—don’t you know?—they were police officers and would be sure to deal with me as police officers do, merci beaucoup. Thankfully, the bluster didn’t last long, and some well-placed obstreporousness aided the magical reappearance of my passport.

A little shaken, I got my hands on one of a number of freely-roaming luggage carts and settled into the throng of people waiting for suitcases. Apparently, I chose poorly, because, of all the passengers, with all their luggage carts, I was singled out.

“That’s my cart,” someone behind me said.

I saw no reason to believe him, and, admittedly, told him so.

“You use my cart, you pay me,” he protested.

This went on for a few parries, just long enough to settle the matter peaceably, without the exchange of either money or fisticuffs. But, unfortunately, also long enough to infuriate a thrice-as-large-as-me passenger from my flight (who, incidentally, happened to be friends with my armrest mate). He turned around, sheer anger on his face, took my two bags and proceeded to hurl them to the floor with as much force as he could muster (which was a lot).

As if this wasn’t dramatic enough, he then began screaming at me, his words mostly drowned out in the shower of spittle I found myself under. When he started pushing—hard—a small British nun in a grey habit stepped between us. For this, I’ll one day get to thank her.

After my erstwhile attacker had returned to his conversation with my erstwhile armrest antagonist, she turned to me, said, “They do things a little differently here,” and quickly disappeared into the throng.

Evidently.

Leaving Mopti for Timbuktu, Mali. Photo by Luis Dafos.

Why do this? Why dodge the near-blows of irate Beninese men? After all, we all have our share of near-miss travel stories. Is it simply wanderlust? Dopamine imbalance? An irrepressible search for better and better stories?

I think the answers are deeper. I volunteer for a humanitarian medical organization, as a surgeon on-board the world’s largest charity hospital ship and part of a crew of 400 strong that provides medical and surgical care to the populations of some of the poorest nations in the world. We come from all over the world, representing 35 countries, and we all come with that expressed purpose: to bring hope and healing to the world’s forgotten poor.

You think differently, act differently, and hope differently when you’ve experienced the world.

Travel has been in my blood for as long as I can remember, and all travel teaches you to look at the world differently. You order your Starbucks differently when you’ve been to coffee plantations. You watch movies differently when you’ve been to the countries they portray. You hear music differently when it evokes nostalgia for places you’ve been. You think differently, act differently, and hope differently when you’ve experienced the world.

But this sort of travel—this is singular. Entering into the world of another changes you more deeply than I could ever have imagined. I spent five months in 2008 aboard the same ship, in Liberia. I met patients with long-neglected tumors deforming their countenances beyond recognition. I met children with diseases which we in the West give no second thought to—but which, there, became near-certain death sentences. But I also met the smiles and the laughter and the hugs and the tears of people who were just as real, just as broken, and just as hopeful as any you would ever meet. Back then, I wrote this:

Their faces were fantastically deformed by Brobdingnagian tumors, scarred expressionless by burns, and bandaged beyond recognition. They jumped, shuffled, and shook, with their trachs, their crutches, their legs casted into immobility. They danced, amputated. They sang, voiceless. They smiled, scarred.

In the middle of all of us westerners who sheepishly ringed the edges, this was the church of the outcast, the shunned, the spurned, the grotesque. This was the congregation of the sideshow.

And it was beautiful.

So it was, for that beauty, that I found myself in Benin this year, saved only by the grace of a diminutive nun. And my first night back, standing on the top deck of the ship, watching the water and breathing the diesel-laden African air, I’d come home.

© Gretchen Wilson-Kalav for TravelBlogs, 2009. | Why We Travel: Mark Shrime’s Story | 3 comments |
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Post tags: Benin, medical volunteering, volunteer work, voluntourism, why we travel

Craig with his son Aidric in Bulgaria.

I was working full-time in Phoenix and doing evening classes for my MBA (paid for by the same consulting company that I’d later leave just weeks after finishing my degree). I was happy, getting plenty of love and leisure in that lifestyle (despite the terribly full, yet routine schedule).

Corporate brass wanted to promote me to a senior level that would’ve probably doubled my salary and expanded my ability to enact change within the organization. By most standards these dimensions of personal and professional success would’ve been enough to keep the lips of most any 25-year-old grinning from ear to ear, behind a glass of rum at least half his age.

But a seemingly innocuous visit to Thailand in the winter of 2004 (that mostly took place during/after the massive Boxing Day tsunami that rocked the region) set in motion a mindset that has since seen me living quite “comfortably” (warning: very subjective) out of a backpack for over three continuous years, in over forty countries all across the globe.

Years back, I’d had the notion that I’d seriously commit to learning German and become a knowledge worker of some sort in Germany. (I’d been rather captivated by the place on a high school exchange back in ’96.) Pursuing my Master’s put an end to that idea, but not the notion of living abroad.

And when my 2004 holiday visit to Thailand came along, the overwhelming desire to escape from the uninspiring game of corporate chess (political posturing, elbow rubbing, etc) came crashing down on me like the nearby tsunami that could’ve very well claimed my life.

But deciding to up and abandon your stable life for one of pure travel is a vacation delusion that few actually follow through on.

I reflected on several things during and shortly after this initial Thai experience:

It took nearly 11 months to finish up that degree, design and build a Web site that would best allow me to share my knowledge and experiences with others, prepare a successor at work, and shut down my life. Belongings were lovingly sold, tossed, or donated to charity, friends and family. I spent a lot of time researching not where to go, but what to take. And ultimately, my life was compressed down to that of a backpack small enough to fit in the overhead bin of most any commercial passenger plane.

And that’s the way it’s been since December, 2005.

Craig, with his girlfriend Tatiana and their son Aidric in Slovakia

Sometimes I get asked by folks if I was running away from something, or someone, back in the States. Sometimes I get asked if people told me that I was throwing away my career, or not living up to my potential. Sometimes I’m asked if people inspired me or encouraged me to adopt this lifestyle.

To the curious, I explain that truly one of the best ways you can leave a company is to tell them you’re doing it for travel. Not for another company, or for any other myriad reasons people give notice for, but to go and do the very thing that your peers are afraid to do themselves. And this, this response is even more motivating for the individual shedding themselves of their environment for reasons of wanderlust.

The plan was simple enough though: not to necessarily travel forever, but to live abroad for the rest of my days.”

Still, years later, I get furrowed brows and letters of what amounts to dissatisfaction with the choices that I’ve made (and continued to make) with my lifestyle from my mother’s side of the family. Perhaps more than a little xenophobic at my grandmother’s level, down to the ‘long vacations are what retirement’s for’ mindsets of her children and their families. They could just never really grasp what I would want with more than two weeks of vacation time per year and a stable, well-paying job. To toss it away to live an unscheduled life in the (comparatively) impoverished places of the world seemed certifiably nuts.

On some level I found that parts of Rolf Potts’ book Vagabonding articulated a handful of the thoughts and feelings that I was having in 2005. And as I slowly expanded the circle of people around me whom I was revealing my intentions to throughout the year, I’d refer them to this book as some insight into my state of mind.

I’ve since discovered that many of my coworkers thought I’d be back after only six months. I had the undying support from my father and brother, but there wasn’t a single person in my network of friends, colleagues or acquaintances I knew that could offer me any inspiration or advice on perpetual travel. Perhaps if I was from Australia it’d be a slightly different story, but such things are just not a part of the culture in the United States.

The plan was simple enough though: not to necessarily travel forever, but to live abroad for the rest of my days.

© Gretchen Wilson-Kalav for TravelBlogs, 2009. | Why We Travel: Craig Heimburger’s Story | 9 comments |
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Post tags: long-term travel, Perpetual Travel, why we travel

About 40 million years ago, somewhere in East Africa, there was a stand of trees that was home to a number of tree-dwelling prosimians. A prosimian would look to us very much like monkey, so let’s call them “monkeys” for simplicities sake.

One of these monkeys, George was trying to enjoy a gin and tonic after a hard day at the food processing plant. George brought the glass to his lips, only to be startled by a sudden blast of loud bass-n-drum music from the branch above. Frustrated, George grabbed the broom from the closet, and started banging on the underside of the branch above his.

“Will you kids keep it down? I’ve just spent the last 8 hours digging termites out of a rotting branch with a stick, and now I just want to relax with some PEACE and QUIET!”

The monkeys on the branch above turned up their stereo amongst a throng of giggles. George sighed and retreated to his comfy chair, downing his G & T in one gulp. Looking up he saw his wife Estelle, looking sympathetically at George as she brought him another drink.

Taking the glass, George said to his wife, “you know, this tree is getting way too crowded. We should think about moving.”

Estelle shook her head, “come on now George, we can’t afford to move, not on your salary at the plant. Real estate prices are outrageous nowadays. Why, I just heard from Norma-Rae today that a branch on the lower levels of that small Baobab tree over on Banana Boulevard just went for eight-hundred thousand. It was on the lower level, like the second branch from the ground.”

George downed his second gin and tonic and stood up. “You’re right, it isn’t just this tree that’s too crowded. It is this whole forest. We should move away, somewhere else…”

Estelle raised her simian eyebrow, “where to George, there aren’t any other stands of trees close to here.”

George looked out at the wide, grassy plains. “What about the plains?”

Estelle rolled her big, brown eyes. “No more gin for you, you are talking crazy now.”

“No, I’m serious. Why not? Look down there. It’s wide open space. There isn’t another monkey in sight. Why, we’d have the whole place to ourselves.”

“There are LIONS down there, George.”

“That’s no problem, we can outsmart a dumb cat any day. If we stand up on our legs instead of scampering around on all fours, we can see the lions coming over the top of the grass. And that would leave our hands free to throw rocks at the lions. See, it all makes perfect sense.”

Estelle looked at George, unsure, but she saw that he was serious. Her mind raced. Should she? Sure, it was dangerous, and her mother would call her crazy, but think of the adventure. George was right, there was a lot of open space out there beyond this stand of trees. “Alright, let’s do it,” she finally said.

And so, George and Estelle set out, down the trunk of their old tree home and out onto the Serengeti plains and into the wide world, just one example in what is a long line of intrepid travellers stretching to the present day that have helped spread us humans around this world.

The Biological Imperative to Travel

The first fish that said, “sure, it isn’t water, but I bet I could use these flippers to move around on dry ground.” Those early humans from Africa, who kept heading north, thinking to themselves, “yeah, Europe looks cold, but I think we could make a life of it there, we could grow blond hair and call ourselves Swedes!” Those folks standing on the shores of south-east Asia who would eventually become Polynesians, saying to their friends “hey, let’s hollow out this log, throw some plants and animals in here and hit the Pacific Ocean. There has to be something out there.”

It is in our genes, in our genetic code, to be explorers, adventurers and travellers. As life has evolved from the primordial ooze to the wide diversity that exists on our little blue-green rock today, at every step the beings that eventual evolved into us where the ones that got out there, took the chance and made a move. We are chance-takers by genetic necessity. If we weren’t, we would have died out, or evolved into something very different, like rhesus monkeys, sheep or catfish. Overall in evolution, survival of the fittest might rule, but when it comes to human evolution, it is survival of the most likely to pack a change of underwear, a toothbrush and take off down the road.

Some might argue that the time has come for us to settle down. We’ve spread all over the world and made large, unmoveable cities in many places. There is no where left on the earth to colonize, so why keep moving?

I would counter-argue that now more than ever we should be on the move. In an age when differences between two groups of people can break out into full-scale thermo-nuclear war, getting to know our neighbours around the world seems like a good thing. We are less likely to bomb them, and they less likely to bomb us if they know us, I would hope.

Further, in an age when we humans appear to be using up the resources of the earth faster than the earth is replenishing it, maybe we need to keep looking for new places to live. There seems to be lots of empty real estate on Mars, or at the bottom of the ocean. Sure, it may seem far fetched and impossible, but that’s probably what all the other fish said to that first one that proposed scampering up onto dry land.

So I for one will keep on travelling, and if anyone asks why, I will say “to evolve as a person, and to evolve our species. I travel because it is what we are genetically born to do. It is my biological imperative.”

Now all I need to do is convince my next employer to give me a couple of extra weeks vacation. You know, for the good of the species.

© Gretchen Wilson-Kalav for TravelBlogs, 2008. | Monkeys With Suitcases: The Biological Imperative To Travel | No comment |
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Post tags: why we travel