Germany, FrankfurtGermany, Frankfurt

Stuck in Heathrow…

Ironically after all the planning and preparation, we did not make it further than to London Heathrow on the first day. Ending up in on of the many nameless and similar hotels lined up there, both of us had seen during consulting projects in the last years.

What on earth had happened?

The flight from London to Madrid, from where we had a directly connecting flight to Quito was so much delayed, that it was clear we will miss the second one in Madrid. Initially we were very relaxed with 6 months free time ahead of us and already saw us sitting in a nice hotel in Madrid with a good glass of red wine – all paid for by British Airways – and taking the onward flight one day later.

Madrid or London for a night?

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Round the World, FarewellRound the World, Farewell

Farewell from friends, family and colleagues

With all the planning we wanted to do: done, our todo list getting shorter and our preparation as much completed as possible, we had to start the sad part…saying good bye to many friends, our families and colleagues at work, which we wouldn’t see for the next 6 months to come *smiley crying*

We don’t want to bother you with too many pictures of us over and over again with different people, but it was very good to feel so many people wanting to say “good bye” personally, making it much easier for us to leave and be sure not to be forgotten *smiley winking*

But not everybody could make it to our big(ger) farewell party…

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Round the World, PreparationRound the World, Preparation

Ready to go – half a year, once around the globe

Time flew by quickly since we managed to do our route planning and we didn’t manage to publish any updates on our blog, as we were still working more than full-time in our project jobs as consultants and in parallel spending much of our free time to finalize our plans, getting even more excited and preparing for our big adventure.

I did one of the most important decisions to be ready for long-term traveling…my hair is now cut short and we will not have to pack a hair dryer into our luggage. Sounds much better in German, describing my hair style now as a “Ohne-Fön-Friese”, which suits much better for the colder Andes *smiley winking*

Now there are only 7 working days left…

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Round the World, PlanningRound the World, Planning

Planning a RTW trip – finding our route around the globe

When we realized that we just made it, so having approved sabbaticals and thus will be taking a 6 months break from our jobs, we got all excited. The decision was to make the most out of the time we have and spend the whole half year traveling.

And with that started our looooong list of ideas, places to visit, recommendations we got from colleagues, documentaries inspiring us about fancy locations and tips from friends and family. Putting everything on a map made it obvious – we needed prioritization!

Note: This is a post from before our round the world trip in 2009, but moving it to our new domain, I considered it deserves a little refresh from writing and styling perspective…

We went through some rounds, discussing ideas of potential focus areas and concluded as a first step to focus on the southern hemisphere and more specifically on Latin America, the South Pacific including New Zealand and Australia.

And with this in mind, we published the following image to “Get a first impression about the planned routing…”

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Round the WorldRound the World

Vision 2009 – Around the World in six months

Do you know this feeling, when looking at something you did about 10 years ago?

Yes, I know, it’s by no means up to your current standards and this is exactly the same for me, but reading through the first message we posted in 2009 for our friends and family to follow our steps around the world makes me feel different…it’s rather about: “This was special! How can we do it again?

This is really how it all started for Iris and myself becoming travel-addicts…

In 2008 it was confirmed that we both will have a sabbatical from our jobs. And the plan was to travel the full 6 months from July to December 2009. We were fully excited and started our long-list of ideas…

Continue reading Vision 2009 – Around the World in six months