Category: Travel Planning

This is not the article I promised to write on camping. Lea and I were going camping, but then the South got smacked by Hurricane Delta. Experienced hurricane trackers that we are, we checked the weather daily to see if Delta would veer further north or west and maybe, maybe, maybe wouldn’t rain on us too hard… But such was not to be. Our campsite in west-central Georgia was destined to get hosed by endless rain bands straight from the Gulf of Mexico. We called the park and delayed our reservation.

This was disappointing, but not altogether unexpected. After all, Lea and I are travel disaster magnets.

On our very first trip together, Lea and I went camping at Fort Pickens National Seashore at Pensacola Beach on Labor Day weekend, 2000. That year had seen a typically hot summer, but we reasoned that by Labor Day it would have cooled enough to make camping tolerable.

Hah! Had we stayed home in Baton Rouge, we would have enjoyed a record high of 104°F according to Weather Underground’s historical data archive. On Pensacola Beach, the high was “merely” 94°F, with a nighttime low of burning up in a tiny tent without even a breeze to offer relief. At least the water was cool, but that summer had also seen a spike in shark attacks along the Gulf, so we weren’t too comfortable getting in.

A few years later, we again decided to camp in the Florida Panhandle, this time at Thanksgiving, 2003. Normally, late autumn in Florida is comparable to a cool summer in the northern states, but this year Florida rewarded us with nightly lows of 49°F, 41°F, and 32°F. Had we remained one more day, we would have woken to a balmy 26°F.

The second year we were together, Lea and I went to Tickfaw State Park, less than an hour’s drive from our house in Baton Rouge. We’d invested in a brand new waterproof tent that was larger and more accommodating for the two of us (well, for me) than the 6’x6’ tent we’d taken to Pensacola. That first night at Tickfaw, a whole bayou’s worth of water fell out of the sky and we discovered exactly how waterproof our tent wasn’t. The next morning we gave up on staying any longer, packed the whole mess into our car, and went home.

In 2005 we camped in Milton, Florida, to go canoeing on the Blackwater River. It rained that first night, but not enough to deter us – we were well-practiced now at keeping the elements at bay. The rain did, however, raise the level and the speed of the Blackwater so that our canoe trip the next morning was, shall we say, exciting. I remember having trouble simply getting our canoe in the water and pointing it downstream. At a bend in the river, we paddled right into a log that barely broke the surface, sending Lea and me flying into the drink. Somehow our gear remained in the canoe. At noon we pulled ourselves onto a bank to eat lunch and dry off, while a whole church group of teenagers calmly paddled past us in pressed khakis and unwrinkled shirts.

In April 2006, we planned to spend a weekend at Dismal’s Canyon, a private campground in northwest Alabama that’s one of the few places in the world where glowworms can be found. Bad weather and tornadoes were forecast, so at the last minute we changed our reservation to Red Top Mountain State Park in Georgia to get out of the storm’s path. What happened? The worst of the storm skipped Dismal’s Canyon entirely and came straight at us. We woke after midnight to the sound of hail on our tent, ran to the car, and sheltered at the nearest Waffle House until the front went through.

The mother of all bad weather events to coincide with us trying to camp was undoubtedly the May 2010 “thousand year flood” of Tennessee’s Cumberland River. We’d met with some friends at Cedars of Lebanon State Park and planned to take a nature tour on Saturday, May 1. The rain was steady all morning, making us hunt down a covered pavilion to cook breakfast and reducing the nature tour to an indoor lecture. That afternoon we retreated to our tent to wait out the rain – until the water surrounding our campsite started to steadily rise. We didn’t even bother to fold our tent up – we just rolled it into the trunk of our car and high-tailed to our friend Melissa’s house (south of Nashville) through a zero-visibility downpour. Even when we got there, I was somewhat dismayed by the water approaching Melissa’s back patio, and even more so when watching a building float down the Cumberland on live TV.

Does correlation imply causation? Do Lea and I have especially bad travel karma? Do we actually cause these things to happen by deciding to travel somewhere? The data isn’t limited to camping trips.

We spent a week in Negril in May 2006 for a friend’s wedding. May is the start of the rainy season, but even so we weren’t expecting the monsoon that trapped us in our hotel room for three solid days while we watched the area outside our window turn into a decent-sized pond. Our trip to the Yucatan in April 2007 was greeted with unseasonable wind and cold – which didn’t stop the snorkeling companies from trying to convince us to go swimming in that year’s extremely cold and choppy coastal waters (we didn’t). In October 2013 (admittedly, again in the rainy season) our cruise stop in St. Lucia was met with a downpour excessive even for that time of year. We took an excursion to see a waterfall, but ended up standing in one.

In July 2012, we spent three weeks in East Africa, with a layover both ways in Rome. In Rome we enjoyed a heatwave with highs in excess of 100°F, and the discovery that many buildings in Rome don’t have air conditioning. (Neither were the subways, which were packed with disgruntled futbol hooligans unhappy that Italy had lost to Spain 4-0 in the 2012 Euro championship.)

We landed in Dar Es Salaam to find out there was a doctors’ strike underway. There were riots in Zanzibar before we arrived, and shortly after we left, one of the ferries to the island sank with over 800 people on board. Bombings in Mombasa kept Lea’s sister Lisa from traveling with us into Kenya, and security at our hotel there was extra-tight. We had to pass through metal detectors just to get in the door, and armed guards wouldn’t even let taxis approach unless they’d been specifically called by the concierge. (Now, that’s service!)

During our South American Odyssey, a part of Argentina we traveled through was getting over a surge of Hantavirus cases. A Yellow Fever outbreak was just getting underway in the Brazilian state of Bahia as we arrived in its capital, Salvador. To be clear, we were vaccinated against Yellow Fever, but there is no cure, vaccine, or treatment for Hantavirus, according to the CDC. It was hard enough keeping the bus schedules straight, much less the potential contagion vectors.

Don’t get me started on volcanos. Whatever the “average proximal volcanic eruption rate per traveling couple” is, Lea and I exceed it. A volcanic eruption in the Galapagos delayed our flight to Ecuador, and the leftover fumes prevented us from exploring the tunnels on Isabela Island. Earlier that year, another eruption shut down Guatemala City’s airport shortly after our stay there. Two days after we bought tickets to Iceland – two days, I tell you – the Bárðarbunga stratovolcano erupted under the Vatnajökull ice sheet. Though that ended up becoming the highlight of our trip, but when I first read the news about the eruption, I called Lea from work and said, “Seriously? Seriously?”

Whether or not you believe that Lea and I have a “natural disaster fairy” who follows us around, I’ll give you the same advice we give everyone – Before planning a trip somewhere, email us first and make sure we’re not going.

P.S. Things are afoot on my fiction writing blog: Check it out!

And we’re off! Right now Lea and I are sitting in the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport waiting on a jet plane, don’t know when we’ll be back again. Lots of our friends have been excited about our trip, have wished us luck, and even put us in touch with people we can meet along the way. Meanwhile, a small minority has responded to our plans with some variation of, “You guys are crazy! Backpacking for a year around South America? You guys are going to get killed down there!”

In honor of that sentiment, here follows a list of all the ways we plan to get killed while traveling around South America. Friends, this is for you.

“You know, every frame of this movie looks like someone’s last known photograph.”

-Joel Hodgson, MST3K Experiment 524: “Manos, The Hands of Fate”

Ecuador: Explosive Decompression

Assuming we don’t burst into flames as soon as we leave the United States, we’ll be landing completely unprepared at the Mariscal Sucre International Airport outside Quito, Ecuador. Nestled in the Andes, the second highest mountain chain on earth, we’ll be disembarking at an elevation of 7,874 feet above sea level with an atmospheric pressure of a mere 10 PSI. Now I can’t speak for Lea, but as someone who grew up at sea level in the lowlands of Louisiana, I fully expect to explode like Arnold Schwarzenegger on the surface of Mars in Total Recall.

Peru: Alien Abduction

One of the places I have to visit while we’re in Peru are the famous Nazca Lines which, as Erich Von Daniken’s classic text Chariots of the Gods informs us, are landing markers for alien spacecraft. Now if you get scooped up by a flying saucer while driving through the backroads of Alabama you can’t really be held accountable, but if you go to Nazca you’re practically begging for it.

Now this is kind of a cheat because I don’t expect the aliens to kill us. However, due to the effects of time dilation and the distance to the aliens’ home planet, I expect all of you to be long gone by the time we get back so it’s really all the same.

Bolivia: Death Road Bus Crash!

This one is almost too easy. It is a well established fact that no one has ever survived a bus ride over the Andes Mountains into or out of Bolivia. The only thing in question is whether or not someone will be there to film the event and how awesome it will look on television. Will our bus tumble sideways or do cartwheels as it plummets over a sheer cliff? Will we land with a thud or explode like every car that ever ran off a hillside in 70s and 80s television? Place your bets now, amigos!

Chile: Dehydration, Desiccation, Mummification

After having been killed crossing the border from Bolivia, we’ll enter Chile via the Atacama Desert, the driest place in the world. Of course, we will forget to bring water bottles and die of thirst while baking in the sun waiting for the next bus to come by. Here’s the cool thing about the Atacama: it’s so dry that if you die there and no one moves your body, you will be naturally mummified. According to Bernardo Arriaza’s Beyond Death: The Chinchorro Mummies of Ancient Chile, the oldest naturally mummified body found in the Atacama has been dated to 7020 B.C.

Patagonia: Consumed by an Elder God from Beyond the Shores of Eternal Darkness

In 1997, an ultra-low-frequency underwater sound referred to as “The Bloop” was detected at approximately 50⁰S 100⁰W, a remote location in the Pacific west of the southern tip of South America. The sound was loud enough to have been picked up by sensors up to 5,000 km away. It resembled the profile of a noise made by a living creature, but far more powerful than any ever measured on earth. Since then, scientists have “attributed” the noise to that of a large icequake. However…

What no one in the scientific field wants to admit out loud is that the location of the signal corresponds very closely to the suspected location of the lost sunken city of R’lyeh, prison of the dark entity known as Cthulhu. Lea and I plan to be at the southernmost tip of South America on the longest day of the year. What better time for a monster from before the dawn of time to rise from the deep and eat us all? If you gotta go, you gotta go.

Argentina: Trampled by Drunken Cattle

From the research I’ve done on Argentina (which honestly boils down to watching food programs on the Travel Channel) I gather that all they do down there is slaughter cattle, eat red meat, and drink wine. It doesn’t take a stretch of the imagination to know that sooner or later the cows are going to turn the tables on their Argentinian gaucho oppressors. It’s just our luck that we’ll be passing through the country’s scenic ranchlands when the cattle finally snap, break into the wine barrels, get thoroughly boozed up, and go on a rage-fueled rampage killing everyone in sight.

Uruguay: Sand Blisters

Our plan for Uruguay is to spend a lot of it on the beach. We’ll be there in one of the hottest months of the year, so it stands to reason we’re going to scorch our feet. We’ll consider heading back to Montevideo for medical treatment, but it’s such a long walk to the bus station and that beachside tiki bar will look soooo inviting. We shrug our shoulders and instead of getting proper care we numb ourselves with mojitos and margaritas until we pass out. Our blisters get infected overnight, and we die.

Brazil: Eaten by Everything

Ah, the Amazon. I hear Brazil has been making great strides to chop it down and turn it into Wal-Marts, but I understand that a great deal of it remains. No doubt at some point Lea and I will find ourselves hiking through dense jungle and accidentally step into a nest of bullet ants. Since the sting from a single bullet ant is the most painful of any insect on the planet, and we’ll be covered in the little bastards, we’ll lose our minds and run screaming for the nearest body of water in an attempt to get them off.

On the way to the river, we’ll trip over a giant anaconda. This will piss the snake off enough to wrap around both of us at once and swallow us whole. It will be so sluggish while digesting us live that it will be easy prey for the hungry jaguar that pounces on it from the trees. The jaguar will get a few good bites, but in their struggle the jungle cat and the snake will both fall into the river where they, and us, will all be eaten by piranhas.

Columbia: Old Age

The great thing about Columbia is that it’s the one country in the world where nothing bad has ever happened to anyone. Lea and I will love it so much that we’ll decide not to come back. She’ll teach English and I’ll set up a snow-cone stand. The climate is so excellent, the mountains are so beautiful, the seaside is so lovely, and the people are so friendly that we’ll spend the next five decades in blissful semi-retirement until finally uploading our brains into shiny new android bodies, the Matrix, or robots exploring the surface of Mars (whichever becomes viable first).

We lived happily ever after, and were never heard from again.

Have you ever updated something on your computer, have it get stuck at 95% and just freeze? Yeah, that’s how Lea and I feel right now. Our flight leaves for Ecuador a week from Wednesday and while we’ve been pushing and pushing to get ready, it feels as if we’ve been stuck at 95% and can’t get all the way finished. So far the only thing we’ve completed is rehoming our cat. The rest is just… Argh!

Here’s a list,  because the Internet likes lists.

Boxing Up, Selling, and Otherwise Disposing

We’ve been asked several times if we’re keeping our home while we’re away. Since it’s just an apartment (one where the property owners recently decided to install outdoor speakers that blare pop music 24 hours a day), no we’re not staying. But that means that every item we’re not taking with us needs to be either boxed up and stored, sold off, or thrown away. We’ve been downsizing in stages for years now, but we’ve still just got stuff.

We’ve sold a bunch, including one of our cars (sale pending on the other). We’ve donated books, DVDs, and comics to the library. We’ve thrown many things in the dumpster (with more still to go), and we’ve put lots and lots of our belongings into boxes. Nevertheless, there’s still a lot left because we can’t stop living and need things like clothing and food, at least for a while. There was a rapid frenzy of boxing things several weeks ago, then everything has slowed to a crawl as we hit items that 1) we still might need, or 2) are large, awkward, and hard to fit anywhere.

Signing Our Lives Away

Not to mention the metric butt-ton of paperwork, contracts, and legal documents we’ve got to get in order. We’ve packed up and moved before without as much hassle – you don’t have to get your whole lives on paper just to change cities or change jobs. Leaving the country on your own nickel without benefit of an employer’s per diem or insurance coverage, well, that’s an Amazonian tree frog of a different color.

First, even though we don’t anticipate any terrible danger per se, it’s not a bad idea to get one’s wills and advance healthcare directives in order. And, since we’ll certainly need someone stateside to take care of financial matters (and check our P.O. Box from time to time) we’re hiring a personal assistant company and giving a family member our power of attorney. All of which requires lengthy forms to be filled out, signed, witnessed and/or notarized, filed with the courts, copied, and mailed to all necessary parties. We’ve checked off more than half of those boxes, but there are still some left to go and the clock is ticking.

And that’s the easy part. The hard part? Finding health coverage. We’re losing our employer-sponsored health care and going out on our own. Most U.S. plans are only good if you reside in the states, so we’re having to go with an expat policy. Which meant finding one with halfway decent reviews, filling out a lengthy application, then filling out even lengthier questionnaires about our medical history and current issues, every one of which pushes that premium up, up, and away. The one we chose (not going to mention who, because they’re not paying me to advertise) has an expat plan that also offers coverage in the U.S. but at twice the price. What’s even better, the U.S. coverage isn’t ACA compliant, so we’re still going to get stiffed with a tax penalty at the end of the year. The solution? Ditch the U.S. coverage and just make sure we get medical treatment anywhere except the United States if something happens to us.

Where are we in that process? Well, there’s one more form to sign, scan, and send back in. As with everything else, we’re still at 95%.

Wining and Dining

Understandably, before we start our grand adventure all of our friends and family want to see us off. This has led to traveling around to visit folks and a lot of meeting people for lunch and/or dinner in and around Atlanta. Which has been great – we love eating out and spending time with people – but it’s been chewing into our prep time and causing last-minute waistline expansion which we’ll have to make up for by switching to a ramen-only diet before we leave. Seeing all our friends one more time before we go is a welcome respite from the dreaded “doing stuff” and at the same time the nagging, responsible voices in the back of our heads keep telling us we ought to be at home printing another form or packing another box.

To try and take care of a lot of goodbyes in one fell swoop, we’re hosting a “Rum Sail Away” going away party for ourselves and two other friends who are also leaving town. (Hey Sonica! Hey Erin!) This will hopefully be a great time, let us see a bunch of folks all at once, and clean out my Caribbean rum collection which has been growing faster than I’ve been drinking.

Once we’ve scratched that off the to-do list, we’ve got a plan to push that 95% completion up to at least 99%. We will spend Monday driving around, signing and filing documents, returning overdue library books, picking up prescriptions, and generally putting the last nail in the paperwork’s coffin. On Tuesday we’re not going to leave the apartment or communicate with anyone (except via GrubHub) until the apartment is Packed. Caput. Finito.

Wednesday I pick up a moving truck. Thursday we move the Stuff into Storage. Friday will be for odds and ends, and sometime before we leave we’ll have to give the apartment a thorough scrub down. Even though we know the apartment complex is going to rip everything out and renovate the place as soon as we’re out the door, we still want our damn deposit back.

And then, just maybe, we’ll sit back and binge Narcos on Netflix until our plane takes off.

Stay tuned, compadres.