We've told our bosses, found someone to rent the house, gotten our shots, and figured out the general itinerary. It's starting to get more real and more exciting. I have often felt that the anticipation of a big trip can be as exciting as the trip itself.
We will be gone for 6months. It's something like our honeymoon. It just made so much sense. We had both always dreamed of a trip like this, so there was no convincing necessary when I brought it up. Alex was even ready to go for a year, but I think that might have been too much for me. As it is, I know I will miss our friends and family, Toastie and Kitty, even the fridge and TV (I'm truly the intrepid type). But of course all that will still be here when we get back (unless the renters burn the place down).
We will spend at least the first couple of months in language schools to really get up to speed on our Spanish. The only goal we've set for ourselves is to be mostly fluent by the time we get back. There's just something intangibly cool about being able to really communicate in two languages and we would love to raise the kids bilingual. When we get back, we plan to have 2.4kids, buy an SUV, a big screen, and start going to the mall on weekends. It's all planned.
We will arrive in Quito, Ecuador and do a language program there for a month. That place seems to be like the language school capital of SA, so there are lots of solid options. Some of "teaching trips" and other locations in Ecuador, so we probably won't spend the whole month in that one city. Then we head north a bit to Colombia and do another language program in Medellin. After that we fly all the way down to Buenos Aires and work our way up over and up through Argentina, Chile, Bolivia and Peru. Why so screwy? We are trying to avoid the rainy seasons and end up in Bolivia and Peru when they are nice.
Stay tuned. I promise to keep the posts more interesting than anything else you will ever read on the internet. Lots of pretty pix too.
