Nothing is certain yet, but Tracy and I (Adam) are at the beginning stages of planning an adventure. We are hoping for this to serve as a way to communicate with our friends and family about what we are doing while we are away, to help document all the adventures we have along the way, and to give insight into our planning and implementation.
As our blog title suggests, our adventure will include a trip through Central and South America. (If you have not seen Motorcycle Diaries, stop reading now and go rent it immediately). We are not sure how closely our path will follow that of Che and Ernesto, but you get the idea.
Our idea has actually evolved over the last 6-9 months. At the risk of oversimplification, it has been something like this:
Tracy went back to school at the Ag Institute at NCSU. She is loving it and is actually now looking into graduate school in sustainable agriculture/sustainable development. I (Adam) have been working for Child Protective Services for about 2 and a half years. I enjoy my work, but must admit that once my commitment ends in September, I will be ready for a slight change. With Tracy finishing at the Ag Institute and my own commitment to work for CPS for 3 years ending shortly thereafter we began to consider what we might want to do next. We are both terrified of being trapped in a mortgage, or having kids or even pets and feeling weighed down, so we decided we should take advantage of our restlessness, freedom, and youth and plan to do something that may not be feasible down the road.
Plan number 1 was to go live in Guatemala for a year. We both have spent time studying/hanging out in Guatemala and love it there. It was the natural choice as we are familiar with how to live in Guatemala (transportation, housing, eating, currency, Visas, etc.) I was considering employment as a teacher or something interesting while Tracy was looking into working on a Macadamia nut farm that does a lot of work in the communities doing sustainable agriculture type work.
This seemed exciting, but it is also familiar. We both love Latin America and would like to see much more of it. We then ran across an organization called WWOOF. This organization is a network of organic and sustainable farms throughout the world. The farms vary widely in their crops, their purpose, their philospohy and their locations. As we began to think more, learn more, and talk more this became our new goal. While we leave open the idea that our adventure could continue to evolve, this is where we are currently at in our planning.
As it stands now, we have found farms in Argentina, Peru, Chile, Ecuador, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica and Mexico. We hope to depart sometime in the fall and spend about a year travelling from farm to farm. Our plan is to fly into southern South America (Chile or Argentina) and work our way back to North Carolina by bus (and boat).
Our thoughts about this and excitement is more complicated than just hoping for a vacation. So hopefully as we plan, we can share more of our thoughts about this on the blog and have a chance to hear the responses of friends and family.
*note- we are both technologically challenged, so hopefully we can figure this thing out along the way and maybe even upload pictures and such as we travel.
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