We’re going to essen­tially be trav­el­ing around the world. Flying from Vancouver, Canada, to Istanbul in early 2010, we will be trav­el­ing south through Turkey down the Aegean coast. We’ll hop a ferry from Bodrum or Marmaris to one of the Greek islands, and intend to island hop our way over to the Peloponnese to visit Sparta and Mycenae.

From Patras, Greece, we will likely take an overnight ferry to Brindisi or Bari in Italy, in order to make the journey up the Adriatic coast to Lanciano, near Ortona, where Laura went to high school. We’d be crazy not to head to Rome, but for now, that is the extent of our west­ward ambi­tions. It’s much too expens­ive to stay in Western Europe any longer than we have to. From Italy we’ll seek afford­able trans­port­a­tion back to Turkey to con­tinue east.

From here the plan gets a bit sketch­ier, as we intend to let things unfold as they will. The goal is to secure tourist visas for Iran around this point, which will involve some paper­work. After explor­ing more of inland Turkey (Pamukale, Cappodocia, and Hattusha, the ancient capital of the Hittite Empire, among others), we’ll hope­fully cross the border at Gurbulak into Persia.

Broadly speak­ing, from here we will travel south­east into Iran, learn­ing much about this deeply mis­un­der­stood (and often maligned) country. We will fly from some­where in Iran across the cur­rently dan­ger­ous Stans to arrive in north­ern India, even­tu­ally cross­ing into Nepal. Finally, we will fly from Kathmandu into Southeast Asia, where we intend to acquire fully legit­im­ate work visas to teach English in Thailand.

That’s about all the advance plan­ning we have so far. I’m sure we’ll deviate from this, but you’ll have to check back to see exactly how.