He said:
Thirty-three thousand feet somewhere in the Pacific Ocean
Life takes some strange turns. Never in my dreams would I have imagined I'd be sitting in seat 37A
on the first leg of a trip to circle the globe with only my whim as a schedule and single duffel bag as home.
Yet here Kim and I are, still practically newlyweds, beginning a circumnavigation that we probably won't
complete until the end of this year. The details from this past week are still buzzing in my brain. I entered
the final checkmarks on the 117-item to-do
list only yesterday. The bills are prepaid, our garage is clean, the dog has been handed over, the myriad medicines
are packed, our five cameras and seven lenses are safely stowed, all travel documents are photocopied in quadruplicate,
we've paid our income tax (early!) and said all of the farewells. My characteristically anal preparations are
She said:
Here I sit on this plane bound for Bali and then, the world. I sat for my pediatric
nurse practitioner boards at 9 p.m. last night and am still in a post-test daze. I hardly know
what I've brought with me since Randy so sweetly stepped in and packed for me to give me time
to study and take the exam. My only responsibility for this trip was organizing the medications
we'll need for the next six months. I've promised not to give away all of our medicine to sick
fellow travelers like I did on our 3-month honeymoon trek in Nepal last year. Word gets out that you're
a nurse and suddenly you're a walking pharmacy!
This trip, especially the Africa portion, has been a dream of mine since I was a child. I first satisfied my love
for travel by becoming a "traveling nurse" for three years. Every three to six months I traveled to a new assignment
of my choice and had the luxury
(He said, cont'd) complete,
and now, after 3 full-time months of planning and packing, nothing stands between the journey and us. Of course, none
of this seems real -- I mean how could it? How can you really know the feeling, the routine, or the lifestyle of
vagabonding around the world whenever and wherever you want until you actually do it?
On the other hand, I'm certainly not a stranger to travel. It was my deep-seated wanderlust that, over of
the course of a decade, migrated this Midwesterner from Dayton, Ohio to the outdoor dreamscape of the Pacific
Northwest and to one of its largest employers, Microsoft. Unfortunately the 70-hour weeks at the software giant
left little time for extended travel, so on those occasions that I had a couple of days to load some film in my
camera and head for the mountains, I kept up the same frenetic pace in the wilderness as I did at work. Then,
unbelievably, I became the field program manager for Microsoft's short-lived adventure travel website, Mungo Park.
Though much of my job anchored me to Seattle, I did go on numerous trips that gave me a glimpse of foreign landscapes
and cultures, albeit through sleep-deprived eyelids. The round-the-clock demands of editing and sending live daily reports
and images made it all but impossible to savor the trip as a normal traveler. It was the cruelest of ironies. Hopefully
not so with this trip.
Other than the major airport hubs etched in our airline tickets, we've given ourselves the flexibility
and time to follow our whims. One of our goals is to send back images that capture perspectives of
other worlds and other times.
(She said, cont'd) of living in Alaska, Hawaii, Washington D.C., Los Angeles, Dallas, and Seattle. I chose
to settle in Seattle as it held two things I love dearly... mountains and my grandma.
I have always had a desire to be involved in the healthcare needs of developing countries. I have had
the most enriching experiences working at Harborview Medical Center's Children's Refugee Clinic in Seattle
and can't wait to see the homelands of our patients. Since we're in each country for such a short time, I
was unable to pre-arrange any medical volunteer projects, but I brought my stethoscope in hopes of observing
in clinics that we stumble upon. Training with a Nepali doctor at the end of last year's trip to Nepal to
fulfill part of my nurse practitioner requirements has made me all the more passionate about medicine in
developing countries.
Medical training is not the only thing I brought back from Nepal. Randy and I also added a four-legged member to our family: a
little Tibetan-Mastiff mutt whom we named "Khumbu," after the Mt. Everest region where we bought her. We will miss our high-altitude
hound over the next months.
I am so excited to be able to see how many people in the world live and to expose myself to other ways of
life. Hopefully this trip will help us choose the next direction our lives will take.
Dispatches:
Randy and Kim Kerr circled the globe in 1999 making the first 360-degree iPIX™ photographs of many of the world's most stunning places.
Their images and journal entries were previously featured as
Route360: Round the World Roaming with Randy and Kim Kerr on Altrec.com.
He said:
Thirty-three thousand feet somewhere in the Pacific Ocean
Life takes some strange turns. Never in my dreams would I have imagined I'd be sitting in seat 37A
on the first leg of a trip to circle the globe with only my whim as a schedule and single duffel bag as home.
She said:
Here I sit on this plane bound for Bali and then, the world. I sat for my pediatric
nurse practitioner boards at 9 p.m. last night and am still in a post-test daze. I hardly know
what I've brought with me since Randy so sweetly stepped in and packed for me to give me time
to study and take the exam. My only responsibility for this trip was organizing the medications
we'll need for the next six months. I've promised not to give away all of our medicine to sick
fellow travelers like I did on our 3-month honeymoon trek in Nepal last year. Word gets out that you're
a nurse and suddenly you're a walking pharmacy!
