Nobody believes me when I say that the 80 days thing is a coincidence. But it is.
We leave the day after Isabel's last exam and return the day before the first full day of school. 80 days.
Actually from take off to touch down at Winnipeg International is 79 days and 20 hours, but door to door from our house... precisely 80 days.

And a bit about the backstory. In 1993 after three years in veterinary practice Lorraine and I quit our jobs and backpacked around the world for eight months, doing everything from living in a cave in Greece (a very nice cave mind you) to camel trekking across the Rajastani desert to celebrating Christmas in Hong Kong to island hopping in Thailand to volcano climbing in Indonesia to living with a family in Samoa to... well, the list does go on and on. Everyone said, "Wow, that was the trip of a lifetime!" To which we responded, "Nooo! It can't be the only time we do that! It just can't be." We swore we would do something similar again when we had kids. It's 22 years later. Isabel is 13. Alexander is 10.
It's time.

Wednesday, July 15, 2015

Day 26 Bali Bye

Bye bye to swimming under frangipani blossoms, to lounging on batik cushions, to watching firefly reflections in rice paddies, to listening to otherwordly gamelan music drifting across the valley. Bye bye to a place of smiles, of unlocked doors, of omnipresent art, of omnipresent kitsch, of fragrance, of stench, of glimpses of... something. 


Hello to eighteen hours in airplanes and twelve hours in airports. Hello to flying across the southern Indian Ocean (transindian? transindic?), passing over a point on the exact opposite side of the globe from Winnipeg (remember the old digging to China joke? It's not China.) Hello to Africa.

Correction and clarification:
Yesterday I accidentally damned Melissa Gilbert. It turns out that she's the beloved former child star of Little House On The Prairie, Diary Of Anne Frank and The Miracle Worker. Whoops. I meant to damn Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love.
And I don't "hate yoga". Far from it. In fact I like to think I do a damn fine tree. Nothing else mind you.

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