The countdown to departure is on!

Work is done, the packing has begun and so have our mixed emotions of excitement and nervousness (but mostly excitement). For those of you who we haven't been in touch with lately, we are taking off on an around the world trip on November 3, 2009 returning in August 2010! This has been something that we wanted to do at some point, but never really thought it would be possible. We've been education and career oriented for the past 10 years and found ourselves unsettled and wanting to do something more...so after much deliberation and weighing all of the pros and cons, we have decided that it's now or never. We were bothered by the indirect (or direct, depending on how you see it!) societal pressures to start a family and knowing that we will eventually do that, we felt that now is as good of time as any to see the world.

Then came the decision of where to go and for how long. To be honest, we pieced together an itinerary and are planning to go with the flow as much as we can (and for those of you who know me well know that this is not how I usually roll!)So after a few Friday nights of "trip planning", we came up with our schedule. It is as follows:

November 2009- March 2010 = NEW ZEALAND
March 2010- April 2010 = AUSTRALIA
April 2010- June 2010 = SOUTHEAST ASIA
June 2010- July 2010 = EUROPE
July 2010 = PEI
August 2010 = EDMONTON

We've got many destinations planned for each area, but are going to be spending the most time living in Wellington, NZ for 4 months at the beginning of the trip. We'll be sure to keep you posted on the particular destinations in each country we visit.

So here we are, packing up our condo (we are out of our lease on October 31, 2009) and wondering where and how we accumulated all of the stuff we did!? We arrived in Edmonton "for 6 months to a year" with our 2 door Honda Civic packed solid...that was it. Three years later and we are finding ourselves packing up our belongings (way too much stuff) and saying "goodbye for now" to our great western friends!

We will try to post on a weekly basis and update you on our adventures. As well, we will be setting up a skype account as this is how we plan to communicate throughout the 9 months. So get your skype accounts up and running! We'll post our skype info before we leave. In addition to skype, we'll be continuing with our emails:

Julia - campju@hotmail.com
Clement - clement7ca@yahoo.com
Julia and Clement - clem_and_julia@hotmail.com

Back to the boxes...