Vantastic Voyage

Our trip destination has changed a couple of times as some of you now know. We went from taking a van through South America, to driving from Seattle to Panama (the country) and back, driving all through the U.S., and doing the same in Europe. After much deliberation and discussion, we decided to go with Europe. The U.S. will have to wait for now and we still have a great desire to see more of our country. The allure of Europe’s similar ease of travel and experiencing a wide variety of cultures, languages, cuisine and libations were all too hard to pass up. Though the U.S. has plenty of interesting culture and a variety of foods, the contrast is much greater overall in Europe. We can try all kinds of food by shopping in grocery stores on the cheap, which is what we will rely on primarily. Dining out will be a luxury on our trip and is not in the budget to take part in on a regular basis. My recent experience of shopping at grocery stores for food in countries between Norway and Spain averaged out to $8 a person, per day, and we ate and drank well.

We have done a bit of brainstorming for the last few months about items we would like to have in our van and concepts for how we would like to build out the inside. We are planning on getting a few of the essentials from IKEA and did a bit of testing for mattress pads. We had found a van that was 5 hours west of London that was already built out for living and traveling in and even had a wood burning stove installed in it. That would have been a nice addition we could have used and pulled out of there once the weather warmed up.

Our departure date has been set back by one month and we will now be leaving in early November. I received an offer to fill a temporary job marketing for Cascadia College’s International Programs department. The pay is good and I will be traveling and marketing in Asia for 3 weeks as another perk. We could use a little extra money and a less stressful departure. I am grateful for the opportunity and am looking forward to seeing a couple friends in China and Vietnam.

Ratha will pick up jobs nannying if her current employer finds her replacement by the end of September (her original last day). She is a hot commodity in the nannying community for good reason.

Ratha and I started a joint bank account last weekend and are closing in fast on our goal to raise money for the trip. We are looking at checklists and trying to think through the gear we will be bringing with us. We can check 200 pounds of baggage which will hopefully comprise most of our things we intend on taking. We figure after the climbing gear and the kayak we will have just over 100 pounds to work with. More details on that when we get closer to the departure date. We will be doing an inventory to show what we bring with us and keep track of what items we could go without and those we wish we’d had from the start.

We just came up with our domain name and have a new Instagram account specifically hosting our trip related photos. Pretty jacked up about our domain name, but turns out that we are not the only ones to come up with the creative name Vantastic Voyage on Instagram.

Lastly, we have another decision to make. After deciding we would go to Europe, the Netherlands looked like the best place to start as they have a very large buyer and reseller of new and used vans. Since then, I have found that arranging all the appropriate paperwork needed to buy and insure a van as a foreigner is easiest and fastest in the UK. The downside is that the majority of vans in our budget have their steering wheels on the right hand side when the majority of countries we will be traveling to also drive on the right side, making it a bit more difficult. In addition, the van has a good chance of being a manual shifting transmission. I just took Ratha through her first lesson in my sister’s car, Rosie. I was quite impressed with her natural ability, though she was quite a bit stressed out the entire time. Germany is our third option for a starting point as they also have affordable vans and a good variety. We are in need of more information before we can decide and I have not heard back from any companies I have contacted in all of the aforementioned countries.