The Final Destination

After spending a few weeks relaxing from our incredibly stress-free vacation on the Greek islands, Amanda and I were ready to do some more traveling. I flew to Ann Arbor to spend some time enjoying their unseasonably cool August. Our days were spent playing ladder ball, sipping wine, and eating the most incredible dinners courtesy of Master Chef Ruth Petran and Master Griller Bob Petran. However, in the interest of saving everyone’s keyboards from saliva and drool induced meltdown, I will deny the urge to go over each meal in detail.

We thoroughly enjoyed our grand finale of the good life of all play and no work before our official move to Tucson. Not to place Tucson in a negative light. It is, however, no coincidence that upon our arrival Amanda will begin her massive push to achieve the greatness she had in Rochester and I will begin Law School, a sharp contrast to the lives of travelers.

On my fourth day in Ann Arbor we loaded the Hyundai with the deftness and precision of the world champion of Tetris. Neither nook nor cranny stood a chance against our superior packing skills. By Friday afternoon the Sante Fe was sagging beneath the weight of Amanda’s entire business, a 48” glass table strapped to the roof, and enough artwork to open our own wing at the Louvre.

Our final journey back to the real world began on Saturday morning. Had we not gone drinking with Bob and Ruth the night before, we just might have made it out of Nebraska. Yet, after passing through the potholes of Michigan, sprawling suburbs of Illinois, and the rolling corn fields of Iowa, it was a roadside campsite in the cornhusker state that we settled on for night #1. We were able to catch a few hours of sleep between the constant barrage of freight trains and 18 wheelers that assaulted our tired ear drums all night. I surrendered at 3:30 AM and decided to pack up the tent. It was an early start to a grueling day.

Sixteen hours of driving can be worse than waking up with your head sewn to the carpet. Yet, the beautiful scenery in Colorado worked hard to fray the strains of sitting upright for so long. The massive leather bound photo album behind my seat destroyed any hopes I had of reclining to an even remotely comfortable seating position. After passing through some heavy hitters in the famous ski resort lineup such as Breckinridge and Vail, we headed south past Telluride to the small ski town of Durango. The beautiful peaks surrounded us with the realization that you really don’t have to travel far to see some of the most stunning nature in the world.

We had our first real meal in two days at a Mexican restaurant in Durango and then drove our final hour to Mesa Verde National Park. Once our tent was erected we took a sunset hike on Knife Edge Trail. It skirts the edge of the Mesa allowing us to see for hundreds of miles over the flat valley below. Afterwards we attended a talk by a park ranger about the storytelling tradition of the Pueblo peoples that inhabited this land over a thousand years ago and still do to this day. We definitely heard the spirits talking that night. We fell asleep under a bright full moon in the desert: our new home.

In the morning we took a tour of Cliff Palace, the largest cliff dwelling in North America. After visiting dozens of ruins in the last few months, it still managed to impress us by its size and level of preservation.

By noon we were heading towards New Mexico for our final day of driving. We passed through the Navajo Indian reservation, the eerie specter of Shiprock, and were welcomed to Arizona via I40 by the incredibly nostalgic Route 66 town of Holbrook and a lush and green palette of plant life. It seems the arid forests and deserts of Arizona have had a good share of rain the past few years. How beautiful it has become. As we headed south we passed from high desert to pine forests, over red rivers, and into the Sonora desert. This dry desert is home to more species of plants and animals than any ecosystem in North America. Now you can add two more: Amanda and Leighton. We drove up to our new home just after a rainstorm and in the middle of a colorful sunset that is so common to the desert.

And so, after nearly 2300 miles we are here. Our new lives have officially begun. We were welcomed with open arms and a warm dinner by my parents. We have no income, no friends, and so many unknowns. We hope Tucson is as good to us as Rochester was. It’s a high peak to summit but we have faith. Amanda’s business will grow and I will study. Of course all are welcome to our spare bedroom on Croyden St.

Epilogue of the Wanderers

Millions of people travel in this world. Many of these tourists take packaged tours with guides and travel agents. However, many go as Amanda and I did. They take the bare minimum of supplies; a couple of shirts, some underwear, and a toothbrush. They put these items on their back and leave. We met hundreds of such travelers. Some had no plans and had been gone for more than a year. Others had 1 year’s worth of plane tickets with plans to spend no more than 2 weeks in each country. Some worked as they traveled. Some took many drugs. Others hung out in the same hostel for months. Some traveled to escape their reality. Some were looking for themselves. Some had no budget. Some had the smallest budget imaginable. Some traveled alone. Many traveled with their loved one. Many more traveled alone only between traveling with new friends they met along the way. We traveled with people from Canada, Norway, France, Australia, Israel, India, Argentina, Ireland, Scotland, Germany, Sweden, New Zealand, and many other places around the world. And while we all had our own agendas, our own plans, our own time line, and our own budget, we all shared one thing in common: we had all sacrificed so much to see what the world had to offer.

While Amanda and I would love to look at ourselves as pioneers, we are not. We simply are two Americans who created an opportunity for ourselves to get out of our familiar lives of work and play to explore this vast planet we live on. Go ahead and browse through this blog again. In the last seven months we packed in a lifetime of stories, adventures, sights, sounds, and food sickness. We saw so much. In typical American fashion we moved fast and tried to see it all. Yet, we failed miserably. Once we got to Peru, our first country, we realized we could not see it all. Once we reached India we understood why everyone told us 25 days was not enough. The vastness of this world and diversity of its inhabitants is astronomically huge. In a way, it is overwhelming. Take India for example. Life is simply a struggle to survive in India. The majority of over 1 billion people try every day to find safe water, and food, shelter. Yet, the resources simply cannot be spread thin enough. Where do we fit in as tourists? In Bolivia we saw a new president, Bolivia’s first with Inca roots, fighting a wealthy Spanish population in the Southeast in a country that has been ruled by Spaniards since the occupation in the 1400s. In Turkey we saw a country caught on the fence between the westernized world and decidedly un-western Muslim religion that 97 percent of its inhabitants practice. Many of the countries we visited are all too familiar with terrorist attacks and civil unrest and strikes and chaos. We were simply tourists there to observe from afar. Some countries made us miss the comforts of home more than others. We have it good in America. Sure most of the world hates us and our foreign policies. But we have to ask ourselves if this matters as long as we can flush our toilets, buy our fancy electronics, sip our Starbucks, and buy our cheap gasoline ($13.5/gallon in Turkey). I don’t mean to sound sarcastic or even elitist. These truly are the things you begin to miss. We have rights in this country unlike any others. We have laws that protect us and police who don’t ask for bribes (often). America has its issues much like any country, but it is a wonderful place to call home.

Maybe this is why we travel. It is good to leave for a while and forget about the mundane media reports on the price of gas or Obama’s preacher. It is good to step outside of our American cruise ship to catch a glimpse of the beautiful and turbulent ocean that surrounds us; if nothing more than to realize how grateful we are for all the comforts of life in a western world.

We missed our friends, we missed our family. We missed knowing what was happening around us. We didn’t miss the hectic schedules and American work ethic. We didn’t miss 14-hour workdays and only spending a couple hours a week with each other. We didn’t miss the American media or the election news. In fact, there is a long list of the things we didn’t miss so much about home.

It seems Americans, much like any country, have the tendency to become engulfed by the microcosm of their lives. This is only natural. Why worry about the ban on head-scarves at public universities in Turkey when it’s Muslims that wear head-scarves and Muslims who are killing American soldiers in Iraq? Who cares if Argentina is facing a nationwide strike due to taxes on beef exports that could send the country into its second massive recession in 10 years when we can still buy a Big Mac for $3 any time we want? It is easy to view the world through our American goggles. This is what I loved about our trip. We saw the world in a different light. We hope that my words and Amanda’s photos acted as a portal of this perspective for our friends and families. We want this blog to not only share our experiences, but to reveal a small portion of the vast world that exists beyond our borders and TV screens.

We hope we can carry all of the wonderful experiences with us as our journey continues on the homeland. Life is, after all, nothing more than collection of experiences. We strive to find a way to shape them into some meaning now that we've returned to a different reality. We certainly have a more global perspective and we hope it will last as I begin to bury my head in books for Law school and Amanda begins building her successful business from scratch all over again.

We want to thank all of our readers and encourage you to check back every few weeks. We have decided to keep the blog going because life can be an adventure – even if we aren’t stopping thieves, escaping road blocks, getting published in a national magazine, or hiking the Inca trail. We have seen so much of the world and it has been a bittersweet ending to this chapter in our lives. We will miss the life of a tourist. Yet, we are excited to see what life brings us next.

And because ending with a quote just feels right, I will leave you with J.R.R. Tolkien:
“Not all those who wander are lost.”

Blink of an Eye

The final tale of our journey is indeed a wonderful one. In fact our merrymaking has been so intense in the last 2 weeks that our blog has suffered dearly. Who has time to write when you’re exploring an entire island by scooter? Why go online when dozens of beautiful beaches await us, lounge chairs and umbrellas galore? No time for pictures when there are so many gyros pita stands to try. Once Nick and Lisa landed in Santorini our travel brains seemed to turn off. These final two weeks were the only section of our 7 month adventure that was strategically planned. Hotels were reserved, ferries were booked, and budgets were thrown to the wind. This was the Greek islands in the summer, there where 4 of us, then 5, then 4 again, and we had more fun than can possibly fit into one of our Eagle Creek back packs. The alcohol was flowing and the mornings grew shorter and shorter as we partied our way closer to the finish line. And while time has erased so many details in my sun and beer soaked brain, I wish to stop with the generalities and fill in as many blanks as possible in the grand finale of Hablog Ingles.

Thira (Santorini)

Known as one of the most touristed islands of them all, Santorini, despite the throbbing crowds, did not disappoint. We visited the White beach, a beautiful outcrop of limestone that slid in the ocean creating a small beach of a beautiful color. We drove our scooters to the northern end of Oia to watch the sunset amongst hundreds of tourists. After the crowd applauded the sun’s final descent into night, a full moon made its glorious debut directly behind us. It was a memorable scene as we perched ourselves high in the bleached city that suspended itself on the edge of the cliffs, hundreds of feet above the sea. Thira is thought to be the site to the largest volcanic eruption in the history of the world. In 1500 BC the island’s entire center exploded into the atmosphere 30 km high creating a massive caldera that soon filled with sea water. It is one of nature’s masterpieces and the cause for all the crowds in Sanotrini. Yet, when the cruise ships depart and the sweet light arrives, this island is very romantic. The four of us relaxed, drank wine, and caught up on old times while staring off into the sea from our hotel.

Amorgos

After 4 hours on the slow boat, we arrived in the very un-touristed island of Amorgos. This island is basically a massive mountain protruding from the sea. We loved the contrast of its tranquility and serenity compared to Santorini. Again we rented two scooters because this is an amazing way to experience a Greek island. Here we went on a hike above the sea, and visited many beautiful classic white towns. We took the bus to a monastery that, because the Greeks love to do it, clung to the side of a cliff like the pickle from my quarter-pounder that now sticks to the window of McDonalds.

Naxos

In Naxos, an old friend from France that Nick and I met in Costa Rica joined us. C’eline was happy to see us waiting for her at the port when she arrived. Now that the party had really started, the five of us rented an apartment near a very nice beach and lounged around all day. The five of us enjoyed the shallow waters as we tossed the Frisbee for hours. We had a wonderful seafood dinner that night and before we knew it we were off to …

Mykonos

As we stepped into the scorching heat of a bus parked in the sun, a fat sweaty man soon followed. He looked at his passengers – a rag tag bunch of independent travellers eager to see the island. “Welcome to Mykonos” he mumbled as his hand reached up for the stereo and the house music began pumping through the sound system. As our ride began and our heart beats assumed the rhythm of the music we knew that Mykonos would be intense. Mykonos, at least the part of Mykonos that the five of us experienced, is a never ending party. Our nights started at 11 and ended at 4 am. We sat at the beach among hundreds of party animals, a dance club party filled the background with all 3 genders joining in on the fun.
It is a beautiful island with some incredibly scenic towns and never ending white-washed buildings. But who cares when you’re gettin’ down at the night club SPACE or cruising the never-ending bars and restaurants that line every nook and cranny of this once sleepy place? We had lots of fun in Mykonos and though we had to say goodbye to C’eline, we were happy to be moving on.

Tinos

This unknown was an added island as we decided three nights of Mykonos was too much for us. Turns out it was well worth the stop. This was old world Greece. Finally, we found towns with no tourist shops and only the occasional taverna. We took a drive at sunrise in our rented shoebox-of-a-car. It was a fitting farewell to our version of a 5 island tour.

Athens

Athens was the final stop of more than 100 for us. We made it. This is it. This is a dump. OK, so first impressions aren’t always accurate. Athens is a city that demands your attention to produce good results. While much of it is a ghetto, a little discovery will produce excellent eateries, wonderful gyros pitas, awesome bars, great vistas, nice beaches, and yes, the Acropolis. It’s too bad that so many tourists spend a whirlwind day at the Acropolis, Agora, and wonderful museum before boarding a ferry to the islands. It was a really nice city to spend our final three days. Since we had three full days, we did as Athenians do. We saw Mamma Mia at one of Athen’s outdoor movie theaters. Afterwards, we danced to some real music – none of the Mykonos house mixes here. The weather was perfect with a nice breeze for 3 straight days. We dined like kings and stayed out late. On the last night we climbed to the top of Lycabettus hill for a stunning 360 degree sunset over one the oldest cities of the world.

And then we flew home on four different flights. Just like that, the journey had ended. Seven months, thirteen countries, in the blink of an eye.

The Home Stretch

The sole of my right shoe is now peeled back a few inches from the toe. Amanda’s favorite shirt has elongated itself into a dress from so many hand washes in a hotel sink, and drying over the back of a chair. Our hair is long and shabby, our clothes need replacing. Yes, as I sit here in our beautiful hotel perched on the scenic caldera of the Greek island of Santorini, I am painfully aware that the end is near. Six months ago, this time would never come. Five months ago we had thousands of adventures in front of us. Last month we still had two countries on our list. Now there is Greece.
Before getting ahead of myself, I must back-track 1 week to Turkey. After taking a plunge off the mountain with the Mediterranean as my backdrop, we took a bus inland towards the ruins of Heiropolis in Pamukkale. This ancient Roman city resists the urge to be bland by perching itself atop a large outcrop of limestone terraces. The Romans shaped them into pools and what is left are stunning waterfalls of cool spring water into dozens of beautifully shaped pools over a bleach white landscape of calcium rich soil. It made for an incredible sunset. The ruins were crowned by an amazing Roman theatre – one of the best preserved in Asia. What might have caught our attention the most was the hundreds of bikini clad women, mostly Russian, posing in terraces for pictures. The beach was a hundred miles away yet everyone was in their bikini taking a swim. Considering the Turkish tourists wore headscarves and coats, it made for some bizarre contrasts.
We then headed for our final Turkish stop at the ruins of Ephesus. Regarded as one of the best preserved Roman cities in the world, we were certainly impressed. However, the stifling heat, encroaching forest fire, and crushing mass of cruise-ship tourists had us moving on our way fairly quickly to the port town of Marmaris. From here we took a pricey catamaran to the ancient Greek island of Rhodes.

Our guide book told us we’d either like Rhodes or love it. However it was dead wrong. These descriptives are far too weak and commonplace to truly explain the way we felt while roaming the ancient streets of Rhodes town on the northern tip of this large island.
Maybe it should have read: you will want to give up all your material possessions, renounce your citizenship to the US, climb a mountain, climb five mountains, do everything you hate – even listen to country music, just to be in Rhodes. It was fantastic. And all we had to do was give a company 50 euros each to get here! The old town is surrounded by ancient walls, 16 meters thick. The cobble stoned streets demand that you take your time as you stroll through crooked passageways, tunnels, and old, old, old. We loved our little apartment off the street. It was as though we had always lived there. And though the crowds could be intense, it was not difficult to find the quite streets where cats and old ladies still reigned supreme over mass tourism.

We took an excursion to the famous town of Lindos on the Eastern coast of Rhodes for a day of scorched skin, floating in the turquoise waters, and beer sipping.

After waking to a minor earthquake on our last morning in Rhodes, we boarded an 18 seat plane and now we are in Santorini; an island which speaks for itself. My sister Lisa and high school friend Nick will be meeting us here shortly. It is the beginning of the end and never have I experienced such a strong sense of the word “bittersweet”. We can’t believe our lives of travel are nearing an end but wow has it been great. We can’t believe we only have 2 weeks left but… we have two weeks to spend in Greece! Life is good. No, life is great.

Sailing the Med at 6000 ft

4th of July

“This man stole my passport!!!” A small crowd quickly grew in numbers to engulf the scene that was unfolding in front of a fruit stand in the Western Mediterranean city of Kas (pronounced kash). Fists started flying as I held the man by my shirt.

Five minutes earlier, as Amanda and I strolled through this beautiful Turkish beach town, Amanda stopped me and told me something that really caught my attention. With her right pointer finger extended Amanda said: “Leighton, isn’t that the man that was on the beach yesterday?”

I turned for a look and began to follow him. It would be hard to call this a chase, but the guy sure was taking some strange turns as he wound his way through the small alleys and shops in the center of town. After nearly being run over by a kid on a scooter, my hand reached for what I suddenly realized was the exact shirt I had been wearing the day before.

Had I spoken Turkish there would have been many wonderful and glorious phrases spilling from my seething mouth at that moment. “You f#@$% sh@@#$ad ba#$%d. However, all I could think to say was: “That’s a nice shirt”. I said this because it was a nice shirt. It was mine after all, and after not having it for the night, I realized how fond of it I had become. It was really nothing too special – just a grey Jockey T shirt. However, when you have been wearing the same 4 t-shirts for the past 6 months, you tend to grow quite fond of them.

So now I was standing in the street holding a Turkish man wearing my shirt. This was the only man at the beach yesterday whose face I remembered. As we swam in the clearest and freshest seawater of our lives, he sat on a rock smoking his cigarette with an impossibly long ash.

“How you know he steals from you?” A thick Turkish accent from the crowd asks me this fair question. As I answered yet another local stepped up to bat. His right hand made a solid connection to the face of the man wearing my shirt. My shirt staggered backwards and fell into the stack of crates. More locals saw an opportunity they could not resist and crates began flying at the lanky man.

Amanda had left about 3 minutes prior to the flying fruit crates. As instructed by me, shortly after my first foray into crime fighting, she was causing a scene by running around the town screaming for the police.

The Turks will throw a punch at any opportunity apparently. So anytime this 6 ft scrawny man with a darkened complexion and dark beard’s mouth opened, it was met with a new fist. I was smiling the entire time.

We had spent a good portion of the prior afternoon at the police station struggling to fill out a police report in Turkish.

The bag sat ten feet behind me as we stared off into the Mediterranean in awe. In it rested my pants, knife, wallet, credit cards, passport, camera, cell phone, and many smaller items such as my insulin, blood tester, small plastic samurai man, luggage keys, and basically everything of value that I possess on my travels – including my Herpicin Lip Balm because lip herpes can be a problem in the sun.

I wanted to throw a punch but I’m just not a violent person. Fortunately he was bleeding quite badly by the time Amanda arrived with the police to a crowd of about forty.

While the owner of the fruit stand was no doubt concerned about his flying crates of fruit, I was more focused on my shirt. I really like that shirt.

Our fingers shook as adrenaline pumped through our bloodstreams. Amanda and I were escorted to the station by two detectives.

I sat in the blue chair at the end of the hall tonguing my herpetic lip, pondering which items I missed most. Was it the samurai man, the driver’s license, the passport, the camera? We sat at the police station for many hours. Amanda produced a beautiful image from her digital camera of the beach we were relaxing at the day before. The man with the now bleeding face sat in the left corner of the frame, waiting to run off with my possessions. The police loved it. It was possibly the first time they had evidence of a petty thief in action. They wanted to hire my little Sherlock Holmes on the spot. They took him into a room near where I sat. Apparently the man and four police decided to sit down and watch a Bruce Lee flick on high volume in this room. However, I did not notice a television. Nor were there any chairs. I was promptly asked to move down the hall, away from the noise. I never received an invite to join in the melee.
My translator was a Turkish man of 21 years whose German girlfriend was also a victim of theft that morning. Their criminal was caught on tape. We shared our stories and begged the police to let me search the man’s hotel room who at this point was still wearing my shirt.

Items began turning up one by one. First the phone, then the camera, then my bag, then my sunscreen walked through the door as detectives searched his hotel room and the trash bins around the hotel. “Where’s my passport?” I screamed in agony.

In the end, we left the man in his jail cell – minus my shirt. He has many pieces of evidence to prove his guilt and even more bruises.

I hope they cut his hands off. However, this law was abolished in Turkey with the fall of the Ottoman Empire nınety years ago.

I still have no knife, no shorts, and worst of all, no passport. I do have one hell of a great story to tell. It is certainly an Independence Day that will not be forgotten.

Living Under a Rock

Cappadocia is a modern day Bedrock. The main difference is that cars are not foot powered and I haven’t been able to find dinosaur vacuum cleaners or anything that resembles a bird can opener. But people do live inside rocks and mountains as they have for hundreds of years. There’s even a Flintstones cave hotel. I realize I have been quite liberal in the use of this word in past blog entries, but Cappadocia is the definition of surreal. Nothing has captured our bewilderment more than the hundreds of fairy chimneys carved into ancient homes and churches. Imagine a tall rock spire planted in the desert with a door, windows and stairs carved into its side. Walk inside to find multiple floors, carved tables, shelves, and even large, domed and frescoed churches. The volcanic rock is particularly soft in this region. For some reason, its inhabitants in the 11th-13th centuries decided to pick up a hammer and chisel and start digging. Nearly everywhere we turn, we see windows set hundreds of feet into the cliffs. The landscape alone is enough to deem this region stunning, the fact that thousands of people still live in the caves is the tipping point. This place is beyond anything we have ever seen. After 6 months of travel, we don’t feel this way very often.

Each home is supremely different. All resemble something from a Dr. Suess book. Some are built in groups such as apartments, other stand solo surrounded by grape vines. Each morning a barrage of 20 + hot air balloons make a quite assault on the sights below. But this only adds yet another element of madness as now the skies are filled with colorful jewelry.
We rented a scooter on our first day to do some exploring. We hiked and climbed and played in this ancient fun house of a place.

And if things just couldn’t get any stranger, it turns out that they lived underground too! Over 30 underground cities have so far been discovered. Using similar methods of carving and removing rock, the Cappadocians dug down as well. The largest underground city is 12 levels deep. Discovered in 1982, it is thought to have housed up to 30,000 people completely hidden beneath the desert’s surface. It is said that they lived here during periods of war and conflict (history has placed quite a few in this region of the world) to escape religious persecution. This was a very Christian community surrounded by Muslim armies. All entrances could be blocked by a 10-ft diameter stone that was rolled into place. The city we visited at Kaymakli was 8 levels deep and supremely strange. It is difficult to fathom an entire city living beneath the ground, yet here I was staring at their pantries, churches, air shafts, and toilets.

We’ve spent the last two days exploring the beautiful pigeon homes and rock formations in and around the city of Goreme, our home base for Cappadocia. Turkey just keeps getting better.