The Adventure Begins!

...Actually, the adventure for me began a long time ago. As of today, I have not slept in the same bed more than twice since completing my year-long program with the Urban Servant Corps on August 9th and spending the following week in a stupor at my grandparents' house. Since the day USC ended, I have seen two concerts at Red Rocks Amphitheatre; been to various art exhibits and seminars; reconnected with a few good old friends; taken a road trip with my family through Wyoming, Montana, Yellowstone National Park, Spokane, Seattle, Portland, Boise, and Park City; ended the long-distance part of the relationship with my boyfriend; celebrated  with my friends in Durango; said many goodbyes; drove to Michigan; said many hellos; and marveled at the life changes that seem to be occurring like crazy among myself and my peers.

But those were just my activities in the past month and a half. For those of you who haven't heard from me in awhile, let me backtrack a bit and briefly explain my life since graduating from Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado. I graduated in 2009 with a major in Art and minors in French and Psychology, and immediately used my last opportunity as a student to take an Innovative Month trip to India with Reyes Garcia of the Philosophy Department, his girlfriend and traveler extraordinaire Tracy Davis, and several FLC students. Seeing India opened my eyes to the vast differences in cultures and lifestyles that can result from only the slightest difference in location or political and religious belief. I looked people in the eye who had lived in ways I had never even thought to imagine, and I was eager to learn how their experiences had shaped them. I got a taste of the depth of the human spirit, and I hungered for more. When I got back to the United States, I immediately began searching for the next lesson in humanity. I wanted to have more experience working with people and coming to understand the human condition in a more real sense before going back to school or starting a career, especially since I still had little idea of what field I wanted to pursue. I spent the next year living and working in Durango, researching opportunities like teaching in France, living at Holden Village in Washington, and joining the Peace Corps in Africa. I began seeing Neal around Christmas of 2009, and pretty quickly the "2 years abroad for Peace Corps" option was out, so I started looking for programs a little closer to home. My mom, being the ideas person that she is, was the first one to suggest joining the Urban Servant Corps in Denver for a year, and after that moment it was pretty much a swift roll down the steep hill of Fate. The Urban Servant Corps is a non-profit organization linked to AmeriCorps and associated with the Lutheran Church. It combines the tenets of simplicity, service and social justice with the intentional community model. I lived in a house with nine other people, all of us volunteering full-time at nonprofits around Denver and spending our off-time learning the complex meaning of Consensus. My volunteer placement was at Sewall Child Development Center, an inclusive preschool-type setting for "friends" aged 2-5, where I played with sand, practiced yoga, and learned the complex meaning of Give-and-Take. Living and working in community was a challenging, humbling, and transformative experience, one that I would trade for nothing and a lesson I hope to continue learning throughout my life.

And now that the backstory is in place, let's move on to the Year-Long Summer. Neal had been planning a global adventure of his own since before I met him. When I heard his plans, I was excited and a little jealous but had no thought of actually joining him. Little did I know that I was cresting another ridge of Fate Mountain. Ideas became discussion, discussion became research, then guidebooks, then itineraries, then budgets, then plane tickets, vaccinations, visas....and here we are, at the next course in my lifelong Humanity lesson. I knew after visiting India that I would have to do more traveling, though I hadn't expected it would be so soon. Well, no better time than now, right? Both Neal and I had talked to many people who had traveled within the United States or to other countries and stayed with locals. We wanted to have an authentic cultural experience, and be able to see as much of the areas as possible without spending a lot of money. Through our  conversations and online research we discovered the WWOOF program, which is a website connecting local farmers to volunteers in locations around the world. The premise is that the farmers provide room and board and the volunteers work an average of 5 hours per day, for typically 2-6 weeks. It is a good opportunity to get to know local culture through the locals themselves, and get firsthand experiences of the culture, the language, and the land. We also plan to use the websites CouchSurfing.org and servas.org to connect us to local English speakers who are willing to take us in and show us around a bit. In between hosts, we will be backpacking, camping, climbing, surfing, snorkeling, working at an orphanage, visiting friends, and who knows what else.

A lot of people have asked us how we managed to save up the money to do such an extensive trip, and to be honest, I don't really have an answer to that question. You'll have to ask Neal what he thinks did it, because I am convinced it was a side effect of the Cosmos responding to our intentions. Of course, I only made $75 a month the whole year I was volunteering! Neal definitely bore more of the responsibility for the financial sector, by working hard all year long post-graduation, moving into his truck for the summer, and liquidating as many unnecessary bills as possible. It was hard work and a lot of alternative thinking, but I believe it was more than that. How would you explain Neal finding a penny on the ground every single day for the past 4 months? Every bit counts. Hopefully our story will inspire you to start thinking differently about how to travel the way you want, or at least give you hope that this sort of thing CAN be done.

Be sure to take a look at our trip itinerary, which will probably be altered or completely changed many times in the course of the year. And if you are wondering just WHY we are doing this trip in the first place, and what the heck we plan to get out of this whole experience, you'll just have to read our next post!

...The title of the blog is a little misleading, since we had a full summer in Colorado before our year of summer even began, and it will be closer to springtime when we get to New Zealand, but "A Couple Summer Months, a Hint of Fall, Fiji, Spring, then Almost a Year of Summer" seemed a little too unwieldy and not as striking to the imagination. So we're keeping it simple.

Please feel free to comment on our blog and send us your own travel stories and advice! We would love to get some conversation rolling in our communities about what inspires all of us to explore the world outside our doors. Let's make this experience a shared one.