These are some of the questions we’ve been asked most often about the trip. Please feel free to ask us anything, however detailed or ethereal.

"How do you pronounce 'Rousmaniere'?"
"Why travel around the world?"
"How did you travel?"
"Did you quit your jobs?"
"How did you get the news, especially with the war?"
"How did you plan the trip?"
"How did you afford to travel around the world?"
"How much did it cost?"
"How did you pack?"
"Where did you stay?"
"How did you pay your bills/do your banking?"
"How did you file your taxes?"
"How did you get your mail?"
"How did you keep in touch with people back home?"
"How do you think the trip has changed you?"
"Did you get sick, robbed, etc.?"
"Was it hard to travel together?"
"Are you going to write a book?"
"What was your favorite place?"
"How do RTW tickets work?"
"How do I learn more about traveling around the world?"
"How far is it around the world?"

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"How do you pronounce 'Rousmaniere'?"
"Roo-Man-Ear."

Though French in origin, the name has taken on a decidedly Yankee twang since it landed during the American Revolution. We’re afraid that family pride dictates we treat those who utter "alternative" pronunciations ("rose-man-ary," "rooster-ears," etc…) at a level on par with a dinner hour telemarketer. Our sincerest apologies in advance.
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"Why Travel Around the World?"
A few reasons, the most obvious being: Romance! What is more romantic than traveling to strange lands, meeting exotic people, and experiencing new tastes with your true love?

It was also a youthful nod to every person who wistfully told us: "I wish I had done that when I was younger." There was some hope that we would perhaps bear witness to lives lived more simply and maybe adopt some aspect for ourselves. We also wanted to do something extraordinary for no other reason than to know that we can.
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"How did you travel?"
We drove our beloved Subaru Outback (nick-named "Babu") around the U.S., a Star Alliance Round-The-World Air Ticket for most international travel, supplemented by rental cars, motorcycles, trains, ferries, helicopters and camels.
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"Did you quit your jobs?"
We quit our jobs cold turkey. One of the main purposes of this trip was to re-evaluate our lives. We weren’t ruling out going back to these jobs, but we felt it would be too hard to make honest life decisions with something to fall back on. Our employers were extremely understanding and supportive. Some offered to come along and sherpa for us.
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"How did you get the news, especially with the War?"
It’s kind of funny, but the real problem for us was news overload. Every day abroad, we spent a couple hours reading the local papers (The Bangkok Post is a favorite), the International Herald Tribune, The Economist and watching CNN, BBC, Star News, plus the 30 other English speaking channels that come with a $9 room in Southeast Asia. Internet cafés are abundant around the world, so news is always a click away. There was also an abundance of grapevine news from the network of travelers you meet along the way (always taken with a boulder sized grain of salt). In the U.S., we could always count on finding a local National Public Radio news broadcast no matter where we were road trippin’. We were so grateful that we are now proud members of N.P.R. Alabama.
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"How did you plan the trip?"
By the seat of our pants.
It took us nearly two years just to decide to do it. After that, the planning was pretty minimal. We were working so much that most of our detail planning was done in the two weeks between leaving our jobs and jumping in the car to start the U.S. leg of the trip. We continued to tie up loose ends from the road. The most important things we had to deal with before we left were storage and shots.

Transitional Planning:
We had no illusions that hitting the road wouldn’t be a culture shock, so we did a little defensive travel planning to try to ease the transition. The U.S. leg came first to give us the comfort of familiar faces and places as we got further from home. New Zealand was our first foreign stop because we thought Will’s familiarity with the country and its western ways would help ease us into travel abroad. After New Zealand, however, we had no plan other than to travel in a roughly northwestern direction and try to time spring/summer seasons everywhere we went.

Let’s Talk About the Weather:
Early on, we poetically described this trip as our effort to "follow spring around the world." Well, like most romantic ideas, ours wasn’t scientifically accurate since spring tends to migrate north/south not east/west (leave it to a Cornell engineer to rain on our parade with this factoid). So, we adopted the less poetic "follow spring in a diagonal direction around the world" and packed accordingly. We successfully avoided winter until we encountered a glorious, freak April snowstorm in Venice, Italy. It was so magical we hardly noticed our sandaled toes turning blue.
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"How did you afford to travel around the world?"
A lot of people have asked if we are independently wealthy. No. Nor do you need to be. Basically, we’ve worked very hard and saved like crazy. Luckily, we do have the Internet gold rush to thank for erasing our debts, but aside from school we simply refused to incur any more debt. Dana, who we both believe was a little old lady in the depression in a prior life, deserves all the credit for teaching Will what business school couldn’t: How to be frugal on the less important things so that you can afford the truly important things, and how to tell the difference.
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"How much did it cost?"
Around $34,000. You could easily travel more cheaply or higher on the hog. This worked for us. A rough outline for two people, for nine months:

Per Diem — $ 15,300 ($60/day average*, includes lodging, food and drink, and all incidentals)
Air — $ 8,400 (2 Star Alliance RTW tickets. 34,000 miles, including taxes and change fees)
Eurail — $ 600 (Italy/France)
RyanAir — $ 200 (Ireland, for various reasons we saved our RTW ticket miles here)
Health — $ 4,500 (Insurance- there are far cheaper travel plans. For us, COBRA was ideal)
Medical — $ 500 (All shots and medicine - malaria pills, antibiotics, etc.)
Storage — $ 1,400 (All our stuff — some seemed much less important after the trip)
Gear — $ 1,000 (Backpacks, shoes, clothes, sleeping bags, etc.)
Gifts — $ 1,500 (Everybody needs an America’s Cup hat and coconut spoons!)
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Total $ 33,400

* Keep in mind that $60 per diem is an average of a just-surviving $100/day in Europe and a very easy $25/day in Southeast Asia.
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"How did you pack?"
We each had a backpack with a capacity of 4,800 cubic inches. These packs included detachable day packs. We allowed ourselves: 2 pairs of pants, 1 pair of shorts, 2 shirts, 2 t-shirts, 5 pairs of underwear, 2 pairs of socks, 1 pair of sandals, 1 pair of hiking shoes (Merrill's — great!), a fleece pullover, and a fleece sleeping bag liner. Between us, we also fit in 1 flat bed sheet, 2 pillow cases, a digital camera, 1 palm pilot with folding keyboard for writing, a couple of travel and literary books, a leather-bound journal, and a football-sized bag of emergency medicines (many thanks to those who donated their stockpiles of anthrax-era Cipro). Dana was especially glad we packed the sheets, since the ones provided (or not provided) in a lot of hostels or guesthouses were pretty grubby. Since we intermittently purged and collected things, Dana's pack weighed between 15-30 pounds, and Will's pack (galant husband that he is) weighed between 20 to 40 pounds at any given time.

Will’s daypack was the designated evacuation pack ("evac-pack") and hardly ever left his shoulder for nine months. It contained all the crucial belongings we would need if we had to leave a country on a moment’s notice. At first the evac pack was absolutely bulging with stuff but, as the trip progressed, we found that fewer and fewer of our belongings qualified as "crucial." Eventually the evac pack contained nothing more than our journals, passports, camera and tickets.
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"Where did you stay?"
Our lodgings varied wildly. We woke with roosters in country farmhouses, breathed the morning sea air on private island paradises, and tented in coastal beach dunes. We squeezed into a hostel broom closet called the "Vaseline Room" and slept on top of the covers wearing two layers of clothes in a desert motel where a bucket of bleach was suspiciously handy for wiping crime scenes off the walls. We stayed with family, with friends that we knew, and with many new friends that we met along the way. Some places came out of our travel guides and others by word of mouth.
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"How did you pay your bills/do your banking?"
We had two online bank accounts, and paid all of our credit card bills online. Internet cafés were easy to find everywhere we went. We had a few bills (like health care) that couldn't be paid online, so we left some checks and envelopes set up for Dana's mother to mail in for us at the appropriate times. (Thanks, Judy!) We highly recommend having two different bank accounts, since we had a number of problems with Citibank's service, and found that our money was sometimes inaccessible. Luckily, we had another online bank account as back-up, otherwise we would have been in a tight spot. We'll never use Citibank again after this experience.
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"How did you file your taxes?"
We filed for an automatic extension from abroad. We downloaded the forms from the web, mailed them in (Thanks to Todd Hoffine for carrying them back to the U.S. from India!), and did our taxes when we got home.
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"How did you get your mail?"
We had our mail forwarded to Dana's mother, who graciously agreed to read it all for us, and e-mail us if there was anything important. Everyone should be so lucky to have a mother like this!
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"How did you keep in touch with people back home?"
We relied on e-mail. Internet cafés were easy to find everywhere we went, and were generally inexpensive. ($1/hour in most Asian countries, though the price went up to $5 or $6 per hour in Europe.) We highly recommend
Lonely Planet's Ekno service, which gives you free web-based e-mail when you use their phone cards. The phone cards offered pretty cheap rates internationally, though we rarely made calls. They also have a voicemail option that allows other people to leave you free voicemails (you pay to retrieve them). You can also have your e-mails read to you over the phone for those rare destinations when you can't find an e-mail café. It was pretty hilarious listening to the automaton voice saying things like: "Hey dudes, what is up with your bad selves?"
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"How do you think the trip has changed you?"
We struggle with this question. The great epiphany we expected to occur in some remote jungle or island never presented itself — at least not explicitly. The changes we feel are very deep but also subtle. Some of the more tangible changes we’ve noticed: We are now confident that we could go anywhere together, and also confident enough to tell each other when we just don’t want to. We don’t stuff ourselves at meals, we exercise more, we recycle more, we try not to take things like clean water and a roof over our heads for granted, and we continue to spend most minutes together. In some ways we’ve become more trusting of people and in other ways less so. We expect that this trip will reverberate in our lives for a long time. Check back with us in a year, and then the year after that…
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"Did you get sick, robbed, etc.?"
Nothing bad happened to us our on our trip! We travelled to a Dominican Republic resort a year earlier, and had the worst night of our lives when Will got a terrible case of food poisoning. Since that happend in a resort, we expected worse to happen in our lower-budget accommodations on this trip, but we got little more than an upset tummy here and there when our diets changed drastically. Will did get his yearly, requisite case of bronchitis, which was quickily cured by our handy antibiotics and the spicy chicken soup in Thailand. Dana got a fever after our camel safari through the desert, which was probably caused by dehydration. Other than that, we were more healthy than we ever are at home!

We were pretty careful with valuables like our wallets, passports, camera, and air tickets — Will basically carried them in our "evac-pack" for the entire nine months, but we never had any problems with theft.
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"Was it hard to travel together?"
Imagine being with someone every minute of every day for 10 months with the exception of about 12 total hours (most of which was quality bathroom time and a three minute affair Dana had with a sky-dive instructor strapped to her back at 12,000 feet). It isn’t always easy to learn virtually everything there is to know about someone. The various stresses of extended travel can trigger character revelations that often leave you feeling alternately confused and amazed about this person about whom you thought you knew so much already.

We weren’t completely unprepared. We had heard some horror stories about couples splitting up minutes after returning from trips like the one we were going to take. We made a deal that we would never hesitate to discuss any bothersome quirk that might present itself or, hopefully, those newly revealed traits that caused us to look at each other with a new sense of love and wonder. Of course, such honesty is much easier said that practiced. But we made it through still very much in love and feeling like we’ve compressed 20 years of marriage into one.
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"Are you going to write a book?"
The funny thing about this trip is that once you leave home, you meet hundreds of folks who are doing the same thing, all with varying levels of style, and every one of them has a story. Compared to travelers we’ve met along the way, our trip doesn’t seem nearly as novel and book-worthy.
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"What was your favorite place?"
Ummm……Folks do like us to distill our trip into this one answer. If hard pressed we would hedge with two countries: New Zealand and Thailand. Both countries are stunningly beautiful and their residents unrivaled in their hospitality. New Zealand is tough one to beat based on the personal relationships we rekindled and established. Thailand is a favorite for being so exotic, so livable and so exciting to the senses, especially the taste buds. If you want to nail us down a little more, see the
Top 10 lists section of the site.
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"How do RTW tickets work?"
There are many different companies that sell specific around the world air tickets. Each of the major air alliances offers a round-the-world ticket, all with wildly different flavors. There are also a number of consolidators that can put together tickets on the cheap. In general you can loop the earth for as little as $1,000 on upwards depending on how many stops you make (or how remote they are). How you go really comes down to cost and flexibility.

Airtreks — the best place to start building your dream trip. Air-treks is a consolidator providing very cheap tickets, with varying degrees of flexibility. The best part of the site is their trip-building tool that lets you put your trip together and will provide immediate pricing, plus a nifty world map charting your itinerary in just a few clicks.

Star Alliance — The Star Alliance (United, Air New Zealand, Thai Air, Singapore Airlines, Lufthansa, etc.) sells RTW tickets that give you an allotment of total miles to travel in a year with few restrictions and a high degree of flexibility (but higher cost). We purchased 34,000 miles, which gave us more than enough to give the earth a big hug.

Oneworld Alliance — The Oneworld Explorer (American, British Airways, Quantas, etc.) ticket allows you to purchase a number of continents in which to travel. You are then limited to a certain number of stops within each continent.
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"How do I learn more about traveling around the World?"
There is a varied amount of info out there on RTW travel.
Lonely Planet has recently published a guide to Traveling Around the World. Here are some links that we found helpful as well as some sites from fellow travelers we met along the way:

Boots'n All — A great site with lots of travel resources, including ticketing (they use the Air-treks engine), message boards, and great travel logs from folks who just write in from the road.

Travel Library.com — Round-the-world travel guide that does a good job of laying out a nice checklist of traveling considerations. It’s a bit dated when it comes to prices and costs, but it does a fine job of helping you cover all the bases when planning your own RTW adventure.

The Chicken Bus — The Chicken bus was one of the first sites we found when planning our trip. It’s a well done site of travel tales and advice from a married couple, like us, who picked up and went for an eight-month walkabout that covered a remarkable number of countries.

The Dharma Bums — We spent a random half-hour on a bus in Thailand chatting with the Dharma Bums, and have kept in touch and met up lately for pancakes here in Gloucester, half a world away. Kate Rope and David Allan are both writers; she was a Luce Fellow at the Bangkok Post and he is a Frommer’s writer/freelance travel writer. Their site is a wealth of lovely and insightful articles about their travels.

Amy Tobey is an inspiration. Part Berkeley hippie, part Wall Street capitalist, over the last 10 years we’ve often watched Tobey just pick up and go. She is currently taking 15 months to travel the world, but recently reported: "I think I might just keep going this time." Here are some links to stunning photos of her most recent travels in South America.

Garvin and Karen Snell, a married couple who are Boston T.V. journalists, are taking a year to travel all the continents. Their tales of Laos and Mongolia are wondrous.
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"How far is it around the world?"
We could tell you, but the hilarious site below provides much more entertaining answers:
What's the Circumference of the Earth?
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