What's the plan?

So we narrowed it down to China, Vietnam, Thailand, India and some eastern European countries, but now what? Where to be begin... We started to think of all the things that would need to be done and we ended up dropping them into a few categories:

• Our house (rent, house sitter...)
• Travel & Accomodations (places to visit, what to see, where to stay)
• Budget
• Health (research, shots, etc.)
• Schooling for the kids
• Social Contacts and getting in touch with the locals
• Keeping in touch with those at home

I'll leave out all the details and bring you up to speed on each.

We've managed to arrange with friends of Nadim's sister-in-law that they will rent our house at a decent rate. It takes a load of our minds to know that we can trust the people who will be in our house while we are away.

We've not booked accomodations yet, but we have done some research on what to see and which cities to stay in. We've also found that there are service apartments in certain areas that can be had at reasonable rates and would work well for us. Booking places will have to wait until we are a bit closer to our departure date.

We recently visited a travel agent and had our draft budget reviewed. Happily we had over budgeted in a few places, but not under budgeted.

We did some research about the healthcare situation. The availability of healthcare in each area that we would stay was part of our selection criteria, but we also knew that we would need certain shots before we go. We have visited the travel clinic recently. That was a story in itself. I'll tell you about it later. To make a long story short, we had some shots and have some more to come.

I've been busy researching home-schooling. I met with a mom in our neighbourhood who has three children and home schools them. She was a great help and gave me some great tips. I'm well on my way and feel much more confident than I did originally.

We've been trying to reach the Baha'i community in various areas. We've had some luck with the Baha'is of Thailand, but haven't succeeded much elsewhere. We did get some great material that is yet to be read completely yet from the National Baha'i center in Canada. Hopefully that will help. We've also been looking at how we could volunteer or work in the various areas. We still have some figuring to do in this area.

We are quite pleased to have stared this blog and hope that it will keep everyone informed of what is happening with our trip. We also plan to take a lapop to help us keep in touch with those at home. Beyond that we keep suggesting that people meet us across the world in whichever country we happen to be in!

So this brings us up to date. I've managed to condense all our plans and excitement into few short blogs.... From here on in, we'll try to keep you in the loop as it happens.