Los Angeles to the World...

After a year of planning (and saving), we left on February 6, 2007 to backpack around the world. We bought one-way tickets to Hong Kong with no plans or itinerary of any kind. Our trip ended 216 days later in Mexico City. You can read all about adventures by clicking on any of the links under Past Journals. Since our trip finished, my writing can be found at: http://jackatrandom.com/





Vagabond
*A vagabond is a (generally impoverished ) itinerant person. Such people may be called rogues, hobos or schnorrer.
*A vagabond is a traveling person that does not have a home, just roams wherever he or she pleases.
*Vagabonds are not bums, as bums are not known for traveling.
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Lots of people travel the world for a year. But few do it with no itinerary, plans or agenda. And so it is with us, we go into our world trip with plans... to have no plans. For the rest of 2007, we'll be drifting around planet earth with only a vague understanding of where each week will take us. According to Wikipedia, we might as well be vagabonds.

We could have booked round-the-world tickets and saved some money. But the idea of having to be in a certain place at a certain time felt very un-driftlike. We probably could have saved a lot of trouble and time had we spent the last few months preparing (even a little) for this trip, but what's the fun in knowing exactly where you'll be sleeping every night?

Of course, we may regret this when we're sleeping on a park bench in Kathmandu. Yet the idea of meeting travelers and drifting with them to a far off place, just because we can, is impossible to resist. Besides, if we miss a boat/train/taxi because of the way we choose to drift, who cares? We've got all the time in the world.

So here's what we had planned from the beginning: On Tuesday, February 6, we arrived at LAX and got on a plane.