Project Runaway

Project Runaway is officially complete. On time and pretty much on budget. And as project manager I am on the quest for my next project.
I started this blog on May 7, 2009. I have wrote my blogs while on buses, boats, airplanes, and trains. I have shared our adventures, our triumphs and our tribulations. Through [...]

I said goodbye last week to my last grandparent, my grandmother Ellen. As I helped my mother and her siblings make arrangements, it made me reflect on funeral customs of some of the countries we were blessed to travel in.
Funeral rites are as old as civilization itself. The customs are as varied as the cultures [...]

It is around this time of the year that people send the dreaded Christmas letters. I understand that these letters are written with the best of intentions. That people sincerely believe we all want to  hear what their family has been up to for the past year. And I think if our lives had not [...]

I am afraid to fly.
It wasn’t always that way with me. I think it started when the kids were small and we had a bad flight home once. I couldn’t spend the year we traveled, terrified, gripping my seat on every flight, not eating, not sleeping, not ever getting out of my seat. I had [...]

There is a jaw bone in the ground, the rains have washed the mud away and exposed it. Farther along a piece of red fabric sticks out of the ground. I stop scrutinizing the ground, horrified.
Nicole clings to me. None of us have spoken a word since we arrived. The stupa towers [...]

At first it seemed like a good idea. But sometimes when you are hungry every restaurant suggested seems like a good idea.
We were told that Kuala Lumpur’s Chinatown was the place to be to shop, people watch, and eat. I don’t remember what it was we had done that day to make the four of [...]

It was a rainy day in Hue. Dwayne and I head out with our umbrellas in the downpour. Inside the first set of walls we stop to check our guidebook and get our bearings. A man with a cyclo (rickshaw) approaches and asks where we are going. We tell him we want [...]

There were times in the last couple of years that I wondered if I would ever feel normal. I wondered if I would know normal even if it looked me in the face. Then normal became that thing I did to ground myself while on our nomadic journey. It would be simple things like shopping [...]

 
Inspired by the book ‘the secret lives of litterbugs: and other (true) stories’ by m.a.c. farrant; I have decided to do a twist on my stories, by doing a collection of personal ‘blog shorts’. I am going to post 1 a week on Mondays for the next few weeks.
On a train to Firenze, reading the [...]

It is Thanksgiving and I have a lot to be thankful for this year. This time last year we were in Spain trying to fit two chickens in a teeny oven in an even teenier kitchen. The last year has seen burdens turned into blessings, and I count the many I have and hold them [...]