Hello! Thank you for checking up on us! That countdown showing “1” on our home page is taunting me, as I haven’t gotten a blog post together in a while, and…

…we leave in the morning! We’re in Fort Lauderdale tonight, and tomorrow we leave for Cartagena. I’d hoped to have a few posts documenting our final preparation, but it turned out our final preparation took forever, and we’ve been up till 1 or 2 every night, and worked all day every day to get ready for now. Since the last post we’ve:

• Gotten (legally) married — woohoo!
• Packed up our house
• Had movers move our stuff into storage
• Moved the rest of the stuff ourselves, that we didn’t have them take for some reason
• Bought the rest of the trip supplies we need
• Packed our epic backpacks that will be all our possessions for the next 4 months
• Researched and bought health insurance
• Somehow packaged hundreds of pounds of clothes, computers, electronics, food, and more into our little Ford Focus
• Drove to North Carolina
• Flew here!

I won’t lie, it was pretty bittersweet for us leaving the house for the last time as we moved out. Pretty sure there was some dust in our eyes that evening.

Also, we managed to only fight once during all this as well, which we consider to be a great success. There’s a good chance a lot of our time in Cartagena will be spent at the pool or sleeping. Both of us are totally fine with this.

What About Those Visas?

Oh right, in my last post I said I was going to talk about some of the bigger preparation pieces we’ve had to handle. Two countries we’re visiting in South America, Bolivia and Brazil, require visas for US travelers, so we needed to get those before leaving. The stress came because in the last month and a half of being in the country, our schedule was roughly:

• Get married
• Go to Canada… where we need our passports
• Go straight to North Carolina to visit family
• Two weeks at home to finish up
• Go to Colombia… where we need our passports

For each visa we needed to get, they needed to have our passports at their consulate. For one to two weeks. So, this schedule was challenging. Spoiler alert: we got it to work out. But basically, it went like:

• Lose a day putting together the application for the Bolivian visa
• Send our passports and visa application to Bolivian Consulate
• Got our passports back three days before leaving for Canada
• Get to North Carolina, and lose two nights putting together the application for Brazil
• Send our passports and application to a visa processing agency to help with Brazil
• Got our passports back four days before leaving for Colombia

I guess technically we had plenty of time to spare…

And Vaccinations?

Right… so I spent most of 2017 catching up on vaccinations I needed, while Erika insisted she was good to go. I got TDaP, I got two rounds of Hepatitis A & B, I got Typhoid, and we came into the final stretch with me just needing one more round of Hepatitis and a Yellow Fever shot.

Well, what we didn’t know is the only yellow fever vaccination that is FDA approved is completely unavailable right now. Evidently, the company producing it is moving production operations, and while that’s happening, it’s not available. During this time, the FDA is making the other yellow fever vaccine, which is approved in Europe and about 100 countries, available on a limited basis here. Limited, like, there are only three providers in North Carolina that have it. So I got an appointment with one.

We went over the holidays to deal with that, and to also get anti-malaria medication. While at the travel clinic, the nurse recommends we get the meningitis vaccine, so we both do that and Erika proceeds to fall apart for three days basically with flu-like symptoms. Poor Erika. Also, while there the nurse reviews Erika’s records and notices… oh hey, looks like someone is out of date on their typhoid vaccination. So after all this, which of the two of us was the first to get fully vaccinated for this trip? That’s right, John was. Booyah.

Next Time

The trip begins! We leave in the morning for Cartagena, so come back soon as we’ll be checking in from there!