April 2018: Monthly Roundup

So, I’ve seen other travel bloggers do this (a monthly recap or roundup or whatever it may be called!) and I really like the idea – taking a minute to pause and reflect on the month, and record down little tidbits from travel and life that may otherwise go unnoticed. So, here we go, the first monthly round up on Blended Journeys!

Where we were

• New York, NY
• Iguazu Falls, Brasil
• São Paulo, Brasil
• Bonito, Brasil
• Rio de Janeiro, Brasil
• Ubatuba, Brasil
• Ridge, Maryland

Highlights and Laughs

Starting our trip! We have been talking about this trip for so long and it finally started! I still have to pinch myself a little bit to remind myself that this is real life and that we are actually doing this, but I’m so grateful that life and work and love conspired to have given us this opportunity.

Going to and getting so close to Iguazu Falls. I am such a water baby and to see something so powerful and to be able to get so close that we got soaked induced never-ending huge, full-face smiles from me. It’s a place I would happily visit again year after year.

Meeting Scott and working with Project Favela. I am a volunteering junkie at heart, and I think it comes from the hours spent with Interact club in high school. So, after many, many, many hours of work and research, being able to actually see an amazing volunteer opportunity come to life in Brazil was a huge highlight for me. I’m sure you’ll be hearing more from me about Project Favela, but the impression that our short time there made on my heart is deep and I hope to spend more time working with them and talking about them in the months and years to come.

Seeing Damian in his homeland.  I know I’ve mentioned this before, but I really, really, really enjoyed seeing Damian speaking his native language and in general, just being a baller Brasilian. It was underscored by being able to see where he grew up and picture little Damian running around like a little monkey and causing havoc. As much as I struggled with the language barrier, I wouldn’t change a minute of being able to see Damian rock it.

Yummy, yummy, yummy fruits. One of my favorite things about going to India is being able to eat fruits there that are not available in the US (or available but at super low quality and not even fun to eat all). I really enjoyed being able to eat some of my favorites in Brasil – including custard apple (pictured below), mango and guava!

Lots and lots of silly laughs with Damian. It’s hard to describe how weird we are when we are together, but one of my favorite things about our relationship is that we can randomly break into mirroring awkward dances off each other (picture documentation below, look at that focus), trying to say animal names with the wrong emphasis (eg-RET) and a million other things that can’t even be explained. Spending so much together brings this out even more, and it is so fun when it happens.

Being able to “hop” back to the US for a dear friends wedding. At the end of April one of my oldest friends got married. We have been friends for over 25 years and I knew we had to be there. We didn’t tell most people that we were back in the US, because we didn’t have time to see a lot of folks but being able to celebrate my friend and have some quality time with some other buddies from home was so, so meaningful.

Getting some “reset” time in New York. It’s no secret that the first month of travel has been fun, but also a bit of a difficult transition for me (note lowlights below). After the wedding we headed to New York for a couple days to finalize packing up of our apartment and putting stuff into storage. It was a brutal drive from the wedding but when we turned into our neighborhood it felt like a little weight had been lifted off my shoulders. It was really good to have a few days at home to stop, reflect and adjust for our travels going forward.

Lowlights

Traveling too fast. I am someone who likes to travel slow – stay in one place for a while, linger over maps, find offbeat places and things to do, live like a local, etc. I knew going into this first phase of our trip that this would be an issue, but it was hard to avoid since there are so many amazing places in Brasil, because of the sheer size of the country and how excited we were to get going. I faced burn out quite a few times, which was not fun. But, it was a good reminder for me to slow down, which I’m excited we are going to do in the next few phases of our travel.

Nausea and headaches and insomnia from malaria meds. I know taking preventative meds for malaria is a hot topic for discussion on the travel circuit, however, given how attracted mosquitos are to me and that we’d be doing outdoor activities in areas where malaria does exist, we decided to take Malarone while in Brasil. About a week into our trip I was feeling terrible – bad nausea, headaches, insomnia, lack of appetite, dizziness, etc., which all came to head in an awful car ride from Rio to Ubatuba. When we got to Ubatuba we did some research on the prevalance of malaria in the areas of Brasil we were headed to going forward and I decided to stop taking malarone. It took a few days to start to feel better, but man that drug is not fun.

The difficulties of trying to rent a car in the US. We landed at Washington, DC’s Reagan National Airport at around 10:30am on a Friday, planning on renting a car and driving out to where my friend’s wedding was. Guys, I have never seen such a mess of trying to rent a car anywhere. When we tried to book cars online, the website would let us go all the way to the end and then when we tried to confirm say there was an error. When we tried to get to a rental counter there was basically no signage telling us where to go. There were even multiple contradicting signs telling us Level 1 was up a level and down a level from Level 2. When we got there most of the counters had long lines and only 1-2 staff and when we got to the front the agent told us to go to another agent and wait in another long line. When we got to the other agent she tried to get us to sign a blank rental agreement (not out of malice because that was all they had). Etc. Etc. We tried to laugh at it but after 20+ hours of travel it didn’t feel so funny in the moment. Oh, travel.

Missing my people. I’m someone that is about halfway between an extrovert and an introvert. I like my alone time, I need my alone time. But I also really like my people. When in New York I spend probably 2-3 nights a week hanging out with my nearest and dearest, and not having that time together was a hard transition for me. I know there is FaceTime and texting and all that (well, for those who have a working phone) but it’s not the same as getting together and just talking about life and letting it flow. I’m still working on this and am sure it will continue to be one of the more challenging parts of traveling for me, but I’m looking forward to having some family and friends come meet us during our travels in the coming months!

Being too dependent on Damian. Towards the end of the first phase of Brasil I ended up in a position where I just felt trapped by circumstances – my phone had totally eaten it and I had a week before getting to the US to fix it so I had to be on my computer to be in touch with people, I wasn’t able to communicate with 97+% of the people in Brasil and it wasn’t safe enough to go walking in Rio on my own. So, I felt stuck and isolated and had to depend on Damian for nearly everything, and that was not fun for either of us!

The never-ending cough. I don’t know how or where I picked this up, and if it’s allergies or a low-grade cold, but I have been coughing non-stop for the last week. I have to constantly have Halls with me and ready to go or the cough becomes so intense that it triggers my gag reflex, which triggers vomiting. Fun times I tell you. Fun. Times.

What I read

Those who know me know that I am obsessed with reading. It might actually be a bit in an unhealthy way, as I have to read every single night. Even if I’m plain exhausted I’ll read 3 sentences and even when I’m totally drunk I’ll read however much I feel like (and then have to read it again the next day…). I’ve been trying to pivot from short-form reading (magazines, twitter, online articles, etc.) back to books both because the short-form reading is often about politics and easy to get wrapped up in, so it can quickly become a stressful time suck. I get so much pleasure out of being totally absorbed within a book and so have been trying to proactive about spending more time with books. I have a lot more in my head to say about reading so maybe I’ll save that for another post 🙂 Here’s what I read this month:

Ginny Moon by Benjamin Ludwig (2017) — This was a really interesting book written from the perspective of an autistic teenager. The story itself is super captivating, but what I loved most was that it really got inside of Ginny’s head and helped the reader understand the internal monologue of someone who has autism, and who has struggled with abandonment her whole life. I would recommend this in a heartbeat and have put it on Damian’s must-read list!

We’re Going to Need More Wine by Gabrielle Union (2017) — I’m going to start by saying I am a Gabrielle Union super-fan. I love her personality and passion in speaking out what she believes is right and that her voice is a really important one in today’s discussions around race. In this book she writes multiple essays/stories about events in her own life and allows those stories to be combined with her perspective to make points about the black woman experience in the United States today. It was a relatively light read, but also an important one.

Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick (2009) — I am aware there are a lot of human rights atrocities in North Korea, but until I read this book I had no idea the details of them, the feeling of going through them and the desperateness that they spur. The author wrote this book from deep research and interviews with those who have been able to defect from North Korea, giving it an authenticity that I appreciated. This book also really made me want to learn more about the situation in North Korea, and I’ve added a bunch of documentaries to my Netflix queue for that. I think it’s awesome when a book can grip your attention deeply and also raise your awareness about critical issues in today’s world.

The Royal We by Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan (2015) — This was a lighter read, a love story/romance novel that was “inspired” by Prince William and Kate Middleton of the UK. I’m not ashamed to say that I loved this book. Of course the author’s made some changes to the story, but they made it more fun and interesting, and, maybe embarrassingly, some of the language they used to describe the couple’s love for each other was very moving (I may or may not have highlighted a lot of quotes about love from this book in my Kindle).

How to Be Everything: A Guide for Those Who (Still) Don’t Know What They Want to Be When They Grow Up by Emilie Wapnick (2017) — I’ll start by saying I love the premise of this book and it sits very squarely aligned with who I am. The author starts by laying out what a “multipotentialite” is, basically someone who has a lot of different interests and the internal drive to pursue them all, whether sequentially or simultaneously. She then talks about how for people like this there isn’t a single answer for “what do you want to be when you grow up?” but that there are ways to create diverse, fulfilling and flexible careers. I think this book didn’t grip me as the others because this is a self-reflection process I have been on for years and have taken the time to understand this aspect about myself and create my career accordingly. But it is well-written, with strong perspectives and helpful exercises, and one I would recommend to someone who may still be in the process of working through their own multipotentialite-ness.

What’s next

We are headed to the second phase of our Brasil trip – driving up the Northeast coast, from Salvador, to TBD! I’m excited to just be on the road and, depending on how we feel that day, decide whether to stop and stay somewhere, drive on, etc. … and to have it be all about beaches, beaches and beaches. We still have to figure out whether to go to Lençóis Maranhenses National Park, which looks stunning, but is difficult to get to and get out of. We’ll see what happens but it will be fun either way I’m sure!