The Preparation

As you can imagine, our preparation started with planning our route. It took some time to narrow down the flight stops and routes with oneworld. (We chose them mainly because they offer stops in French Polynesia and Easter Island en route to South America.)

Other preparations:

1. Travel Insurance. We mainly used BootsnAll for this and finally decided on Patriot International with the Leisure Sports Rider. We looked long and hard...all of them screw you somewhere, but this seemed the best.

2. Vaccines. We went to our local county office and got updated on our vaccines.

3. Prescriptions. Lee and I are not sickly people, but we do both have some prescriptions we need for the road. But this still hasn't been resolved with our insurance, so fingers crossed! We have also requested travel prescriptions, such as malaria, traveler's diarrhea, etc...

4. Important Document Copies. We spent some time scanning all our important documents, such as our passports, travel insurance, wills, airline tickets, credit cards,etc...to give a copy to each of our families.

5. Registering with Embassies. Still working on this.

6. Travel Supplies. We've tried not to go overboard with this, but we did end of up buying a couple new things, like all-terrain shoes, sleep sacks (for dirty guesthouses or hostels) and underwear. I got a new bag (backpack, rolly convertible) for my birthday and Lee got a new jacket. Lee's still lobbying for a new camera, which I think he'll get.

7. Holiday Accommodations. Since we're traveling over the holidays, we needed to book those accommodations. So far, we've booked Bangkok for Christmas, Chiang Mai for New Years and Singapore for Chinese New Years. We recently found out that we had to book our Indian train travel ahead of time. We couldn't believe how many trains were already wait-listed.

8. Visas. According to our research, only India and Vietnam do not issue visas at the border. So, those are the only countries we have to "prepare" for. But we did spend some time shooting and printing all the passport pictures as most visas require 2.

9. Blogspot site.