So long and thanks for all the kazoos!

The two of us at the sand dunes in Huacachina, Peru

Wow, that was quick! Exactly a year ago today, we set out to explore the world, and now it’s all over, we’ve been back a month, and we’re both off to find adventures new.

It’s been a bit hard adjusting to life after travel – places where we can eat the salad safely, brush our teeth with tap water, and even sometimes understand everything going on around us! It’s also strange not going everywhere as the travelling duo – and leaving our Kazoos behind for once.

I find statistics a comforting way of dealing with change, and so I set out to enumerate our trip:

    • 18 countries.
    • 54,800 miles – that’s 2 1/4 times around the world.
    • 0 missed flights, trains or buses. We don’t have to say ‘yet’ any more!
    • … but 1 flight bought for the wrong month. No refund. Expensive mistake!
    • 4 pairs of sandals.
    • 88 bus journeys, 15 boats and 5 motorbikes.
    • 94 towns, villages & campsites.
    • 1 theft.
    • 99,608 words across 139 blog posts including this one. Sorry about that!
    • 23,500 miles of overland travel by bus, train and the occasional car. That’s just shy of once around the world.
    • 1 night spent on an airport floor.
    • 2 kazoos, and two friends to pose with them
    • … but no actual kazoo songs performed.

All in all, quite a trip!

So now to the future. I’m taking tentative steps towards the world of work, aiming to work in IT for a cause I can believe in a bit more than an investment bank. On the side, I might just start up another blog too – but this time probably with fewer gratuitous kazoo photos. Keep an eye out for that.

Laura is about to jet off again, this time to a new job as a postdoc following her previous research in DNA damage and cancer. She’s firmly got the travelling bug – so this is in Philadelphia, USA – and she leaves in less than a week!

So it just leaves us both to say a big thank you to everyone who made the trip so worthwhile and memorable – and to you out there for reading the blog and keeping us going. It has quite genuinely been an adventure of a lifetime, and we’re pretty sad to see it’s over.

I guess there is one final obvious question : Would we do it again? Absolutely! Although I think we might need to refine our Kazoo skills before we embark on the second lap…

Simon