The Birth of an Idea

The Birth of an Idea

Enjoying a beautiful sunset in Todos Santos, Mexico

Our time in Todos Santos has shared many similarities to our time in San Francisco in the sense that in between the short adventures with Mike into La Paz to visit with the crusty sailors and our trip today to the mountains to visit Marcos the potter, we have had lots of time to work on actually preparing for the next few legs of the post-career journey. Today, I want to do two things: first, share one of our new ideas that we’re currently brainstorming on, and two, ask for advice and suggestions for how to live the big picture adventure we have in mind.

The time we’re looking at is the period after the Marathon Madness and before Julie potentially going to school next summer in Seattle (we’ll share more about this in a later post). So we’re looking at roughly 2/7/2012 through 6/7/2012. We have two main things we’d like to do during this time period. The first is the biggest part in question and the part we’re looking for suggestions on while the second is pretty well set to follow (spending up to two months with our friend Matt in Naples, Italy). We would like to focus on making strong strides towards fluency in Spanish. Here in Mexico, we have begun with workbooks and lessons on our Kindle along with much real life experience practicing the language with Mexicans. We plan to keep up the practice speaking together and with the lesson books over the next few months. However, after the marathons, we hope to dive in and make a strong push to Spanish fluency.

The parameters we’re working with are first and foremost to be working on Spanish. The next two big parameters in order of importance are safety and cost. We don’t want to be doing anything that will jeopardize our lives or put us in harm’s way. We also want to get the biggest bang for our buck. One big idea is a language school in San Pedro La Laguna, Guatemala. Our cycling friends, Jenn and Dave are planning on going there and they have received good reviews from some friends of theirs that have already attended. However, Julie has been researching and has found a couple concerning articles relating to storm damages and theft.

We originally thought of spending six weeks in Guatemala but are now thinking that may be longer than we want to spend in the developing world, especially with concerns about ATM fraud and mudslides. That has led us to think about a new, fun idea to get a bit of everything. We are now thinking about maybe spending 2 weeks in school in Guatemala and then flying over to Europe, most likely starting in Spain. We figured we could do two weeks of intense Spanish lessons (6 hours a day) and then fly to Spain to travel the country working on what we’ve learned. We have a couple ideas for Spain, one being to hike the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route (at least 500 miles of walking) or maybe even researching walking from either Spain or Portugal, all the way to Italy. We haven’t researched this one much but we’re in the brainstorm stage right now so anything goes.

What do you think we should do? We have up to 2.5 months, we want to work on our Spanish and end up in Naples, Italy, ensuring we’re back in Ohio, ready to leave for Seattle by early June. We’re up for adventure, we want to learn Spanish and any ideas to help accomplish this are greatly appreciated at this point. Add to the comments section or send us an email. You could come up with a plan and even join us for the adventure. We have had so many people following this website over the past eight months and we’d love to hear your ideas to help contribute to where we go next.

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