A Round the World Adventure

Today is our three month anniversary of traveling the world. We are in Istanbul tonight, our 18th country within 90 days.

Traveling is wonderful. Traveling is tiring. Traveling is glamorous. Traveling is dirty. Traveling is interesting. Traveling is exciting. Traveling is exhausting. 

Some days we eat doner kebabs, some days we eat ethnic food, some days we eat McDonalds. Some days we make lots of friends, some days we meet great people, some days we can’t find anyone else who speaks English. 

As I write this, we are sitting in the lobby of our hotel in Istanbul (which, incidentally, seems to double as a Turkish bath house, business meeting place, family house, restaurant, sauna, and community hangout). We’ve been booking flights and researching hotels and reading about Istanbul and trying to stay awake after an overnight flight and sleeping til 4 PM this afternoon. All day, we haven’t met a single person who speaks decent English, until this very moment, and one of the Turkish businessmen is giving travel and museum tips to Rachel.

Every country has kind people and brusque ones. In every place, we realize that it is much broader than the stereotypes we hold and yet those stereotypes are also formed for a reason. Yes, Turkey is 98% Muslim, and they check your car trunk before you drive into the mall with infrared glasses and make you walk through a body scanner to enter. But overall, as we have found in every country, the people are as friendly to you as you are to them.

We missed posting blogs about Ireland, Nice, Monaco, Barcelona, York, and London (again!) where we met our dad on his return from a missions trip in Sudan. We hope to do posts on those places, because they were all, in one of our overused words, amazing.

For tonight, thanks for being our friends and cheering us on for the last three months. Traveling has changed the way we see the world, the way we see ourselves, the way we see the church, the way we love Jesus. 

Traveling is an adventure.

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” – Mark Twain