What is going on?

I am a Finn who travels quite a lot. For the coming Autumn, my husband and I are travelling around the world in ~60 days. I have created this website for our family and friends to keep up with us around the world. I enjoy photography so this will also be a place to publish those snapshots on the way. I work in European wide eLearning projects in the University of Jyväskylä, Finland.  My husband is an English free-lance writer who divides his time between Jyväskylä and London. Besides photography, I like to do some soul searching in the form of Shorinji Kempo – which is something you can also follow me doing along the way.

Why?

We decided to do a Round the World (RTW)  trip in the Autumn of 2009 for several reasons:
- We are both still youngish and have the leg power to walk around without extra trouble
- We are at the time in our lives when this is financially possible
- We don’t have strings to houses (bigger morgage or something), animals, kids, ill relatives or cars
- Our primary target is Asia: China & Japan, which are impossible to comfortably travel to in summer (too hot)

How will we do it:

We got ourselves One World Around the World Traveller tickets for four continents. We outclude Africa and South America. Perhaps some day.

16 flights, out of which 4 are over night. One World was our choise marely because it includes Finnair and Japanese Airlines. Those are the two single most important companies for us. We wanted to fly directly to Japan from Helsinki, but ended up with two different scenarios of it due to pricing and scheduling

The Euro being very strong in the spring of 2009, I actually ended up paying 700euros more for her ticket than my husband. My ticket is controlled by Finnair where as my husband’s ticket is controlled by British Airways. Due to scheduling with work and the extra trouble it would have been for me to go from London and return to London,  I decided against possible extra days of traveling with Ryanair… Been there, done that, with our trip to China in 2006, from which I learned that extra travel on top of all the travel is just not fun. It’s not as expensive as one might think – about the same as the cost of flying from Europe to Australia and back again.

How do we pay for it?

Well, for one, as oppose to most people who travel around the world, we won’t be gone for a year, we’ll only be gone for 2 months. J’s a freelancer so he can work on the road. K’s saved up holidays of two years together, so she’ll be on actual holiday. Plus we’ve got something that the americans travelling RTW are missing – strong currency. The most expensive places in the world in 2009 include Japan, Scandinavia and London… So it’s not really going to be more expensive than living in our homes in Jyväskylä and London. Everywhere else it’s cheaper.

About this site

This is my first powered-by-wordpress site, and I am learning as I go along. I owe this experiment to the Wide Wide World, which I stumbled upon my search for RTW blogs. I think Craig and Dani have done a wonderful job with their site and I decided to use the same Neoclassical theme as they do.  This is exactly what I’ve been looking for after years of struggling with pure html.

About the images

All the images in the blog including the header bar are taken either by myself or my husband. I hope that you ask for permission if you would like to use any of them.

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