Dispatch XX

Greetings from the Andes

First, from high up in the Andes Mountains, Happy Thanksgiving to all of our long-time friends, and many new ones too; to our friends in the United States and around the world! We wish each of you the very best. We are grateful for your friendship and goodwill, and thankful for the many people we have met and for all that we have learned as we travel into our second year. We wish you the very best every day. Stay well. Enjoy life! It flies by.

Many of you have been kind enough to say thanks for the Dispatches I began sending the first day we bounced our bags down Smallman Street in Pittsburgh to catch the Amtrak train that began our 7-continent journey. I hope you’ve been enjoying them. I’ve certainly been having fun writing them. My goal from the start was to explore the world, but never travel by jet, so we could really soak up and share the cultures and people we meet, and then share that experience with you.

We have, however, encountered a problem. I can’t write the dispatches quickly enough to keep up with our travels. If you’ve looked at the interactive map (above) that shows where we are, you might notice that we are currently in Chile and heading to Patagonia, over 420 days into our journey. Eventually we’ll make our way to Antarctica and then across the Atlantic to the North Pole. That’s a long way from the location of my last Dispatch written about Devil’s Tower in Utah, day 52!

I think I have a solution, though. I plan to continue writing the Dispatches, but rather than follow the precise line of each location, I want to pick and chose the highlights—the Navajo shaman we rode horses with in Monument Valley, for example, or our misadventures as we drove the Baja 1000; the time we spent in the beautiful city of Victoria, Canada; our trip across the Atlantic on the Queen Mary II; the exotic delights of Morocco, our 60 mile pilgrimage on along the Camino Way in Spain, and our six day hike to the little known, storied Incan city of Choquequirao in the Andes Mountains. And soon our adventures into Patagonia, Tierra del Fuego and Antarctica.

So bear with me. Hopefully, hopping more rapidly through these highlights will provide a sense of our journey that is accurate while still moving you through this whole experience a little more quickly. (More details will follow when I complete the books I am already working on.)

And remember, there are lots of ways to enjoy and learn what trouble we are getting into. There are always these newsletters and dispatches, but also our Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn pages are there with pictures and short updates about the locations we are exploring. Soon we’ll be upgrading our Vagabond-Adventure website and creating a Vagbond-Adventure Facebook page. We’re also expanding our gallery of images to provide a more visual way of joining along.

All of these approaches will allow you to interact with us, share your ideas and thoughts about the places we are visiting and the people we are meeting. We want this to be a big, interesting, fun conversation.

I’m working on the next dispatch and it will still be about our journey over the Rockies and along the Colorado River to Arches National Park, and soon after that a wonderful horseback trip we took through Monument Valley with a remarkable Navajo shaman named Jameison.

See you soon! In the meantime, crack on!

C-Squared

This is a series about a Vagabond’s Adventures - author and National Geographic Explorer Chip Walter and his wife Cyndy’s personal journey to explore all seven continents, all seven seas and 100+ countries, never traveling by jet.