This is an amazing story of survival, ambition and culinary delights. It’s also a story of mean fish and getting really, really ill.

My friend Laura just returned from a little trip. I’ll let her pick it up from here. Their reinvention tale is nothing short of incredible. After all that, they’re still getting married. Fantastic.

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It took a lot of people to get the two of us around the world. Whether you know it or not, you were a part of it…thank you. With your help, my fiancé Joshua and I were able to travel the world for 20 months. We returned April 1st after visiting 32 countries, 47 states and about 15 of the “7 Wonders of the World”…

A couple of highlights:

• We drove 20,000 miles around the US with only one minor accident (nothing duct tape couldn’t fix) and 0 tickets
• We lived with a large Nicaraguan family for a month while learning Spanish
• We visited the “End of the World in South America” and hiked the unrelenting “W” trail in Torres Del Paine
• We won a wine stomping competition in Buin, Chile and ended up featured in the national newspaper
• We survived severe salmonella in the Amazon jungle while avoiding bullet ants and piranhas
• We ate at the #4 rated restaurant in the world in our REI travel clothes
• We hiked Machu Picchu in Peru and visited the Iguazu Falls from both Brazil and Argentina
• We bought a ticket to Easter Island on a whim the night before we left for the most remote, inhabited island in the world
• We had the privilege of watching Michael Phelps swim at the London Olympics
• We ate Dutch Apple Pie in Amsterdam while drinking $1 Chimays
• We fell in love with everything Italian in Rome
• It only took us 13 safaris to see the Big 5 in Africa
• We bungee jumped the world’s highest bridge jump in South Africa
• We rode an ostrich in between swimming with great whites, duskys and whale sharks
• We thought we were going to die while whitewater rafting the Class 5+ rapids on the mighty Zambezi in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe
• We were the first to summit Kilimanjaro on Oct. 4th – actually I beat Joshua (bigger lungs)
• We met our foster-baby elephant at the Sheldrick Trust in Kenya
• We celebrated a visit to the world’s tallest building in Dubai with the fanciest 4 hour dinner brunch we could find
• We rode on a hot air balloon ride over the fairy chimneys in Cappadoccia, Turkey
• We went on a $50/day 12-day Mediterranean cruise resulting in a 9 lb weight gain in preparation for India (where we lost 30 – courtesy of Giardia)
• We learned to drive scooters at the beaches of Goa
• We barely saw the Taj Mahal through the mist
• We spent a week doing 2x daily yoga in Rishikesh
• We survived India…period
• We did our best to outsmart the scams in Cambodia
• We took our 6th cooking class in Thailand
• We had 50 pieces of clothing made-to-measure in Hoi An, Vietnam
• We got a behind-the-scenes personalized tour of the world’s largest fish market in Tokyo
• And we never once, on all those flights, were upgraded by the airlines

We have way too many pictures and thousands of great memories to go along with them. Thank you for being a part of getting us here. Our stories can be found at http://www.redshirtliving.com

Laura
John Scott is an instructor at Academy of Art University in San Francisco, and the author of “Destination: Reinvention – Starting Over During The Worst Economy In A Lifetime”, available now in the Amazon bookstore.