Reflection: Feet

Once upon a time, several months before we embarked on our trip, we spent hours trying to come up with a moniker. All the cool kids had them. "Six on Six" was appealing because six of us were going to visit six continents. It made us briefly consider adding Antartica to the itinerary but that would have consumed too much time and way too much money. Every variation of 6x6 was taken on social media but 12x6 wasn't so we focused on our 12 feet going to six continents. (A story for another time: I now feel great angst about the "brand" because the pandemic cut us off after 4 continents.) At some point, it became a thing to take a picture of our feet in a circle. The first one I have is from a beach in California at the end of our North American RV/road trip:

Anyway, we took a lot of pictures of our feet during these months of traveling. Most of them were in airports. Our instagram feed has one for each airport we visited with the airport code superimposed. There were 27 in all, not including our return stop in Portland, the airport where we made a stop but didn't disembark, or the multiple visits to certain airports, like Sydney (six, I think).

Part One: The Airports

Our departure airport: Portland, Oregon. Within two minutes of checking in we lost our first child but only for about five minutes. Nana and Papa ate lunch with us and then waved goodbye thru security. We were off!

Missing! LAX, where we spent a night in transit from Portland to Costa Rica

Liberia, Costa Rica. Our first international arrival. Liberia is a small city on the western coast of Costa Rica and the closest "big" airport to our destination, Witches Rock Surf Camp in Tamarindo. We were met by the resort and driven about 45 minutes to the beach. Worth it!

San Jose, Costa Rica. We survived a four-hour drive from the beach to the big city. I had once considered a puddle jumper flight from Liberia (or even Tamarindo) to SJO but was advised that the local airlines often go out of business after too many (fatal) crashes. So a four hour drive, instead. This was also to avoid itineraries that took us from Liberia back to Houston or Miami before going on to Buenos Aires. Instead, we connected in...

Panama City! This stopover was a blur but we stayed in a really nice hotel and had a taxi take us to the Panama Canal locks (and museum) before driving us to the airport. 

We arrived very late at night in Buenos Aires for the start of our month in Argentina.

A port but not an airport! We took a ferry from BA to Montevideo, Uruguay for a week of adventuring. One highlight of the ride was meeting an employee of the US embassy who invited us to Thanksgiving dinner at the embassy! We still regret not accepting that offer.

We flew back from a tiny airport outside Punta del Este (Uruguay) to BA.

Our second airport in BA, this is the domestic facility that's located really, really close to downtown. So we flew into it from Uruguay and then out of it next when we flew to...

Iguazu! This was one of our favorite "National Geographic" destinations. Iguazu falls is at the intersection of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay. 

From Iguazu we flew to Mendoza (via Salta, but we never got off the plane so I don't think it counts). We didn't do the wine tourism that's so famous here but we had a really fun day in the mountains with rafting and horseback riding!

Santiago, Chile. We spent two nights here before our big departure from South America to Australia.

Landed in Sydney and went straight to the airport hotel...woke up to discover we were about fifty yards from the runway. After a morning of watching planes land and take off we shuttled over to the domestic terminal for our flight to...

Hamilton Island! We tackled our jet lag on the beach on this resort island. There was a lot of pool time plus a snorkel day-trip.

A short flight from Hamilton Island to Brisbane where we rented a car (our first experience driving on the "other" side of the road) and headed down the Gold Coast to cosy Byron Bay for a few more days of beach time.

Our plan had been to drive from Byron down to Sydney but the mood of our children persuaded us to buy tickets on a discount airline and fly less than an hour (instead of a 10 hour drive). This airport straddles a timezone (something that Australia handles with a lot of creativity). It's known as the Gold Coast Airport but the town is Coolangata, hence the OOL.

From Sydney (third visit to that airport) across the country/continent to Perth. It would have been no trouble to rent a 4x4 suitable for mining but we had to struggle, on short notice, to find a civilian vehicle for a party our size.

Two weeks later we transferred from Perth in the west to Melbourne in the south. We needed jackets when we landed!

After returning to Sydney for a few days and meeting up with Nana and Papa, we began our visit to New Zealand. We arrived in Christchurch (imagine a big "CHC").

Our circle grew with the addition of four more feet!

After two weeks RVing around the south island, we flew to Rotorua on the north island. There was no security before boarding the airplane. That felt really weird.

Finally, in Auckland, we said our goodbyes. Sixteen feet one minute...

And back to twelve the next.

Ten hours later, we landed in Singapore!

About a week later we were joined by our friends Melanie, Owen, Enzo and Anya, raising our foot count to a whopping 20! This is us at the airport in Siem Reap (REP)

After a few days in Cambodia it was off to Vietnam where we landed in Ho Chi Minh City, where the airport still goes by the letters associated with its old name, Saigon.

My favorite airport code was in Da Nang, where we spent a few days relaxing in the ancient beach community of Hoi An.

Then it was off to Hanoi, our final stop with the friends. See more about that below!

From Hanoi, we flew back to Singapore in early March then drove into Malaysia to stay in Johor Bahru. It was during that stay that COVID took over, forcing us to leave via Kuala Lumpur (KUL), pictured here.

We had a layover in Hong Kong (HKG)...

Then an overnight layover in San Francisco (SFO). It's a little weird that we departed Hong Kong at 1am Tuesday and landed in California at 10pm on Monday but that's the international date line for you!

Our final airport picture was back where we began, in Portland. 

Part Two: Everywhere Else

It became fun to stand in a circle and photograph our feet so we started doing it in cool or memorable places.

Witches Rock Surf Camp in Tamarindo, Costa Rica. We spent a wonderful week here, truly vacationing. We were with friends and family. The surfing was great. The snorkeling was great. The hours of doing nothing was great.

Parque Las Heras in Buenos Aires, Argentina. We visited this park a lot because it was just around the corner from our apartment, which was between Recoletta and Palermo neighborhoods. The kids loved the carrousel, especially. Making friends didn't work out the way we had dreamed but it was fun to see the kids figure out how much they could (and couldn't) socialize with other kids. They also loved the exercise stations.

Montevideo, Uruguay. Granted, we're not standing in a circle but we were excited about this composition, nonetheless. We were supposed to spend a week in the city but our AirBnB was a catastrophe so we moved immediately to a hotel. But we could only afford to stay there for two nights. Fortunately, it was across the street from this beachfront landmark/photo-op!

Iguazu Falls, Brazil. One highlight was a jetboat ride up the canyon and into the falls. This was on our first day, when we visited the falls from the Brazil side. 

Iguazu Falls, Argentina. We consider the Argentine side of the falls more enjoyable. The hiking was exraordinary, with walkways near and sometimes over the water.

Mendoza, Argentina. This picture was entirely Henry's project. He worked for hours on assembling the tiles (from Bananagrams) and then arranged each of us precisely. If you know Henry, you know exactly how his face looked as we executed the final product.

Slope Point, New Zealand. During our campervan expedition on the South Island, we drove to Slope Point and then walked to the southernmost point on the southern island. More than halfway from the equator to the south pole!

Te Anau, New Zealand. True, there are no feet in this picture. But this is the typical view of the area immediately outside the door of our campervan for those two weeks. Just a pile of flip flops ("thongs") and sandals.

Siem Reap, Cambodia. Okay, this might be my favorite. At the absolute center of the Angkor Wat complex, which is about a kilometer in diameter, is this colored stone. It was so remarkable and so understated, compared to the intricate carvings on every other surface. 

Angkor Wat: It finally occurred to me to show the flip side of this foot picture!

Siem Reap, Cambodia: Another break from the norm. Here's Henry, Elise and Lily getting a fish foot massage at the night market in central Siem Reap Town.

Hanoi, Vietnam: After three weeks of travel with Owen, Melanie, Anya and Enzo, it was time to say goodbye. This is our 20 feet in front of our hotel. It's amazing there wasn't a scooter in the picture, somehow!

I think this was Anya's idea for our goodbye. That's 10 hands!

Hanoi, Vietnam: The national train, called Reunification Express, has this remarkable route through an alley in a dense neighborhood. Tourists are no longer allowed to walk through the alley so we took a picture of our feet on a rail in a nearby intersection.

Hanoi, Vietnam: Another stop on our last-day walking tour of Hanoi. There was a temple in the middle of the lake (that we didn't visit) but we did take our picture on the bridge that approaches it. There are so many symbols of harmony in Vietnamese culture and architecture. It would be so easy to miss the tile work in a city park or so easy not to bother, as would likely be the case in the US. But here it's a chance not to be missed.

Johor, Malaysia: With the pandemic eliminating tourism from China, Legoland Malaysia was deserted. This wasn't a problem for us, as there were no lines anywhere and no crowds either. So we got this view of Elise's feet in the lazy river.

In sum, I'm glad we invented that little tradition. It was fun to include our comrades when friends/family traveled with us. It was fun to stop and mark a special visit by taking our picture. I enjoyed it most when the kids thought of it, especially when Henry created the photo in Mendoza. As they say, "leave only footprints."