Twelve Feet, Six Continents, One Year

March 24th arrived twice for us, first in Hong Kong, while we waited to board our 1am departure for San Francisco and then again in San Francisco, because we landed 3 hours before we departed, or 10pm on March 23rd. After spending the night at an airport hotel, we flew from SFO to PDX at 11:35am on 3/24. The only notable part of this flight was that we upgraded to First Class because it was approximately the same price as flying coach and paying for all the luggage we needed to check. The main perk was expedited everything: check-in, baggage handling, security, but not boarding. Not boarding because there were fewer than 50 people on our flight. The gate attendant called it, "Alaska Airlines Private Charter Number 427." He offered to board the flight according to quality of smile. Half the passengers were airline personnel being moved around. One pilot noted that he wasn't flying his usual route to Hawaii because they had cut back to a single wide-body, once a week, w...

Probably the southernmost site on our trip: Slope Point, New Zealand Everybody was right: the distances in New Zealand are very deceiving. It takes a really long time to go anywhere. I'd guess our typical travel speed has been 45 miles per hour. One funny thing about this is that the national default speed limit is 100 kph (62 mph), which our navigation displays no matter where we are, including this gravel road. Going 42kph in a 100 zone; out the windshield you can see the gravel and in the nav you can see the curves! Anyway, we left Dunedin mid-morning on Wednesday and took about an hour to reach Balclutha on the motorway. We found a lovely municipal park with a picnic table, a great playground and a weird, small zoo. Then it was on to the Nugget Point Lighthouse, where we enjoyed a short hike hoping to see Penguins (no) but got rewarded with some baby sparrows in their nest (in the blind from which we hoped to spot the penguins!) Hoping to see some Yellow-Eyed Pengu...

Seen through any lens, this place is beautiful (photo by Sam Westover) Part 1: The Backstory This is a story about a man named Josh. Some of you know him but didn't know that he has a passion for travel. Some of you know him and his passion for travel but not his extensive and well-placed family of travel professionals. Now all of you can know that we are in a Costa Rican paradise because of his assistance. Let's start this story in the middle, of course. It's late 2018 and my colleague Megan and her husband Josh have come over to tell us about Argentina. Megan has told me that Josh is from Buenos Aires and (insert long digression here) his family has an apartment that there might be available for visiting friends. Megan, almost exclusively, knew about our plan but hasn't told her husband because he also works in our field and appreciates that I'm in a delicate situation. At first, on the premise of a hypothetical future trip to BA, Josh is telling us ab...