Welcome to our blog!

…who are we kidding, hi mom and dad!

We are Christian (AKA Kik) and Clair and we made a decision about two years ago to take off on a pretty crazy adventure the summer of 2016. To find out more about us go here.

Here we are six months out. As of today, our plan is to travel to Central America (El Salvador to be exact) mid-July… And haven’t really gotten much farther than that!

Our planned itinerary at a very high level (and subject to change) is Winnipeg – Central America – South America – Australia – South East Asia – Eastern Europe – Winnipeg.

We decided to start-up a blog to chronicle our adventures and keep an online open record for trolls to leave mean comments on. Also, according to internet legend six months out is when you really need to start planning your trip so here we are today. That being said we have been saving our pennies for about 2 years. Our goal has been to save 50k.

The one thing that seems to be the biggest debate online is how much money you need to travel for one year, and I think it comes down to how you want to travel. We plan on living as cost effectively as possible but we also plan on really enjoying this once in a lifetime opportunity. That’s why we’ve had to say no to so many beers/wines over the past year:(

To kick things off, last week we headed to our local travel health clinic (living in Canada we have a provincial health office that we were able to set up an appointment at.) It was really great and they went over about a billion diseases you can get and all the possible side effects of all the vaccines – which is exciting when you’re both getting five shots. We opted for a mumps booster, Typhoid, Yellow Fever, TwinRix (Clair just got the final booster), and POLIO – who woulda thought we’d need a polio vaccine! All of this for an incredibly sore right arm and a grand total of $750. We have really great health insurance through our employers so lucky for us the majority of this will be covered.

We also listed our condo on Facebook – which was exciting!  We have a couple of options going forward so that’s a pretty good confidence booster.

Kik also got the okay from his employer that he has been approved for a one-year leave.

For now we will just keep on researching flights, malaria and whether to bring a sleeping bag or not.

Clair & Kik