The times they are a changin'.

Well for us, the times are certainly going to be changing soon enough. Here it is the second day of 2007 and we are 16 days away from setting off for Guatemala. We have created this blog with the intention of posting interesting information and pictures (if we can figure out how) about our travels over the next year. Strangely enough, creating a blog was not on our "to do" list, but we figure it will serve as a journal for us and a way to keep friends and family up to date on our travels. We still have a lot of items on our to do list that are yet to be done, but hopefully we'll get them all, or at least the critical ones finished before we set off on Jan 18. Although we are anictipating our excursion with great excitement, we still have many moments of doubt and trepidation. We just have to keep telling ourselves that all the plans will come together and this year away will really come to pass as hoped.
Our planned itinerary in a nutshell is as follows: Jan 18 to Mar 1, Guatelmala and Belize. We ease into our travels with a week at a 5star resort on the Caribbean coast of Guatemala and then spend two weeks at a language school in Antigua (south of Guatemala City) hopefully learning enough Spanish to get by. We are joined by two of Sue's sisters (Rose and Darien) for three weeks on Feb 8, and we'll complete our tour of Guatemala and Belize with them. We end up with 4 days on Caye Caulker, an island just off the coast of Belize. On Mar 1, Rose and Dee fly back to Canada and we fly to Costa Rica where we travel around for nearly 3 weeks. We'll also be staying a few days with our good friends Michael and Sue Kallis who have just completed building a beautiful villa on the Pacific Coast. Then on Mar 19 it's off to Lima Peru. After a couple of days in the capital we head to a jungle lodge on the Amazon in NE Peru and then embark on a "circle tour" of the country seeing legendary attractions such as Machu Picchu, Lake Titicaca and the Colca Canyon, the world's deepest canyon at over 10,000 ft. And we leave Peru on April 11 and spend a couple of weeks in Calgary before heading to Australia April 28. We will be "travelling" and not "touring" (we decided to avoid the organized tour route and will be getting around largely by public transportation), so I'm sure we are in for some "excellent adventures" over the next few months.
We will update this blog as often as we can and try to keep it short and hopefully sweet.