Our plans for next year are largely up in the air, but I can give you an idea of what we do know. Our contract at the school runs until the middle of December, and includes airfare home. We expect to leave around December 17th, probably flying into New York. My parents will pick us up at the airport, and we’ll have about a week with them in PA. On Christmas Day they’ll drive us to WV to spend a week with Joey’s family there. Then we’ll head to Charlotte for New Year’s, and probably Atlanta after that to see my aunt. Assuming we know where we’re going next (which is sort of a big “if” at the moment), we’ll fly out of Atlanta for our next destination.
The big question, obviously, is where. And the truth is that we don’t have a clue right now. Joey really wants to find an international non-profit/NGO to work with, so that’s sort of how we’ll make our decision. I plan to continue teaching English, which there are opportunities for pretty much everywhere. The problem is that five months out, there isn’t a whole lot we can do. Additionally, there isn’t really any easy resource to connect with loads of possibilities. Joey checks Idealist pretty regularly, and has found a few other regionally specific sites, but nothing super promising. So if you happen to have any connections, we would really appreciate it!
A few months ago I would have said that we’ll definitely spend another year somewhere in SE Asia. It’s been really difficult deciding where to travel, and there are a bunch of places we really want to see that we couldn’t fit in this year: Australia, India and the Philippines especially. After our second year, we would ship the majority of our stuff home, then head to China for a few days before taking the Trans-Siberian Railway from Bejing to Moscow, via Mongolia. We’d take our time through Europe, and probably fly to the US from London.
That will still be the plan if we end up somewhere in Asia next year, but where we go will really depend on what we can find for Joey. We both loved Malaysia and Thailand when we were there, and Indonesia is a possibility, too. But there are so many other possibilities—Joey’s been talking about Turkey lately, and I keep finding myself looking into Morocco. We both love the idea of Argentina. So who knows!
What I can say is that neither of us are ready to be back in the US, starting “real” careers and grown-up lives. There’s too much we want to see and experience before we’ll be ready for that.
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