Day 133 Tuesday March 23 Going home ☹

We flew out of Manila through Tokyo and Los Angeles, finally landing in Phoenix 22 hours later.  We ate some good noodles and drank some good beer in Tokyo in the hopes of knocking us out for the long stretch of the trip, but no luck, neither of us slept very much, meaning the jetlag is going to be bad; a decent price to pay for what we did over the last 5 months.

And that's all folks.  We hope you enjoyed following the trip through these blog entries and the videos we made.  Along with this being a trip of a lifetime for us, we realize that a lot of people lived the trip vicariously through us, which was our hope all along.  We hope you learned a few things about that far away region, and we hope you gained an itch to explore more of the world yourselves.  All we can say is that wherever you go and whatever you do will be worth it.  It always is.

Stay curious.  Stay energetic.  Stay passionate.  Stay open-minded.  And most importantly, stay happy.

Thanks to everyone for all of your support.  Now that we're back, we hope to see all of you very soon.

Cheers.

The Palumbos

Half way there...

As crazy as it is to believe, today is the halfway point of our trip.  Tomorrow we leave Thailand and head to Laos.  That means in the first half of our trip, we've spent 2 weeks in Japan, 4 weeks in China, and 4 weeks in Thailand.

We're not sure what's crazier, though.

Is it crazier that we've done and seen so much and we're still only half done with our trip?  Or is it crazier that we still have the same amount of time ahead of us, in completely new countries for us?  Either way, this whole thing is crazy, and we're loving it.

We still have to visit Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and the Philippines.  All places that we're completely clueless about right now, and will hopefully have a much better understanding of in the next 2.5 months.  Crazy.

We still get to spend time Ho Chi Minh City with Lisa, Steve, and Luke.  We still get to tour Vietnam and Cambodia with my (now our) parents.  We still get to meet the child that Carmen sponsors in the Philippines and volunteer with his community.  Crazy.

Any way, hopefully you've enjoyed reading about our adventure so far, and we hope we have just as much to report on during the 2nd half of our trip.  And we hope you all are having a great 2010 so far.

And in case you missed them, click the following for the videos we've created so far...

Click for the Japan video.

Click for the China video.

All our love!
The Palumbos