Hello from New Zealand!
We won’t be here for long because in an hour or so, we’re boarding our flight from Auckland to Santiago, Chile. We’ve now been traveling 200 days longer than the 80 of the Jules Verne protagonist I mention in my title, but like him we’re about to experience the magic of the international dateline.
The kids are in fact very excited about the fact that, even though we’ll be on the plane almost 11 hours, we will land about 5 hours earlier than we depart, making March 15th the looooongest day of our trip.
As for our South American plans, after the better part of a week in Santiago, we’re planning to fly to Buenos Aires. We’ll probably head over to Uruguay for a day trip before flying a few days later to Cordoba and then traveling onwards from there to the Bolivian border and going to Santa Cruz. From Santa Cruz, we’ll go to La Paz, where we’ll stop for a couple of weeks for the kids to learn some Spanish. Then, we’ll head to Peru for about 10 days, before continuing on to Ecuador and Colombia. Our plan is to head from there back to the states during the last week of May.
After adding Australia and New Zealand to my last post from Japan, here’s our current count:
- 45 countries so far, total
- Me: 73 countries (including 44 eating McDonald’s)
- Karen: 75 countries
- Henry: 58 countries
- Charlie: 54 countries
- James: 51 countries
P.S. Charlie is going to pull to within one of Henry in the next few countries! Henry visited Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay as a one-year-old only child. Charlie will have to make his way to China if he wants to fully match Henry, though, since we took him there a few months before Argentina.