4 Years Later...

Dear Friends and Family,

Greetings! After a four year break from publishing our travel related activities, we are rebooting The Adventures of Joe & Carol. Of course there have been more than a few adventures since we last posted an update, but perhaps of a different nature than what one would expect after our world tour (or want to read on a public blog for that matter). However, despite our rather domestic tendencies of late, these have been exciting, challenging, and growing years for us as a family and we would never trade them for anything. Briefly, bringing the reader up to date, we have since:

• Cycled a tandem mountain bike from the San Francisco Bay Area to the middle of Utah
• Returned to Southern California for work and friendships
• Lived communally with some extremely generous friends of ours for 9 months
• Found a most amazing church family
• Bought a house
• Had a daughter
• Enjoyed many wonderful outings to various parks
• Traveled to Australia with 1 year-old daughter
• Visited family in a variety of wonderful locations around the West Coast US
• Had another daughter
• Tried some prototype camping with two kiddos
• Tried our luck at Reality TV
• Participated in many Spartan Races
• Learned that business travel is very different than personal travel
• Maintained a house
• In general did many of the things that people our age are supposed to do

However, we find ourselves once again putting common sense and stability aside, and with our two wonderful kids we are headed back to Africa! To make a long story short (so that we can spend our time writing actual updates rather than reminiscing about the past), we are leading a team of 8 adults (us and three other couples) from our church on a two-week short term missions trip with Empowering Lives International (ELI, one of the groups that Carol and I met early on our round-the-world expedition four years ago). We are thrilled to have this opportunity not only to see our friends at ELI again, but to head back out into the vastness of this world and share the vision of ELI and enormous needs of folks in Kenya with some amazing folks from our church who have blessed us over and over again while we have been growing our family and learning how to be adults.

Right, so here we are on a plane with a one year-old and three year-old headed for the UAE, and then Nairobi and then back to Eldoret and our friends at ELI (though this time on a smaller plane rather than hitchhiking with strangers). We’ll try to keep you up to date every so often with a story and photos, so keep checking back if you are interested. So far so good!