An Incomplete Night's Sleep & Post

It is about 4am.

I am listening to our three year-old daughter sing the ABCs in the corner of our little temporary home here at the training center. The kids were both wide awake at 2:30am having not adjusted to the new time zone (it may take several days yet for this to happen by the looks of it), and little Petra has picked up a bit of a stomach bug that has put one of our blankets out of commission and kept her hovered over the sink for a couple hours. She is handling it very well all things considered, and we think it is just a typical travel bug, but we’ll keep you posted on her condition. Carol and Matea have headed back to bed for another attempted round of sleep.

All this unscheduled nighttime activity follows what has been an amazing first day here at ELI. It would take pages and pages to fully describe everything that has happened in our first 24 hours, but I’ll mention just a few of the highlights….

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!

Looking Back

Dear Reader,

Over a year since we returned from our journey, Carol and I find ourselves in the middle of quite a different adventure (home ownership, the birth of our first child, work and community responsibilities, new friendships, and others). Although life has changed dramatically for us since our return to "the real world", we are still enjoying the challenges each new moment brings us, even if they are not related to train travel or language barriers.

I am writing this post in order to create a link back to the very beginning of our adventure for anyone who is hearing the tale for the very first time.

If this is your first visit to our page, you can follow this link back to the very beginning before we left California on our round-the-world adventure.

For those of you who are already familiar with our travels, we would like to share this summary video that Joe created for Carol's birthday, in memory of all the amazing adventures we shared on our world pilgrimage.

Thanks again for enjoying our travels along with us!!!

- Joe & Carol