Well! Here we are nearly a year after we left on our sabbatical and half a year since it finished! After Buenos Aires we fit many more activities into our days, and made more friends along the way, leaving us with much less time for writing blog posts.
I'm a little sad about the gap here, we never wrote about three wonderful partying weeks in Brazil, a hot and gorgeous week in San Pedro de Atacama, an epic off-road adventure through the Bolivian salt flats… and that only took us to mid-March!
At that point I took a sad but lovely sabbatical interlude. An impromptu long week visiting my Mum at home (with my brother too, visiting from Vancouver). Her terminal cancer diagnosis shocked us all and made it a very easy choice to include Cirencester, UK in my sabbatical. She passed away just over a month ago, and I'm still so happy that the last month of our sabbatical included such a cosy, memory-filled week!
Chris and I then went back to his home in Vancouver. Mum was so keen to enjoy the rest of our planned trip vicariously we knew we were going to be adventuring for five — Yvette and I, Chris and his wife Rose, soaking in the sights for Mum back in the UK. We managed to squeeze in two superbly snowy ski days in Whistler before the four of us snoozed our way across the Pacific to Japan!
I badly want to retrospectively add some posts her for Japan at the very least as, wow, it's only become more fun, beautiful and inimitable since my last visit 14 years ago!
If you've not already guessed why I'm writing this post though, we are indeed back travelling again! Only for an all too brief two weeks, but it's back to South America — Venezuela this time, to visit Yvette's family, celebrate our wedding next year with those who can't join us then, and to attend her sister's medschool graduation. It's going to be a busy fortnight!
You might wonder why we didn't add Venezuela to our itinerary earlier this year — bizarrely, courtesy of the strained relationship between the USA and Yvette's birth country, there are almost no flights into Venezuela from South America! There was one extremely slow & multi-hop trip via Panama, or an "easy" flight via… Portugal.
…which is exactly the flight we're catching now! See you in Caracas soon! 🛫🇬🇧👋🇻🇪🛬