Make Much of Time

We made it to Seattle… yeah!

Coming back to the US has been our worst travel experience to date.  But…. it still sure beats going to work.

Lessons learned flying from Lima, Peru to Seattle, WA via Toronto.

1. When entering Peru, check your tourist visa’s days. On entry we were told we had 90 days, but it was really 30 and scribbled illegibly in our passports. Fine assessed for visa overstay on leaving, $275 payable only in US $ and in cash. Total scam.

2. Flying to the US through Toronto, you now go through US Customs and Immigration in Toronto – before your flight into the US. This means lots of added time, you won’t make a tight connection… took us 2 hours to go from deplaning, though customs and immigration, back through security, and finally to the gate for the flight to Seattle…we had to hustle to make it just at the scheduled boarding time – so much for dinner.  It ended up being a couple hours or so delayed, but with no announced departure time, we couldn’t leave the gate to go back to the restaurants.

3. Flying to the US through a connecting flight, you have to go through security again (not new), but they don’t allow duty-free liquor through that secondary security check. So don’t buy duty-free liquor coming to the US if you have a connection. The US is the only country to have this policy, per the security guy in Toronto. They do allow an option to check it in baggage, but you’ll have to put in in your carry-on, check it and hope it doesn’t break – our bottle of Pisco from Peru didn’t break – small miracles.

4. Embraer 190 is the plane that Air Canada flies between Toronto and SEA, has only 1 bathroom for 86 people in cattle class on a 5 hour flight… and it’s in the galley. Neither passengers nor flight attendants like this arrangement.

5. Air Canada considers Canada part of USA. They call it a “trans-border” flight, not an international flight, which means no free food, wine, nor beer.

I think we may have gotten a bit spoiled travelling outside of US, with kids – or perhaps it was The Mayor’s, our youngest son’s, big smile and wave (which is how he got his nickname in the first-place). We were always escorted to the priority lines for immigration, security, and boarding – no matter the airline, no matter the country.  Extremely helpful flight attendants, and always a free beer or wine during the flight…

Like I said, even after a tough day… traveling sure beats sitting in an office, but I still don’t see why North American airliners can’t be a little more customer service oriented…

More Reading

• Best Airlines for Families – US News, notice none of these are based in North America
• Which airlines are the Best and worst for families? – Reader poll of US airlines.
• Momaboard’s Best and Worst Airlines for Family Travel – Reader stories about their experiences.

Photo Credit

I previously wrote about making lists here…

To be clear, if you have the opportunity and possibility of getting on the plane tomorrow, or next week, or do whatever it is you’ve been dreaming about, by all means do so… don’t waste your time making lists.

For me though, I didn’t.  I never thought I’d have the money to do something like this or could afford to quit my job. I didn’t think I could ever get my family interested in quitting work, school, leaving friends etc… Logistically, a trip like this sounded impossible – 3 kids, house, cars, etc… meant we weren’t going to just jump on a plane the next week.

Lists helped me translate my dream to reality. That’s it… it wasn’t long after I started making lists that I realized “Hey this is actually possible, we can do this” – that’s the beauty and benefit of lists… after that, the lists became less a dream and more an action plan.

So here it is, my goals/aspirations list,  the foundation for why we are on this trip. Even before the first inkling of the trip, I had a list like this, but outside of the first couple weeks of January, I just wasn’t particularly good at progressing in these areas, a big source of frustration and stress in my life. Once The Trip became a conscious thought in my brain, I realized that it could serve as a soft reset to my life… clear out all the stuff that wasn’t working right, the blockers, and be free to actively pursue the good stuff.

The list:

You can see, it’s not particularly linear, they aren’t all goals, or even action items… they are more aspirations then anything else; like a vision statement… There are obvious places of contradiction and sources of conflict, specifically between the 7th and 8th. There’s no real order…. But they are there, written down in black and white glory. I can change them or I can delete them, but I can’t hide from them…. I can’t hide that at the very least I felt this way when I wrote them down.  Most importantly, I can use it as a yardstick against what I am doing now… I can review all my activity on any given day and see how much of it is spent in pursuit of one or more of these.

And now, we are living in Lima, Peru in a relatively small flat – relative to the house we used to live in… I am learning to surf, we are all learning Spanish, we homeschool… We are active every single day, with long walks – for fun and for running errands, playing in the parks,  and exploring and searching for cheap and cheerful restaurants…. We still buy stuff, but each thing we buy that we want to keep necessitates an equal getting rid of something, suitcases can only hold so much.

The first 3 months of our trip we worked for a non-profit in Guinea (more on that later), the second 3 months in Europe, now here in Peru, and next week we fly back to the USA to start the last leg of The Trip – driving around the USA. I’m doing lots of research on RV’s, travel trailers, conversion vans, hammocks, camping, etc… etc…

…. I’d say we’re doing pretty well.

For further reading

43things.com – you can publish your goals publically. Though I didn’t do this, sharing your lists, especially your goals or specific tasks to achieve, can help you keep on track. I find sharing with friends and family better than to the world on the Internet, but I do love this idea… and I like reading other peoples’ goals.

How to choose achievable goals – short article on lifehacker.com written by Buster McLeod – a founder of 43Things. Don’t skip the comments, there’s good info there too.

This Magic Journey – Blog post by Chris Guillebeau for some inspiration. This post is about achieving (or just about to achieve) his goal of traveling to every country in the world. “Was it all about the destination? Was it all about checking things off a list? Of course not. It was all about the journey, always.” – Chris Guillebeau

The Power of Less: Changing Behavior with Leo Babauta – I am a huge fan of Leo Babauta and his blogs Zen Habits and mnmlist.com. This blog post however is on Tim Ferriss’ blog the 4hour workweek… yes, total man crush.

One final note:

In making your lists, make sure you know the difference between a project and a task. In other words, make sure your daily to do list is a list tasks not long-term projects. Those tasks should be the individual items necessary to drive a project toward completion. I first learned of this concept in a talk given by David Allen – Getting Things Done, but I can’t find any good links directly to his sites explaining the concept (guess you’ll have to buy the book). Here are a couple of links that do:

• Are You Making This Major Daily To-Do List Mistake? – from lifehack.org
• How to Make your Task List Doable – by Gina Trapani in lifehacker.com

So how did I begin? How did I go from full time gainful employment to getting on a plane with Warrior Princess and three kids for a year-long trip? What were the steps from ‘maybe one day’ to ‘I can do this’ to ‘I’m making it happen’ to ‘We’re on our way’?

If you have build castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.  – Henry David Thoreau

I started by making lists. It was a simple way to start emptying my mind of this dream, and start building the foundations. I put down all my random thoughts, ideas and details… I put down places, estimated costs, things I wanted to see. I wrote about things I wanted to learn… things I never have had time to do while working, things I wanted to show my kids, etc… etc… All this detail eventually gave shape to a general framework of The Trip which then morphed into a plan.

Making lists was also an easy way to do at least one thing every day, one thing toward my goal… doing that one thing – revising, editing, reviewing the lists helped keep me motivated and hopeful.

Making lists was a great way to escape from a rough day, a stressful day, from the noise and craziness. It was daydreaming, it was meditating, it was pure escape, but it was time well spent, moving towards an end goal. It was my Calgon and I still do this.

Make a List- Dream on Paper

Start with what’s important to you. What’s your dream? What is the big thing you want to do? Start by writing it down. Don’t worry if it sounds silly or dumb. Just start writing… then read your list, add to it, change it. Over time you’ll settle on something… something part reality, something part inspirational. It will represent both the kind of person you are and the kind of person you want to be…. Just keep going… Share your lists, your ideas, your dreams, with friends, with family. Eventually add in action items, schedules, and more detail. Start balancing your time… away from the list making and revising to knocking off those action items. Just keep going. Look at your lists every day.

Tip: Make sure one of your lists is a ‘Next Steps’ list. This list should have the very next thing you need to do. Usually you would add to this list at the end of your working session, so when you sit down in front of the computer (or open your paper notebook) the next time, you don’t have to think about what you need to do; it’s much easier to get started again and makes you less likely to procrastinate or get distracted.  Just open up your ‘Next Steps’ list and get busy.

A few of my lists:

• Where do I want to go – continents, countries cities, interesting things
• What do I want skills and experience do I want to learn and have (surfing, new language, photography, etc..)
• What are the goals of this trip I am dreaming about – why are we doing this….
• What needs to happen to be able to get on that plane (these are the to do or action lists)
  • Next steps
  • Finance/budget
  • Processes and systems (snail mail, communication, technology – backups and storage)
  • Sort out what to do with our house, cars, and all of our stuff
• Kids’ school

Start doing this today. What ever your dream is, whatever your big goal, don’t wait until you put your finances in order, don’t wait until you are sure you can pull if off, don’t wait to find that perfect app or that perfect organizational system… start right NOW! Create your lists!

For Further Reading

Top 10 Reasons Why We Love Making Lists – NPR – #1 is Bring order to chaos and #8 is Relieving Stress and Focusing the Mind…. These are the two primary ways my lists helped me, they kept me on the path….

40 Great Resources for Making Lists – Mashable –  I kept all mine in Microsoft OneNote and I always had a small notebook that I carried with me which I then transferred to OneNote later.

Getting Things Done – I’m a fan of GTD… I heard David Allen speak once. His books are good.  Making lists, is a great way to clear your mind. Remember though,  with this productivity/time management system or any other, organizing your to do list is good, but it is infinitely better to REDUCE and SIMPLIFY.

The Power of the List: Essential Lists for Productivity – Great post to really geek out on lists.