As we get ready to leave, I also think about what it will be like to leave medical practice and working for an entire year as well. I’m not the first to do this, of course, many others take a break from their work for other reasons including family, illness and others. Still, it gives me some pause.

I have often had a mixed relationship with medicine. For a very, very long time I did not really enjoy medicine at all. I felt as if I had gotten into medicine as a way to help generally healthy and productive people who had unfortunately become ill, and treat them back to their healthy and productive lives. Much of what I now do is treat chronically ill people who have flares of their chronic illness, and much of that chronic illness is self inflicted by lifestyle habits such as smoking, drinking, drugs, and poor diet. Add to that the increasing pressures put on doctors to meet unobtainable and poorly measured metrics and the constant barrage of negative media about physicians (they’re just after our money, in the pockets of the drug company, etc.) and it’s not an easy path. Of course, the moment a physician starts talking about how it is a difficult career, they’re roundly criticized for complaining from their privileged position. I think if this was something I was getting into solely for the money, there are easier jobs to attain with less training that pay a hell of a lot more in which you’re not responsible for someone else’s life.  Anyway, often times at work people will answer the question “How’s it going?” with a sarcastic”Oh, you know, living the dream,” as I did myself for quite some time.

Having said all that and having the perspective of a few more years under my belt and seeing what other careers are like, in many ways I do think we’re living the dream in the medical profession, at least in my neck of the woods. I have a job in which I am helping people at a critical juncture in their lives, and doing things that can really make a difference. I’m in a job which is intellectually challenging and is never dull or boring. I work with other intelligent people and get to collaborate in interesting ways. For all of this, I’m compensated fairly and and am able to live a comfortable life. Are there very rough days? Are there people who I’d rather not deal with? Are there some days I wish I could just stay home? Well, sure, but isn’t that pretty much the same for any profession?

All of this to say that I wonder how it will be to leave it for a year. I’m not someone who gets bored in general, and I think I’ll find plenty to do during my year of housewifery. When I think about leaving work for a full year, my initial reaction is one of elation and relief, to not have the stresses of work for a full year.And it may be that that is indeed exactly what happens and I find that I don’t miss doctoring at all. This is all, of course, a position of great privilege-many people in my field don’t have the option to just leave it behind for a year, even if they would wish to.

There is a small part of me, though, that is a bit suspicious that I’m actually going to have a harder time leaving behing a professional identity and sense of purpose than I’m realizing. I think of this more as I enjoy interactions at work whether with coworkers or patients, and to think about how those bring variety to my day in a way that my family could not.

Perhaps I’ll just be living a different sort of dream, no?

 

 

A few posts ago, I laid out a plan for the places we’re going to go on our journey. In that itinerary I was doing my best to follow good weather since it’s no fun if everyone is freezing cold. After talking to some people and reviewing our plans, I’ve changed them around a bit to be a bit more linear.

So, to start:

First stop North Island, New Zealand. We’ll be doing a fairly typical tourist circuit there. I’ve ditched the option of going to South Island – that is truly cold and most places don’t have central heating! I have no intention of willingly spending  a good degree of time waking up in a 40 degree room. North island: Glow-worm caves, maori carvings, mountain biking in redwood forests, hot beach, wineries and of course, Hobbiton.

Then we’re off to Sydney for doing Sydney things! No real plans here – the opera house, the aquarium are on the list but we’ll figure this out when we get there.

Then to Cairns for Barrier Reef snorkelling. The 2 Australians I’ve spoken to about this both turned up their nose at Cairns for being ridiculously touristy. They also told me they’ve never been there. I’m not worrying about it too much given that we are tourists, and I still want to go to the Reef. I only hope it’s not too bleached before we’re there.

From Cairns to Alice Springs and a drive and camping at Uluru, or Ayer’s Rock, in the center of the country, which is one of the wonders of the world, depending on what site you read.

From there to Darwin in the north of Australia, which is tropical – rainforests, crocodiles. There’s also a festival while we’re there, and supposedly a great water park.

From there we go to Bali for a bit. I’m thinking this will be a good relaxation point for us to have some beach and down time after being on the move during the last 2 weeks. There’s amazing dance and culture there as well, so it won’t be all sitting on the beach…or maybe it will.

From there to Cambodia where we’ll again most likely do the traditional tourist route of going from Phnom Penh to the beaches to the southwest to Siem Reap. From there we have to get to Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam do fly out to Japan, but that we’ll figure out when we get there.

Then to Japan for 3 full weeks. Starting in Tokyo and making our way southward to eventually fly out of Osaka is the current plan, though again this part needs a bit of planning too. The only thing I have booked so far is our tickets to the Studio Ghibli Museum, because they sell out fast! Tickets for September went on sale June 1st and my first choice date was sold out by June 2nd!

From Japan we have to make our way to Romania somehow. I’m thinking most likely this will involve a stopover in Doha or Dubai, depending on which airline we end up taking.

I cut out short stopovers in Singapore (from Bali to Siem Reap, now flying directly to Phnom Penh) and also a stopover somewhere between Vietnam and Japan (cheaper flights to stop in Taipei). I think we’ll all be happier to be on fewer plane flights and don’t necessarily want to be in a place for just 2 days anyway.

So that’s the plan for the first part of the trip! Next step is planning out what we do once we get to Romania and also a place to stay for when we arrive in New Zealand. The rest of the time I think we can book as we go, with the exception of North Australia where it’s high tourist season and we’ll want to book a bit in advance.

I just cannot wait to get going.

–sf

Our trip is approaching fast. Like all major events, it seems like it’s months and months away until you wake up one day and realize that it’s only weeks. All of the planning and ideas are now becoming reality and things are happening that are now, well, tangible. Or at least as tangible as can be in our computer driven world.

I’ve bought almost all the first batch of plane tickets, from New Zealand to Australia to Bali and to Cambodia. The order of locations has changed somewhat to be a bit more linear and I’ve cut out some of the initial small stopovers. I’m also choosing to spend more money to only fly direct from one point to another. I think we’ll be happier in the end and I usually find that when push comes to shove in times like this, you’re almost NEVER happy you saved the few hundred dollars.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the rhythm of our life here, and how much that’s going to change. Weekends I’m not working (and almost every day now that it’s summer) we all wake up rather lazily, make coffee, and sit around the house and on the back patio reading for a few hours until we think it’s time to do something. Usually that “something” involves the kids running down to the neighbor’s house to play while Eric and I go workout or get some stuff done around the house. Or we decide to go for a bike ride or maybe go swimming. After that we make more coffee and repeat the morning.

If  I make it sound idyllic, well, sometimes it is. Not that there aren’t plenty of times when the kids get yelled at for not doing something or another or other such normal life annoyances, but most of the time now it’s pretty relaxed. I’m almost fearful to say this out loud for fear that there will be some cosmic retribution to equalize this goodness. Or maybe this is the equalization for all the tough years when everyone was up at 5 am and trying to keep the kids from injuring themselves all day.

So I think of this as we get ready for our trip, how the overall timbre of our lives will change. I know that there will be many days where we’re up early and moving all day, and those will be fabulous. And I also hope that we are able to have days where we try to replicate our slow Saturday mornings here, getting coffee somewhere and lazing about, all of us with a book in our hands, and giving ourselves time to savor the experience of just being somewhere too.

–sf

 

I’ve finally started doing some real planning on this trip, not just idly dreaming and looking at the pretty pictures in the travel guides and imagining myself in the middle of them, in an Instagram-ready shot. No, it’s time to figure out some of the details and figure out how we’re actually getting to those places and what it’ll cost us. I’ve known that a trip like this would require me to be flexible, I just didn’t think it would have to start 3 months before we left.

So, perhaps you remember how I’ve been talking about being free spirits on this trip, buying a one way ticket and then figuring it out as we go along? As it turns out, that’s just not going to work. Perhaps it might if we were only going to one country for 9 weeks of travel, but since that’s not the plan, it turns out that I actually have to do some advance planning.

My first discovery: the world is freaking huge. I initially thought that some of the places we were going it would be easy for us to get from point A to point B in, say, 6 hours. Then I did some flight searches and found that it would take 20. Or I had ideas of overland travel and a drive that would take 4 leisurely days, such as driving down the East Coast of Australia. As I’m now aware, Australia is a much larger continent than it appears on a Mercator projection map and that drive is recommended to take 14-18 days.

Uluru  (Ayer’s Rock) was also a must see for us on our trip, and again, I thought, hey! it’s a big tourist attraction and must be very accessible! Wrong again. It’s in the middle of the country/continent, and there’s not a lot of ways to get there that don’t involve a) a plane or b)5 hours of driving. See above comment regarding Australia.

We’re in the process of deciding whether to see less and spend more time or be a bit more whirlwind and try to pack things in. It’s hard because since we’re already there and it’s so far away, it seems like a waste not to try and squeeze in another place. Of course, the goal is also not to be so frazzled that we can’t enjoy it at all.

For now, I think we’ll end up somewhere in the middle. There’s still a LOT more flying than I was initially thinking, and we’re probably not going to go everywhere we initially thought (sorry, Sydney). Australia will be more about natural wonders, Aboriginal culture, snorkeling, hiking and possibly even camping. We’ll be in plenty of big cities along the rest of the trip so I don’t feel like it’s a huge miss at this point.

For now, plan is as such: Fly to Auckland, New Zealand spend  8 days on the North Island (South Island will be another trip, alas it is too cold for us at that time). Fly to Darwin, Australia, spend 3-5 days there. Fly to Alice Springs, rent car or camper and drive to Uluru and back over the course of 3-4 days. Fly to Cairns and spend 4-5 days there, then either fly or drive to Brisbane and fly out from there to SE Asia! Phewf.

Next leg planning, coming up!

 

 

 

 

A few weekends ago the family went back to MSU for the Alumni Weekend. We’d been talking about a trip back for quite some time. Eric has stronger ties to MSU and East Lansing than I do-he got his PhD there and came back to teach there as well. Given this, he was more involved with the undergraduate campus and life than I was. The medical school campus was just off the main undergrad campus and we rarely had cause to go to the main campus. There were plenty of tailgates and games attended by my med school classmates, but somehow I never went to a single one. And while I love my medical school and classmates, I harbor no love for Michigan and the snow and cold. Nevertheless, it is where we met and Eric has managed to make the kids into diehard Spartans fans so off we went!

Michigan State University was the first Land Grant university established in 1862, under the Morrill Act which gave public land to universities to sell to fund centers of learning focused on agriculture,science, military science, and engineering. Morrill Hall on the campus was where Eric had his office, and has now unfortunately been demolished to make a parking structure.

We met up with Eric’s old adviser and longtime friends Barry and Sandy, who took us to the campus dining hall for dinner. The kids LOVED eating at campus dining. The hall is huge and has about 10+ stations for all you can eat pasta, pizza, sushi, salad bar, sandwiches, dessert, mexican and more. It was a fun reminder of how the freshman 15 is so easy to come by.

The next day we went to the MSU bookstore and did some real damage outfitting all of us in MSU gear. I drew the line at getting a flag for the house and said that one hat per person was MORE than enough. We STILL managed to come home with an extra T shirt that somehow skipped my notice.

The next day it was off to the game! Seriously, I can’t believe that I never managed to go to a tailgate or a game the entire time I was there. It was a total blast!

And freezing cold. Note the mittens, hat, jackets. It started to rain just before halftime and we were OUT. Went back to Eric’s friend John’s home to watch the rest of the game and drink beer and cheer the team to victory next to a warm crackling fire. Much better.

The next day we had a late flight so went to Detroit and visited the art museum. It was another cold, drizzly rainy day so our initial plan to walk around outdoors was shelved. I loved visiting the signature piece at the DIA-the Diego Rivera murals.

Woah.

We also took the kids to visit the coffee shop where Eric and I first met, which at the time had the racist name “Beaner’s” (for coffee beans, people) and has now been renamed “Biggby’s”, and also to some other haunts.

A few observations–I couldn’t believe how branded MSU has become. Neither Eric nor I remembered this many people wearing State gear around. Every single student we saw had on at least one if not more pieces of branded MSU wear. Is it like this on all college campuses now?

The other thing I thought of was how we do things a bit differently with the kids-we ended up taking a visit to the arcade Pinball Pete’s when we walked past it, something we certainly wouldn’t have done had it just been the two of us, and it was a fun diversion for the day. I look forward to other little detours like this when we’re on the road.

And about that-I also realized that something that might be hard for me next year is being around people all the time. Eric and I and the boy are people who like our alone time and find it as a way to recharge. The girl likes to be as physically close to someone else wherever possible and doesn’t fit into that mold. I think we’re going to have to find ways to have down time or do some split up days where it isn’t all four of us all the time.

And the last thing-going away made me realize how ready I am to just GO. For the first time when we were getting on the plane to come home, I didn’t really want to come home. I just wanted to keep going to somewhere else, somewhere new, and keep moving.