Living the Corporate Life  Sayonara Tokyo, hello Chicago. Thirty days in a  corporate apartment courtesy of Tara's company.  Friends on the West Coast  We flew West first to relax with Bob & Eileen before attending Mike & Dasha's wedding in San Francisco.  Europe with Friends  We planned our first month to see Mike & Dasha in Paris and Jeff & Grace in Scotland. We also visited our old neighborhood in London and studied at Oxford.  Scandinavia - go North & then South  We spent five weeks here relishing  the freedom our train pass allowed. We went as far North as possible &  then visited Tara's great-grandparents hometown. Studying German Unexpectedly  We met Gary in London, Mickey & Minnie in Paris and Seth's work colleagues in Zurich. We ditched our plans for Greece when Tara found out that she could attend a four week German course in Murnau for free! Europe's Smallest Countries  A closed train station meant we went to Leichtenstein instead of Prague. After friends told us that San Marino, Monaco & Andorra were also very small, we were off on a tiny country tour plus Pisa, Nice & Barcelona. A Few Final MUST do's  Suddenly we had only a week left in Europe. We chose to relax in Geneva at Sophie's instead of madly rushing to see more of Spain. Then it was back to London to see friends again and finally to Amsterdam for a quick weekend before our on-way flight to America.  Home for the Holidays  Thanksgiving w/ Tara's Dad, Dec w/ Mickey & Minnie, Christmas w/ Tara's Mom,  New Years w/ Seth's parents. Pacific Islands  A series of free tickets purchased with frequent flier miles took us to seven of the nine Pacivid Islands we visited. If we had to do it again, we would not have included so many Pacific Island "paradises" in our itinerary and we definitely would not have locked ourselves into flight times. Having said that, we traveled to Hawaii, Australia, Fiji, Tonga, New Zealand, Japan, Cook Islands, French Polynesia and Easter Island. Japan was a nice escape from paradise and Easter Island was an extremely unique and intriguing destination. However, after all this island hopping, it took us five weeks in New Zeland to recover.  The Long Way Home  If it hadn't been for our friend Mike, we might have flown from New Zealand to America. But, no, instead we flew to Singapre, via Kuala Lumpur, to meet Mike who was in Singapore on business. And then, since you can't fly from Singapore direct to America, we just had to stop in Japan again and once there, it made sense to invite our friends Tod & Kristen to China. Home Hunting in North America   Fourteen months after leaving our last permanet residence in Tokyo, we came back to North America and started searching for "home". Our search took us to ten U.S. states throughout mainly the Pacific Northwest and New England plus to Vancouver in Canada. As it stands now, we're leaning towards Vancouver.

World Tour 2000 - 2002 Country Arrival Date United States 11 June 2000 Canada 9 July United Kingdom 20 July France 30 July Scotland 3 August Denmark 10 August Sweden 16 August Norway 24 August United Kingdom 13 September France 25 September Switzerland 26 September Germany 30 September Italy 14 October San Marino 27 October Monaco 29 October France 30 October Spain 1 November Andorra 3 November Switzerland 13 November United Kingdom 16 November Netherlands 19 November United States 21 November Canada 26 January 2001 United States 19 February Australia 28 February Fjij 13 March Tonga 17 March New Zealand 27 March Japan 29 March Cook Islands 18 April Tahiti 25 April Easter Island 27 April Bora Bora 4 May New Zealand 11 May Malaysia 17 June Singapore 20 June Indonesia 9 July Japan 11 July China 27 July United States 8 August Canada 16 August United States 24 September Canada 7 January 2002

Japan North America Europe North America The Pacific Asia North America

I (Tara) spent hours and hours during January 2001 while we were at Seth's parents' house creating route maps for our trip. The idea of an animated GIF showing where we've been came from two fellow travelers who we met in Narvik, Norway. We were having breakfast in Narvik in late August 2000 and got to talking to a man who was also traveling with his wife around the world. Their trip sounded very, very exciting! We exchanged e-mails and I was surprised to get a mail from them in late December saying they'd gotten a web site up. As soon as I saw how kool http://www.world-tour2000.com/ was, I was inspired to improve our pages. At the same time that I saw world-tour200.com, I also saw 2goglobal.com - getting more ideas for our web and also reading about an American couple who, like us, took a year off to travel.