Intelligent Travel

Jenss Family Travels: Wyoming Winds

Rainer Jenss and his family are currently in their third week of their year-long around-the-world journey. They're blogging about their trip for Traveler, and you can read about their stops so far here.

It may sound strange, but when putting together an itinerary for a twelve-month trip around the world, you want to factor in a little vacation time. That’s right, to paraphrase the Encarta World English Dictionary definition, we’ve planned some time throughout the year devoted to rest and recreation; a scheduled period during which regular activities are suspended. I told people before we left that I don’t consider what we are doing a yearlong holiday. After all, there’s home-schooling to be done, blogs to post, plenty of logistics to work through and lots of time in planes, trains, and automobiles. So as we completed only our third week on the road, we found ourselves in Wyoming, where we met up with our first group of friends who are joining us along the way - Carol’s college roommate and her family – for our big "summer vacation".

Our ultimate destination was the 7D Ranch in the Sunlight Basin, an hour’s drive or so northwest of the “Gateway to Yellowstone,” Cody, Wyoming.  This dude ranch, which technically means a ranch that takes on (paying) visitors, probably provided us with as close of an authentic western experience as we could find for a family. Besides the horseback riding for both the adults and kids, it offered top-notch fly-fishing, skeet shooting, scenic hikes, and other various outdoor pursuits. It even included a "Wicki-Up" that simulates the Native American sweat lodge experience. Basically, guests had the choice of going into a small igloo-shaped enclosure filled with burning rocks which brings the temperature well into the mid-100 degree range. For the Indians, sitting inside it (for hours) represented a cleansing of the body and mind. For vacationers, it was a kind of test to see how long one could stand to be in an extremely hot and cramped sauna with several other dripping guests and staff members to boot. Still, there was something about this rather atypical "resort" activity that I found appropriate. It wasn’t contrived or set up solely to amuse tourists, rather it was an attempt to connect visitors with a sense of tradition unique to this part of the country.

Jenss Family Travels: Americana

This month, Rainer Jenss and his family started their trip around the world, and they'll be sending us dispatches from the road over the course of the next year. Check back each week to keep up with the Jensses and see where they're headed next.

“Jeez Dad . . . It’s not Americana, it’s American!” Tyler barks at me with his typical 11-year-old sarcasm and "know-it-all" attitude.  “Why do you keep saying it wrong?” Looks like we both will be learning a thing or two about the true meaning of this word during the first – and longest – leg of our round-the-world tour.

I can’t seem to remember which incident sparked this reaction during the first half of our seven-week drive across the country, there were so many occasions to have uttered it. Ever since we passed through the border patrol in Port Huron, Michigan after our brief stint in Canada, we’ve encountered one uniquely American experience after another, starting with the food.

Carol will tell you that the biggest adjustment so far to life on the road is the almost incessant need to eat out. When we were offered the opportunity to stay in a house in northern Michigan by a colleague of mine (thank you Karen), little did we realize that perhaps its biggest draw would be the chance to eat home-cooked meals for a few days. Never have I seen my wife more excited to go to a grocery store! 

To deal with the constant quest for appropriate family-friendly dining, our investment in the book Roadfood proved fruitful. Far from a Zagat’s, this book highlights some of the best local eateries along our nation’s most traveled roads, according to Jane and Michael Stern, a husband-and-wife pair who have traversed the country writing about food for 30 years.  If nothing spells America more than M-c-D-o-n-a-l-d-s, perhaps we are doing this country a disservice by not recognizing the likes of Thompson’s Restaurant in Bingham, Maine; Lou Malnati’s Pizzeria in Chicago; Bob’s Café in Sioux Falls, South Dakota; and the Sundance Café in Dubois, Wyoming.  For me, these are the places that serve up real "American" cuisine. Sure, most of them offer regular menu of burgers, pizza, and greasy fried food we normally try to avoid, but it’s the atmosphere in which they are served that makes them oh so Americana.

Jenss Family Travels: Tourists in Quebec City

Besides "crazy" I’ve been called lots of things for willingly leaving my job and traveling around the world for a year with my wife and two young boys. Adventurous, courageous, brave—even fortunate—were other adjectives used that I personally think better describe the situation. I prefer being labeled as an "explorer," "adventure seeker," or just plain old "world traveler" myself. The word "tourist" had never even entered the vocabulary. Well that’s exactly what we were transformed into the moment we arrived in Quebec City, staring blankly at a road atlas and asking directions in English in a French-speaking town.

Carol and I had been to Quebec City’s old town several years earlier for Winter Carnival, where the city becomes a sort of North Pole for revelers, complete with snow sculptures, ice climbing walls, dogsled rides, plenty of alcohol to warm the spirits, and a snow bath where the participants are dressed only in bathing suits. I did mention it was winter and there was alcohol involved, right? Well, needless to say, Carol and I didn’t pack the proper clothing for this event, so I think, like us, very few tourists took part. This time, we arrive in 80-degree temperatures, but still with plenty of people crowding the walled city for fun and amusement. It turns out 2008 marks Quebec’s 400th birthday, and much to our good fortune, this was the week the province celebrated with Festival d’Ete de Quebec—a music festival that culminated the weekend we arrived. 

In hindsight, we seemed pretty lucky to get a B&B right smack in the middle of town and for only $100 a night to boot. That’s the payoff for having planned this itinerary well in advance! Room number six at the Hotel La Maison Demers fit all four of us, no problem, with two queen beds, although it gave us our first true taste of quality family time. No privacy in this joint! But no need to be indoors when there was so much going on.

Jenss Family Travels: Maine-Stays

The words I dreaded hearing came less than one week into our yearlong journey. “I don’t want to go around the world,"  Stefan proclaimed, just hours after arriving on Maine’s Mount Desert Island, aka Acadia National Park. Then, just in time to catch my heart before it splattered to the ground, came “I want to stay right here!” With much relief, I told him that this would be the first of probably many times he would feel this way over the next year, and this was just the second of over 60 stops.

In retrospect, my eight-year-old seemed pretty intuitive. There’s a unique vibe that permeates this place, and it attracts Rockefellers and backpackers alike. With so much to offer besides its famous crustaceans—although there is a really cool lobster hatchery at the Bar Harbor Oceanarium—who could blame Stefan for not wanting to leave? In fact, it didn’t take us long to pull our first improv of the trip by adding a fifth night to our Acadia cottage rental in Southwest Harbor, at the expense of forgoing Montreal. 

Jenss Family Travels: Shipping out to Cape Cod

Rainer Jenss and his family have just started their around-the-world trip, and they'll be blogging about their experiences here at IT. The first stop on their itinerary? Cape Cod.

“Where’s the first stop?” was one of the most common questions people asked us when they found out about our planned trip around the world. When replying with “Cape Cod,” which is a mere 4.5 hour drive from our Nyack, NY, starting point, I could sense their feeling of mild disappointment. Cape Town, or even Cape Canaveral, probably was more of what folks expected.

There is sound rationale, however, for what seems like a benign choice. First, it’s a place we’ve gone as a family every summer for the past several years. There's no reason why this one-year family adventure should get in the way of tradition. But perhaps the more important factor was the need to simply ease into this long journey, especially for the boys. The notion of leaving home for 12 months is pretty daunting for an eight- and eleven-year-old (never mind the adults), so starting with something familiar, we thought, would set the right tone.

After the mad frenzy of packing, farewell parties, and final preparations during the weeks leading to our departure, just the thought of getting on an airplane and dealing with a foreign country right off the bat could have been too much on all of us. Getting in a car and driving up the usually traffic-filled I-95 for almost 300 miles actually felt like a welcomed relief. Now, maybe we could finally exhale!

The morning we left can probably be compared to what football players feel like when making it to the Super Bowl. All they want after weeks of non-stop hype and preparation is to go out on the field and just play the game. Even Stefan, who was the most reluctant about leaving home, finally said, “Can we go already?  We’ve been talking about this for four years!”  So on the morning of July 2nd we hit the road, headed to one of our favorite spots on Earth.

Getting Ready for Take-Off: Deconstruction

Rainer Jenss and his family have just set off for their year-long around-the-world trip. They'll be sending their first dispatch from the road soon, but before they left, Rainer managed to jot off some answers to readers' questions about the logistics of making it work.

Ever get stressed about preparing for a two-week vacation, or even a long weekend getaway? Getting ready for a one-year trip around the world magnifies that anxiety exponentially. Even though we’ve been actively preparing for months (and mentally for years), when the countdown went from months to weeks to days, the to-do list seemed to grow longer somehow, not shorter.

Using an assortment of books, magazines and websites as sources, we prepared a well-documented checklist of things to pack, think about, read up on, and take care of before leaving. Some of the items are obvious: make sure you have up-to-date passports, vaccinations, and visas. 

We sorted through advice on what clothes to bring (there are mixed opinions about packing jeans, which Carol and I opted to do) and financial planning.  We used the book, The Rough Guide to First-Time Around the World, by Doug Lansky as our go-to. It is a great guide to get you started, but as with most things in life, one size does not fit all. Since we are traveling as a family, additional consideration needed to be given towards luggage, computers and electronics (especially when you’re posting blogs), home schooling options, and accommodations. 

With the latter, many places, particularly in Asia, don’t necessarily offer rooms for four people, so unless you’re extremely thrifty, you’ll likely have to pay for two rooms instead of one. And one other piece of advice I learned - not only does your passport need to be valid for three to six months beyond your dates of travel, you need to make sure to have enough blank pages to accommodate all the visas and stamps one will accumulate when visiting 24 or so countries in a one-year period before you leave. You’ll get stopped at many borders if you don’t and it’s very difficult to acquire more when you're on the road.  For U.S. citizens, one can get additional pages added directly to their valid passport, as Carol did.  As a German citizen, I needed to apply for a whole new passport to get the additional pages needed.  That meant a rush job and additional expense that I didn’t anticipate.

Jenss Family Travels: Where in the World is Swaziland?

In just a few days, Rainer Jenss and his family will set off for a year to travel the world. They'll be blogging about their adventures here at Intelligent Travel, and today Rainer offers up his itinerary for where they're headed.

Searching for Swaziland

When putting together an itinerary for an around-the-world trip with the help of an eight-year-old and an eleven-year-old, there are going to be some pretty interesting requests. Stefan (8) learned of Swaziland through a piece of a world map puzzle we worked on together to familiarize the kids with different countries. He said wanted to go there because he liked the name. I explained that we would not go there specifically, but we’d be really close by when we visit South Africa. Fortunately, he quickly learned that saying "Namibia," "Botswana," and "Tanzania" sounded pretty cool too.

As we prepare to head out next week, we‘ve come up with the following game plan, knowing that we’ll have to comply with our around-the-world airline ticket, weather considerations, transportation and lodging logistics, and of course, budget. Here's what we've worked out so far.

July – August, 2008: Drive across the U.S. and Canada
We figured we’d start on our home turf to ease into the trip; it will provide us with a good foundation for what lies ahead. But we do plan to get our first passport stamps while visiting Montreal and Quebec City.

September: China
Arriving in Beijing shortly after the Olympics, we’ll head on a two-week “Inside China” tour with National Geographic Expeditions. This should make watching the Games a little more interesting.

Sept/October: Japan
What boy wouldn’t want to visit the birthplace of Nintendo, Pokemon, and in the case of my guys, sushi?  To do so within our budget, we visited the Japan National Tourist Organization, which helped put together an itinerary that provided us with unique access to the “real Japan.” We're looking forward to a professional Japanese baseball game between the SoftBank Hawks and Nippon Ham Fighters in Fukuoka. But who do we root for? Stefan wants to know. Good question.

Early October: Bhutan
We’ll be four of only about a few thousand visitors allowed into this Himalayan country each year.  It’s rugged, beautiful, and very remote, and it measures success not with GNP, but by Gross National Happiness.

Keeping Up with the Jensses: How Do You Do It?

In just a few weeks, Rainer Jenss and his family will begin their year-long around-the-world journey (which they'll be blogging about here on IT). The questions he's most often asked: How exactly do you actually plan such a trip? Here, Rainer gives us some of the lessons he's learned so far, and explains what, exactly is an ARUNK.

Designing an itinerary for an around-the-world trip for someone with wanderlust is like sending a kid into the proverbial candy store. Planet Earth has a ton of variety to choose from. You just can’t have too much too fast, or you might get a bellyache. 

Step One: Find an airline network that suites your needs. We chose the Star Alliance program because it covers most of the destinations we are interested in and  allows us to backtrack if need be (some programs require you to travel in one direction only, east or west). The rules are a bit challenging, but basically we need to start and end in the same country, travel for up to a maximum of one year, not exceed 39,000 miles, and fly no more than 16 segments. But here’s the catch: We have to be very mindful of the cities we select because if we don’t fly in and out of the same one, the miles between them go toward the 39,000 and count as a segment. For example, we want to enter China via Beijing and depart from Shanghai. But even though we don’t plan to actually fly from Beijing to Shanghai, the miles are added to the trip’s ‘odometer’ and a valuable segment (known as an ARUNK, or Arrival Unknown) is eaten up. This is a particularly important consideration, for if you take too many ARUNKS, it can limit the total number of destinations we can actually include in an itinerary.

Introducing: The Jenss Family Travels

Rainer, Carol, Tyler (in the blue shirt) and Stefan (in the green shirt).

In one month, National Geographic Kids Vice President and Publisher Rainer Jenss will embark on the trip of a lifetime. He's selling his house and setting off for a year-long, round-the-world journey with his wife and two sons, and he'll be blogging about his trip for Traveler the entire time. We asked him to offer up a bit in the way of an introduction, and to explain his reasons for leaving his current life in New York to travel the world.

It’s four weeks away from the day my wife Carol and I have been planning and fantasizing about for the last four years. The day we officially act on the most wonderful, life-changing, crazy, outrageous, and most of all, natural idea we’ve ever had: to travel around the world with our two boys, Tyler (11), and Stefan (8).

Over the next year and 50,000+ mile journey, we will all be contributing bi-weekly postings to Intelligent Travel. As such, I set out to address two of the more common questions that people like Keith Bellows, Traveler's editor-in-chief, ask us all the time: Why we are doing this and what do we hope to gain from it? I was immediately struck by a word I came across in Global Traveler magazine just the other day, a term which they've trademarked:

Globility /glo bility/ n: The quality of being open to a world of cultures and experiences.

I wonder if this is even a real word?  It doesn’t matter. Its definition alone makes it something I wanted to adopt for this trip, and in a word, provides the core of an answer that is this complex and multi-dimensional. To understand this further, we need to go back a few years.