After 3 months of traveling and being in 6 countries:

Some thoughts:

• We are still thoroughly enjoying our traveling experiences, we get giddy when taking about our experiences in past countries and the countries we anticipate traveling to.
• After 6 countries it is amazing to see the similarities in geography and humanity despite country, cultural, racial, and religious lines.
• Having free time to leisure read has been an unanticipated benefit of traveling and we are enjoying the opportunity immensely.
• The 2 experiences that have stood out in our minds above the rest are couchsurfing and viewing African wildlife. These are the 2 things we could recommend to anyone without reserve (and we would highly encourage people to do at leas one of these some time in their life).
• The biggest sacrifice to traveling has been missing the ordinary and extraordinary events in the lives of our family and friends back home.
• Believe in the inherent goodness of people, as most people are willing to help (and often go significantly out of their way) to help a stranger in need. This is not an Innocent observation as we have had to rely numerous times on this very statement and have even observed the return of Andrea's fathers wallet with all its cash still in it! (and yes we do know of numerous times that people have had things stolen but these stories tend to be told much more frequently and loudly than the hundreds of positive that happen as well during travel)

Some totals:
The list of transport that has been utilized:

• Local bus: 138.5 hours have been spent ON buses (this does not include amount of time waiting or just sitting on the bus)
• Minibuses: highly used as a meas for transport in Zambia and Turkey
• Taxi : frequently used our longest ride has been for 2.5 hours over dirt road
• Rental Car: This luxury was only in South Africa but proved to be a great experience if not a budget stressor
• Boat rides : Including all types of motor powered boats and for numerous purposes, total so far is 9
• Canoe : 3 days spent canoeing
• Rickshaw : 1
• Cart propelled by bike : 1
• Flights : a total of 13 including both in country and international flights, who knows the number of hours spent in airports

Other totals:

• Number of nights spent Couchsurfing has been 13 in 3 countries
• Fake Soccer jerseys Mike has collected includes: Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, South Africa (rugby), and Turkey
• Will not even attempt to guess the number of pictures taken

Experiences looking forward to:

• Visiting India, but please pray for us. So far during our travels we have interrogated numerous people that have traveled to India and our calculations support that 99% of people experience "intestinal upset" (please read in between the quotations as it has really been described as: leg shaking, stomach wrenching, pound shedding, explosive, and as a squatter living illness). Really more importantly, please be with us in your devotionals for our time spent in the country, and our interactions with the people.
• Hiking in Nepal with our friend Chad (the one who has graciously spent numerous hours designing and updating the website)
• Seeking out portions of Southeast Asia (and possibly China) that are not on the normal tourists agenda
• Reading through our sweat inducing collection of 9 lovingly, handpicked books (we sent much of our camping gear home with Andrea's parents, only to fill up the space and weight with these precious gems - thanks Supna & Paul for donating 2 amazing books to the collection)