Time to say goodbye...

Derek and I have decided that if we ever do a trip like this again, we can't handle saying goodbye to people for 2 weeks straight haha!  We left Charleston for good this morning after a wonderful wedding (congrats Morgan and Kyle Weigand!) and saying goodbye to Derek's mom, sister and brother in law.  We are now in the upstate awaiting our departure.  Tomorrow at 11:30 am it will be ADIOS! to my family, except my mother and step father, who are driving us to the airport.  Derek is trying (unsuccessfully) to lighten his bag just a tad...I have decided to deal with that later.  Everything seems to be falling into place so far; we are definitely ready to get this show on the road!  Stay tuned...we will post as soon as possible once we land in Panama City!

Keep it classy South Carolina- A&D

4 days and counting!!

Well it looks like it’s just about that time!! We have 4 days left, well really we have 3 days, 20 hours, 6 mins, and 35 seconds left... but who’s counting anyways. Right now we are in Charleston saying goodbye to everyone we know down here. We have a wedding to go to on Saturday and on Sunday we are leaving to go back up to the "upstate" to see Ashley’s family. On Monday the 15th we will pack our bags up, hitch a ride with Ashley’s mom to the airport in Atlanta and get on the plane. Take off is at 550pm and we should get to Panama City, Panama around 950pm. We have a hostel already lined up and they should be picking us up at the airport. The ride from the airport to the hostel takes 1 hour and 30 min according to Google maps but knowing how people drive in Central America... I’m guessing it will really only take about 30min. 

This is the hostel we will be staying at in Panama City for about two nights. After that we are going to Bocas Del Toro. More to follow and thanks for reading!

http://www.mamallena.com/

The two week mark!!

We are now 14 days from our departure! There are, of course, a ton of little things that we are realizing we need to do! We are house sitting for our newly married friends Halley and Aj Manet and making it a pretend trip... We are living out of our backpacks for the next few days!

Calling the people we love!

So a few of you have been asking how we are going to call from all over the world. At first we thought we would do skype video chat. It does work but the problem is that both people need to be at a computer to make it happen. We looked around and found out that you can make calls using an iphone and a skype account to other landlines and cell phones in the U.S. for only $3 a month. This includes unlimited calling time, so...... keep your eyes open for a 606 number because that would be us! All we need is wifi and we should be able to call. Ive been using the skype account to call the past few days because it doesnt use up my minutes and it seems to work just fine! A good idea for anyone doing some traveling and needs to make calls. If you want to know more about it you can read about it at their site:
http://www.skype.com/intl/en-us/prices/pay-monthly/
enjoy!

28 Days until we leave!!

Well,
We have 28 days until we leave on out trip. Time is going by fast!! We have almost everything we need done. All shots are done, all cloths are bought, and all the tickets have been dealt with. We are working on packets for people to hold onto when we are gone. They just have all of our passport and visa information, along with our shot records and anything we might need incase we loose our information on the trip. Now we just need to finish working on paperwork, bank things, and taking pictures of all our gear for insurance claims (hoping we wont need that though). We will write up a list of whats in our packs so you can see what one bag can hold! Other than that, just trying not to freak out because the leave date is coming up so fast!

Mini vacation!!

So here we are in Baltimore waiting on our train to DC. We had a choice of two tickets for $28 or wait an hour for two tickets at $12. Which do you think we chose??? The backpacker mindset is already setting in! We are off the DC and then Philly to visit friends and family.... Should be a blast!!

The Real Countdown!

We are now at 92 days until we leave!!  It's amazing how fast the time goes by. Before we know it we will have less than 2 months to go!  We have accomplished a lot these past few weeks...tickets are bought (except for the trip back to the states!), planning hostels for Panama, buying lots of fun of gear/clothes/gadgets  (we'll see how many actually get used haha).  Check back in soon for more details!