Big Week at the PlanetD

We are so excited to be going to Alberta this week for the Chevy Equinox Rocky Mountain Adventure.

GM Canada contacted us last week to be a part of test driving their new Equinox from Calgary to Banff and Lake Louise to Canmore.  It is going to be a week filled with adventures.

Our first media tour with all expenses paid!

We have been told that one night we will be staying in rustic accommodations in the mountains and I am interested to see what rugged means to the good people at GM.  After all camping your way down Africa makes everything seem like luxury.

We will be rock climbing in the Rocky Mountains, hiking on the Columbia Ice Fields and Canoeing on Beautiful Lake Louise in the shadow of the Victoria Glaciers.  I was born in High River Alberta and other than a stop on the Greyhound at Lake Louise while traveling from Saskatchewan to Vancouver, I have never been back.  Although I won’t have a chance to see the Bar U Ranch where my parents lived and worked at the time, I will be able to see the beautiful Mountains and scenery of my birthplace.

We are also going to try to squeeze in an interview with The Banff Squirrel. Looking forward to meeting the little guy!

Dave also has only traveled through Alberta during a drive in a Uhaul when he was 18.  The wandering started early for Dave as he and two friends decided to move out west after high school graduation.  He lasted a summer, but what an adventure that must have been for a bunch of 18 year olds.

Dave is excited for the amazing photo opportunities.  He has had a busy summer working on back to back movies, so to dust off the old camera again is going to be a thrill.

So for my week in review this week…

We wrote a post on Friday about our fears while traveling and keeping up with the travel blog.  So this week is going to be a trial run.  It will be our first time posting scheduled blog posts and tweeting from the road. We received some great advice from everyone and I highly recommend checking out all of the suggestions that we received from people on that post.

I am thinking that it is going to be fairly easy because Alberta will most likely have wifi in our hotels, but at least I will see how it feels to write posts at night and get them out for their scheduled times.

We lost the Vantastic Adventure again. We are now actually relieved.  We really want to do our travels on our own terms this time.  In Africa we were on a strict schedule because we were taking part in a race and had to ride 120 km daily from Camp to Camp.  We didn’t like not being able to stay in a place that we enjoyed or wanted to explore for longer and we didn’t like not being able to interact with people.  I am sure that Vantastic would have been  similar in the fact that we had to do certain adventures and do certain activities. It might not have been the greatest start to our travels.

There are still a couple of more legs to go, but we have come to the conclusion that they are looking for younger and more of a party atmosphere.  So you never know, but we are definitely not holding our breath.

Now we will be starting our travels in India. We are going to fly to Kerala in the south.  It is more laid back than flying into Delhi and we can spend a week or two relaxing on the beach, exploring the back waters and getting our bearings before we look into yoga courses.  Eventually we will make our way north to see the sites and explore the country.

We are really excited to be going to India, we have put it off for so long. We wanted to make sure that we had the time to truly explore everything that the country had to offer.  We also feel like we have traveled enough to be able to handle India. I know that sounds silly because a lot of people travel to India even as their first trip. But we have never felt mentally prepared to take on the experience.  Everything we have ever heard about the country is that it is a difficult travel.  But at the same time, everyone that has gone their would never change their experience for the world.

So, we gave our 60 day notice to our landlord, we have all of our shots and medications from our previous travels, our passports are updated and ready and we have let them know at work that we are outta here!

Other than organizing, getting our visas, packing and putting everything into storage, we don’t have a lot to do… OK, we have a lot to do, but we don’t have a lot of preparations for travel.

The next two months will mostly getting our lives in order at home so that everything runs smoothly while we are away.