Find the Flibbs FAQ

About us

Who are you guys?

We're Heather and Alec. We just got married and this is our honeymoon!

What's this about a trip?

We're going on a round-the-world trip from July through December, 2004.

What are you going to do with all your stuff?

We're selling some of it, and putting the rest in storage.

What about your car?

We drove the car to Ohio in April and left it with one of Heather's relatives. We will be driving it back to the west coast at the end of our trip.

And your jobs?

Alec just finished a contracting job in June and Heather has left her job of 6 years. Timing couldn't have been better and we feel very lucky that everything came together.

What will you do when you come back?

We don't know! That's part of the excitement. We have each been working since graduating college and we're both excited to see what we learn about ourselves and the world.

About the trip

How long is your trip?

A little more than 5 months.

Where will you go?

Our 4 major stops are: Eastern Europe, Southern Africa, Southeast Asia, and Australia/New Zealand. For more information about each of these, see our itinerary

How are you travelling?

Between continents, by air. Within each continent, we'll stick mostly to ground transportation. (train, bus, bike, horse, or foot) Eastern Europe has a fairly good network of trains. In South Africa, we'll be travelling more by bus and train. Certain areas are harder to get to, so we may rent a car here and there. In Southeast Asia, its mostly bus. In Australia.. we're not sure. We do know we can't swim to New Zealand, so we'll have to arrange something.

Did you get one of those round-the-world tickets?

Yes and no. The classic around-the-world ticket (i.e. stop 5-10 times whenever/wherever you want, etc) doesn't really seem to exist, unless you have a lot of money. We did a lot of investigation.

We were almost going to book a flight with AirTreks. They are an online travel agent/ticket consolidator that specializes in multi-continent travel. They have an absolutely amazing web site and really great prices. If you're thinking about making a similar journey, we highly recommend them.

We ended up having enough frequent flyer miles to justify going through United Airlines and its Star Alliance. This restricted our destination options slightly, but saved us lots of money. For instance, we were thinking of going to Kenya, but the closest we could have flown was Ethiopia. Flights to South Africa were no problem though, so we decided to go there instead.

How long are you spending in each location?

We spent a lot of time reading The Practical Nomad: How to Travel Around the World (Practical Nomad) and the biggest thing we learned was not to try to do too much. The typical whirlwind tour around Europe in 2-3 weeks after college leaves you exhausted and confused. If we tried to keep up that pace for 5-6 months, we'd probably want to stop halfway through. We decided that we would stay 4-6 weeks in each location, and then picked our top destinations. It worked out that with 4 major stops, we got 5-6 weeks in each place.

Have either of you travelled to these places before?

Just a bit! Heather travelled around Southeast Asia about 3 years ago. Alec spent some time in Sydney, Australia in 2000. Each of us have done some travelling around Europe (France, Italy, England, etc) Beyond that, these places are pretty new to us.

We each have other experience travelling though. Alec spent 2 weeks in Honduras in 2000, and Heather spent 10 days in Turkey in 2001.

About the site

Why did you make a web site?

Alec thought it would be fun to chronicle this trip so that we could share our experiences with our friends and other travellers. We hope that you find it both helpful and inspirational in creating your own journeys!