Roseville, MN, USA

If you gotta start somewhere, but you don't know where, you
are the best justification there is for the public library.

Planning
Roads and rails are wonderful because they give you options. But options can be paralyzing. We knew we wanted to go generally from south to north. We knew we would have basically the length of summer vacation, which in our house is well known to Phineas and Ferb viewers to be 104 days ("There's 104 days of summer vacation / And school comes along just to end it / So the annual problem for our generation / Is finding a good way to spend it.")


I'm completely embarrassed to admit this, but Phineas and Ferb is not a go-to source for summer planning. It didn't take too long with an Excel spreadsheet for me to determine that our schools give us a paltry 80 days from close to commencement. (Funny, that seemed like a lot longer last summer.)

Off to the Library

I finally read the fine print on my property taxes a few weeks ago and learned that I'm paying over $200 per year to the county library. Don't get me wrong, it's a nice library, but that means there are residents of Roseville who are eating my library lunch -- they're getting top value while I'm bottom-feeding on Amazon Prime. Well, enough of that. If we've only got 80 days of summer, we can't let this to chance. We need top sites; we need seriously moving stuff to anchor our itinerary; we need stuff that is going to blow three little minds on a regular basis. We needed guidebooks.

There are 3 kinds of travel guidebooks. The first guidebooks in history were travelogues such as those that have come down to us from the likes of the 14th century's Marco Polo, and Ibn Battutah. These argue that if you step outside your door it's amazing and you probably won't die. By the 15th century, after the collapse of the peace governed by the Mongolian Empire, this kind of travelogue morphed into something a little more conflicted -- like Afanasy Nikitin's travelogue in which all of his worldly possessions are taken from him a few miles after he steps out of his Russian door, or Nicolo de’ Conti, who was forced to convert to Islam upon returning from India through the middle east. The travelogue from an early tourist in Florida and the Gulf Coast, the 16th century's Alvar Nunez Cabeza De Vaca is hard to beat for grit in the face of improbable misfortune. These later travelogues indulged a sense of wonder about the wider world, but also suggested that travel was a powerful source of natural selection.

The second type of guidebook highlights selection, too, but not natural selection. The Michelin guides, originally developed by a tire company trying to get rich Frenchmen driving, started giving aways stars that people -- some people -- still covet to this day. I'll also place into this category the various travel photo folios. These guides fetishize the travel experience -- they lend to the impression that some experiences are more worthy than others; gather up your fist of dollars, folks, because this is really worth it. These guidebooks would be helpful for deciding which package tour to go on, for example. So yes, I got a dose of these out of the library -- they have the well-composed pictures taken at just the right moment to capture the imagination.

It was the third type of guidebook that we used to carve our route from amongst the many roads and rail lines of East Asia. Guidebooks such as the Lonely Planet and Rough Guides (no sponsorship deals yet) were the go-to source for determining whether point A really could link to point B -- for example, how do you get from Luang Prabang in Laos to China (yes, you can take a bus)? How often does the bus run (daily)? Are there good places to get off the train in Mongolia before getting to Ulan Baator to trek into the Gobi Desert (probably not)? The Lonely Planet's Thorn Tree forum and TripAdvisor.com also helped when it was time to drill-down.

Okay, so now we had guidebooks and, of course, the internet. What about constraints?

Real world meets real world
It is one thing to be an academic like me and tell your colleagues and graduate students that you're not writing papers or grants or supervising research for the summer. Somehow life goes on. It's quite another to be, like my wife, a physician and tell your large employer that you're outta here, so long, good luck. So she did some soul searching and determined that she could travel for a month. Furthermore, she had no desire to see Singapore or Malaysia (so much for the Tip), and frankly didn't care to spend too much time in Thailand. Here's what I loved about that: that meant she wanted to dive in to the adventurous parts of S.E. Asia right off the bat. But these constraints meant that if this was going to be a proper Tip to Tundra tour, that it was up to me. I would have to fly to Singapore (1.3 degrees N. of the equator); I would have to touch the Straits of Melaka for us all. So the tour would begin before my course in Thailand and before the 80 days of summer vacation. So be it.

With only a month, that meant she would be leaving the tour with 50 days to go. That is a shame -- after that it won't be "the whole family" overland. It'll be Dad and 3 kids. What are you going to do, though? We'll survive. We'll invite others to join us. We'll show them the photo spreads. In short, we'll do this thing.

But it did mean the first 28 days had to pop for Anita. No Thailand -- straight to Cambodia. Then Vietnam then, via the road-less-traveled into Laos and from Laos to Yunnan province in extreme Southwestern China. We'll be sending Anita off in Kunming.

From there on we focused on things we'd like to see as we head northward -- Terracotta Soldiers, the Great Wall, the Gobi Desert and the great steppes of Mongolia, Lake Baikal in Siberia and that extremely unlikely peninsula hanging off the edge of Asia: Kamchatka.

Comments or suggestions?

Next time I'll run-down the formalities of independently traveling with kids -- vaccinations, visas -- and give the skinny on what happens when formalities get exciting. Yes, formalities can be gruelingly exciting. Ack.