Landing in at Pearson airport was a bit sad. It was nice to be home (although I'm not sure it feels like home anymore), but the screeching tires on the tarmac marked the official end to Part 1 of our world tour. We're going to try to stabilize the Canadian government by paying our taxes for the last couple of years, catch up with friends who long ago routed all of our emails to their spam filter (DH who??), and hit the nearest gym to see if we can redisco...

So here's the plan: both DH and I are going to retire early, put our finances in order, sell our home of 17 years, sell most if not all of the contents, put our wills and various other legal doc's together, arrange for extended health insurance, sell our cars on the day we leave on our worldwide trip, and do it all within a couple of months so we could hit our hard coded departure date. In our spare time we travelled to Morocco, Winnipeg, Cleveland, and N...

To set the stage, I'd have to confess to an almost ambivalent attitude toward climbing Kili (or any other mountain for that matter). Although I admire the frothing enthusiasm that many people have for climbing and hiking, it’s just not an inner child that I’ve been able to get in touch with. DH and I have climbed smaller mountains before to see lava rivers, explosive volcanoes, gorillas, etc. but for the most part the climbing was a necessary evil...

As with many of our trips, we stocked up on calories at our local (and favourite) restaurant for breakfast, the Cedar Kitchen in Tottenham. Knowing of our trip, the owners, Lois and Nick, bought us our "last meal"- a ominous sign??The countdown had actually started some months previous as we tried to arrange for visas (all 5 countries we're visiting require a visa) but because we had to keep mailing our passports to embassies in Ottawa, we decided to get only...