By Gretchen Richter de Medeiros When we first started thinking about doing a RTW trip, the biggest question in my mind – even before “where should we go?” – was “what will it cost?” I had traveled extensively in my 20s, Rodrigo and I had done a few international trips together, and we’d just finished a 6-week family journey to Brazil, but I’d never planned any trip this scale. 11 months. 5 people. 3 continents. Being a bit on the OCD side about money, I did have good financia

By Gretchen Richter de Medeiros When people would ask about our itinerary before we left, I would often answer with short descriptions of what we’d planned to do. “We’ll visit Inca ruins in Peru”. “We’re going on Safari in South Africa”. “We’re looking for a language-immersion school in France”. In the case of Chile, my standard comment was “in Chile we’re going to drink wine and sit on the beach”. I wouldn’t have guessed that those two things would end up being the perfect s

By Gretchen Richter de Medeiros Leaving Santiago was a challenge in several ways. First, we had to pick up the rental car. Luckily, Rodrigo, Heather and the kids had already scouted out the route to walk from our apartment to the rental car place and had driving directions back (lots of one-way streets and detours around parks and hills made this a not-as-simple-as-you’d-think task). As we were walking to pick it up, however, we realized that we didn’t have driving directions

by Gretchen Richter de Medeiros “OK, remember,” I wrote for the third or fourth time, “we will be arriving very, very early on the morning of September 23. Likely around 1 AM. Will it be possible to check in at that time?” “No problem.” He assured me in his email reply. “The doorman will have the key and he works all night.” Regardless of my careful planning and of multiple email communications, I still had a vague feeling that things might not work out just right. Did Manuel