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Hi Readers,

We are sitting in the Melbourne city library using their free Internet, which is wonderful, and we thought we would take a moment to talk to you. At the hostel (and any Internet cafes) Internet is AUD$1 for 15 minutes (the same in NZ) which isn't enough time to do more than check email. We wanted to let you know that we love reading the comments that you post. Email updates allow us to read the comments but 15 minutes isn't enough time to acknowledge each one. Please know that we are reading your comments and we love them. Not only is it the only way we know that our blog is being read but it also helps combat the lonely feeling of being thousands of miles from the ones we love.

We miss you all and if anyone has extra vacation time piling up and are unsure where to spend it, think about spending it with us on the road.

-Katie and Andy

Travel Insurance and healthcare in the United States

Health insurance is a recently hot topic in the United States. It's easy to ignore and just as easy to get passionate about if it effects you. My friend and business partner George has been complaining about the sad state of healthcare in this country and it has honestly been hard for me to relate. I'm both young and healthy, and until Saturday I'll be lucky enough to be married to someone that works for a relatively large company. (Everyone calm down. We're not getting divorced - Friday is Katie's last day of work.)

Upon researching travel insurance I slowly came to realize that our options for coverage while in the U.S. are pretty limited. Once Katie is no longer working for the Broad Institute we will no longer have employer subsidized health insurance. COBRA is an option, but it will mostly likely be prohibitively more expensive than the plan was while Katie was still an employee.

Our original idea was to purchase travel insurance that would provide medical coverage, but it turns out that the large majority of travel insurance policies do not include coverage while you are in the United States (presumably because of the high cost of healthcare here). You may be wondering why we need coverage while we're in the U.S. - the answer is that we'll be returning to the U.S. for about a month and a half in the summer and it would be nice to have insurance coverage in case we need to return home unexpectedly because of injury or illness.

What are our options?
[1] Buy no insurance. (dumb. but free!)
[2] Buy travel insurance and have coverage overseas but take the risk of not being covered while in the U.S. (slightly less dumb, but still dumb.)
[3] Buy travel insurance and buy U.S. health insurance. (smart. stupid expensive.)

I now feel George's pain.

Option [2] also carries the possible problem of tax penalties in Massachusetts. Moreover, I've heard that having a gap in our U.S. health insurance coverage may make it harder for us to get insurance in the future, but I'm pretty sure that only applies to people with "pre-existing conditions".

IMG to the rescue
So it turns out there are a few insurance plans that cover medical expenses while both overseas and in our home country. The one we will probably go with is IMG's Global Medical Insurance (it's around $1,800 for the year for both of us). The plan comes with the stipulation that you must be traveling abroad for six out of the twelve months of coverage - certainly doable.

To summarize: if we travel for longer than we originally planned it will be cheaper than if we traveled for a shorter length of time and purchased separate U.S. medical insurance. Ok. Gladly.

Andy's Around the World Packing List

Here's my packing list. Most of the stuff is similar to Katie's, but mine includes the digital SLR camera and MacBook Air. We'll write another post at some point listing all of the stuff we're bringing as a medical kit, but first we have to pay a visit to Nurse Jane (my mom).

Clothing:

• 1 REI Sahara long-sleeve button down
• 1 long sleeve synthetic shirt
• 1 REI Airflyte Hoodie
• 3 ExOfficio Exo Dri Tshirt*
• 4 ExOfficio Men's Boxer Brief*
• 3 pairs of smartwool socks
• 1 pair wool hiking socks
• 1 pair Garmont Trail Hiking Shoes*
• 1 pair flip flops
• 1 pair of REI Adventures pants
• 1 pair of REI Sahara convertible pants
• 1 Sierra Designs Men's Microlight Jacket*
• 1 pair of running/sleeping shorts
• 1 brimmed hat
• 1 pair of sunglasses
• 1 bathing suit

Gear:

• 1 Osprey Porter Backpack 46*
  
• 1 waterproof Sea to Summit Deluxe Pack Cover*(small)
• 1 luggage lock for main zipper (TSA approved)
  
• 1 Cocoon Silk TravelSheet*
  
• 1 camp towel
• 1 head lamp
• 1 inflatable neck pillow
• 1 Lip Balm Spf 30 Vanilla*
• 1 Platypus Big Zip 2 L* 
• iPhone 4
• 11" Macbook Air
• Apple World Travel Adapter Kit*
• World Travel Adapter Plug Set* (I have no bearing on how good or bad these things are, the only thing we need them for is the camera battery chargers)
• Nikon D3100 with Clik Elite Chest Pack*, extra battery, battery charger, many SD cards and Nikon 18-105mm zoom lens
• GoPro HD Hero 960*
• 70 Doxycycline pills (malaria)
• Multiple ziplock bags
• Ear plugs

Paperwork:

• Passport (and photocopy of passport)
• 6 Passport sized pictures for visas
• List of vaccinations
• List of electronics we paid for before we left the US (maybe)

*We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com. If you are going to buy something on our list, click the link to help support our travels.

First post or Off to South Korea

I'm writing this at about 1:15pm Korean time. We will land in Seoul in less than two hours. I'm technogeekily obligated to tell you the iPad is at 54% battery, which is pretty much insane. We didn't use it at all on the flight from Boston to San Francisco, but it's been on the majority of the past 10 hours from San Francisco to Korea. Katie and I watched: an episode of House, Stargate Universe, The Big Bang Theory, How I Met Your Mother and BBC's Life. That's about three and a half hours of video playback, volume at maximum (split to our headphones), in addition to playing the game HarborMaster HD obsessively until I beat my high score (an hour or more), as well as reading a bunch of blog posts in the excellent RSS reader NewsRack. I'd say that's more than six hours use, aka insane battery life.

So enough about the iPad, here's our tentative plan for the next couple of days.

When we get to Seoul we'll catch a bus of some sort to the hostel we're staying at and check in. At that point it will probably be five or six o'clock so I don't know what we'll be up to - probably explore Seoul a bit and grab some food.

Tomorrow (Friday) we're doing a tour of the DMZ which should be neat. Apparently there are a bunch of tunnels that used to be used to sneak people across the border (I'm not sure which way). I don't think that will take the whole day so we'll probably end up exploring Seoul some more tomorrow night.

Saturday we're meeting Kim (Katie's old roommate that lives in Busan) in Gyeongju to do a temple stay. The name of the temple is Golgulsa. So we'll do that Saturday afternoon to Sunday afternoon.

Sunday we'll head back to Busan with Kim... and from then on we don't have many plans. Check back to see what we've been up to! (assuming we keep up the motivation to keep writing this)

And.... We're back in the hostel after exploring Seoul for a few hours. We're exhausted and don't have a lot to report, aside from the fact that we are big westernized wusses when it comes to trying new food. For dinner tonight we went into a random Korean place we found on the streets of Seoul and it was... interesting. The food wasn't bad we just mostly had no idea what we were doing. The people working at the restaurant didn't speak any English so we had to sort of point and sound out what we wanted. Then when the food came it was heating/cooking? on our table, but we immediately put it into our plates and the man working there told us to dump it back into the serving dish. Anyway, it was fish with a few vegetables in a somewhat spicy sauce served with boiled rice. The fish was served with skin and bones which was a bit odd to us. All in all it could have been worse, but could have also been better.

Time for some much needed rest.