We were warned Japan was crazy hot in June so we left a month earlier than originally planned and flew to our home town of Calgary, Canada where we spent the summer. The 15 hour time difference between Tokyo and Calgary was brutal to get over but we finally settled into a familiar routine. Typically we don’t get up to very much worth writing about because we come back once a year for a variety of reasons, but we played lots of golf, rode our bicycles, joined a gym and had fun with friends and family. We try to golf and ride our bikes as often as we can while here because both activities require equipment that is impossible to carry on our nomadic travels. Coming ‘home’ also gives us extra time to research some nomad related subjects and roughly plan out the next year of our travels.
In late June James & Tracey, friends we met in Vietnam, stayed overnight with us on their way to Edmonton. It was a lovely coincidence that we were all in Calgary at the same time and had the opportunity to catch up in person again. It has been great to meet fellow nomads during our travels and develop a community of friends with similar lifestyles. We always have fun with James & Tracey and I never remember to take any photos 😄
The City of Calgary has five public golf courses with very reasonable green fees so that’s where we end up playing most of our games with Blair’s two brothers and their wives. Our favorite courses are Lakeview and Shaganappi Valley, both lovely, well treed, 9 hole courses that we can complete in about 2 hours. We had a very good summer of golf, not that we are pros, but we have a lot of laughs out there 😊
Near the end of our stay in Calgary I flew to Comox, Vancouver Island for a few days to visit my sister. It was fabulous to be near the ocean and we had a great afternoon out on the water in her fancy new boat. Her husband left on a motorcycle trip the day after I arrived so I enjoyed some lovely one on one sister time. We visited the 40 Knots Winery, the Comox Valley farmers market, went for walks in the forest, swam in her pool and enjoyed lazy lunches at some of the fabulous restaurants in the area. It was hot and sunny while I was in Comox and that made for a perfect visit.
Leaving Comox marina on my sister's boat
Every year we need to research health insurance coverage to see if there are any new offerings out there available to us. Most of the policies our fellow travelers recommend are unavailable to Canadian citizens so our options are much more limited. A fellow nomad wrote a fabulous blog exploring health care and it was there we discovered the Genki Explorer policy. Genki will cover us in our home country of Canada for 42 days out of every 180 days of coverage, unlike our previous policies with IMG Patriot Travel Insurance which had no coverage in Canada or the USA. We can buy USA coverage from IMG for an extra cost but no coverage is available in our home country. Comparing our current IMG Patriot Travel policy with the Genki Explorer policy the premiums are almost the same but Genki’s deductible is 50 Euros while our IMG deductible is USD $2,500…a significant difference. In addition our IMG policy had a maximum coverage of USD $2,000,000 while Genki Explorer has no limit. It looks like we are going to give the Genki Explorer policy a try for the next year.
SIM cards present another challenge as we move around the world. For the past 6.5 years we have bought a local SIM card in every country we land in and it’s not always the easiest or cheapest way of getting data for our phones. Typically we are finding that we don’t need to make phone calls because everyone uses WhatsApp. Fellow nomad Howard Darby has done a lot of research on cell service around the world and I recently read about his latest recommendation, Flexiroam. After doing a little of our own research we decided to give their service a try. Our phones are not esim compatible so we ordered a physical SIM card and a 30GB Global Data package good for 365 days. The cost was USD $79.20 including shipping and taking advantage of a 30% discount they were offering. Flexiroam claims our phones will connect to a local network as soon as we land in every country and data will be available, so fingers crossed this is true and we will no longer have to buy a SIM card every time we change countries 🤞
We had ample spare time while we were in Calgary to work on the details of our next leg of travels. Blair has always wanted to go on an African Safari so back in May while we were still in Vietnam we pulled the trigger and booked a Tanzanian safari in February 2025. Folks from the UK that we met on an Indonesian dive boat way back in 2010 posted on Facebook they were going to Africa. We asked them about their trip and it sounded like a good fit for us so we jumped in and booked ourselves a safari. Based on their glowing reviews of their first trip with this company we felt very comfortable booking with Lemala. Our itineraries are slightly different but we should end up spending 4 or 5 nights at the same camps with Sophie & Paul. We will have lots of catching up to do since last seeing each other 15 years ago!
Africa was never high on my list but now that we are going I am getting excited, although I’m not thrilled about the vaccines we need to get 💉 Neither of us has ever received the Hepatitis A and Hepatitis B vaccines and that one was strongly recommended by our Doctor. We need 2 jabs each, 30 days apart, before we go to Africa and than a booster sometime within 12 months. I was a bit shocked that each jab costs CDN $100 each, so CDN $400 before the safari and then CDN $200 next year for the boosters…yikes!!!
Once we committed to be in Tanzania by February 18 next year we began planning backwards. There are not a lot of places in Europe that fly to Kilimanjaro Airport in Tanzania but we finally settled on Lisbon, Portugal as our departure point, with a changeover in Amsterdam. From Lisbon we worked backwards 90 days to determine our earliest arrival date into the Schengen zone. To fill in the time before arriving in Europe we decided to fly from Calgary to Loreto, Baja, Mexico for 8 weeks. We spent a few months there 3 years ago and it felt like an easy and familiar place to enjoy some beach time until we could fly to Europe and begin our 90 days in Schengen. We will fly to Paris in November, pick up our leased car from Renault, then meander around Southern France and down to the Algarve in Portugal until we fly from Lisbon to Africa on February 17. Lots of details to be sorted out still but we will have plenty of time while we relax and enjoy the sunshine in Loreto Bay, Baja, Mexico…..