Mary Bellamy

Yeah, so maybe my friend's plan to vacation in Cuba is falling apart, but all systems are go for my trip. On Saturday night, MNB and I are headed to the airport for the long journey to India. We'll be there for a month, hopefully avoiding most of the cold winter weather in Fairbanks.

Of course the trip is well timed. On Tuesday, my entire department got laid off. Good times, right? It wasn't unexpected - most of our funding (like 95%) came from a contract that expires May 31. And it doesn't look like the contract will be renewed. So we pretty much all have jobs until May 31, they just gave us 6 months notice.

We first heard about this possibility back in July. And since I'm a planner, I went into overdrive. All additional principal payments on my mortgage and all investing came to a halt as I began moving all extra money to my emergency fund. And I'm confident I'll be able to find another job in my field. So I've stopped tossing around insane ideas like renting out my house for two years and joining the Peace Corps.

The trip to India will be a welcome respite from the office. People are somewhat chipper now, but I can see the mood growing bleak. And we'll be covering quite a bit of ground as we travel mostly in Rajasthan. For perspective, it's like starting in Chicago, then going to Grand Rapids, down to Indianapolis, out to Kansas City, onward to Omaha and then back to Chicago. Or for more visual people, it's like we're traveling around Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and Utah. It's not necessarily a huge area, but you must factor in bad roads and lots of train rides.

We'll try to check our e-mail occasionally and will update the blog as time and Internet access permit. But you can pretty much imagine that most of the trip will be like this:


Poor MNB still doesn't believe me when I tell him I *will* sing this every time we get on a train.