On December 4, Lindsay and I returned to the US after a year of traveling abroad. Lindsay diligently blogged our experiences and her photos at cadeparade.com.

We have spent December visiting family and friends. On December 31, we fly to San Francisco to start the next chapter of our lives.

It’s adventure time all over again

Time to sift through apartments and carefully consider our work, to reacquaint ourselves with first world amenities and first world problems. To reunite with family and friends, to fondly shuffle through our notes and photos, and to reflect on our travel experiences and put them into context.

Also, to eat fajitas and burritos en masse, because let me tell you: Mexican and Tex-Mex food outside the Americas just is not the same.

The first half in photos

All photos are by Lindsay Cade, and are from the first half of the year.

During the first six months of December 2011 through May 2012, we traveled in India, Thailand, Laos, Vietname, Cambodia, and Burma (Myanmar).

We traveled to places beautiful and remote:

Ate incredible foods:

And some not-so-incredible ones:

We enjoyed amazing sunsets:

We ventured across deserts:

into backwaters:

through rivers and valleys:

We marvelled at constructions old and new:

During the second six months of June through November, we traveled in the Czech Republic, Italy, Turkey, Germany, France, England, Thailand (again! we are quite fond of it), South Korea, Malaysia, and Hong Kong. We ended the trip where we began, returning to India for a month.

I cannot recommend this experience highly enough. My sense of perspective and patience have been changed at a fundamental level. At the same time, I’m very much ready for this return to the US, to be with friends and to focus on my career, to do good in this world of which I’ve now seen a tiny slice more.