Welcome all...
So this is the first post on our "traveling Muths" blog. Currently we're at home in Iowa City, Iowa, where we'll be for only 2.5 remaining weeks. In the immediate future we'll post pictures of ourselves and our friends, to give you an idea of what our current life is like...

Since there will be a wide variety of people reading this, here's some barebones information about us, and then about our upcoming "trip around the world:"

We're a married couple living in Iowa City, IA, which is quite near Mt. Vernon, home of Cornell College, which is where we met. Anderson grew up outside of Denver, Colorado, while Liz was born and raised in northern Wisconsin. Anderson graduated in '03, double-majoring in Classical Studies & Philosophy, and Liz graduated in '04, double-majoring in English and Philosophy. After graduation we moved to Iowa City and started working, needing a respite from school. Now we've been married almost 2 years, and have been working that entire time saving up money for what was first going to be joining the Peace Corps (which may still happen eventually), and gradually evolved into the mostly unknown journey that lays ahead of us.
We have both worked service-industry jobs, Liz as a server at Sanctuary, a jazz pub, and Anderson as a pizza delivery driver at Pizza Pit, to try and take advantage of the college town that we live in. We are tremendous music fans, and travel all over the country to go to music festivals. This year we went to Summer Camp, Wakarusa, and Bonnaroo. Though we enjoyed all three immensely, Bonnaroo definitely had too many people, while the heat and cops at Summer Camp were a bit oppressive. Wakarusa had a nice beach and 2 disc golf courses, though Radiohead at Bonnaroo was the standout show of the summer. Other bands we enjoyed were Beck, Amadou & Mariam, The Pnuma Trio, and The Flaming Lips, just to name only a few. This summer we also went to our first Rainbow Gathering, outside of Clark, CO, which was a wild adventure as well as a refreshing natural interlude before our busy travels. You'll obviously learn much more about us as we go, but here is...

... our current itinerary (which includes 2 months of US travel):

07/26/06 - Leave Iowa City, with the majority of our stuff. We'll be travelling to Denver with our good friends Hunab Ku, so we'll stay the night in Omaha and catch their show.
07/29/06 - After relaxing in Colorado for a few days, we'll catch Hunab Ku's show at the Katenation Festival, which we think is taking place in Idaho Springs.
07/30/06 - In the early a.m. we'll fly from Denver with Anderson's parents Marcia & Rod to Hawaii, for a 2-week wedding/long-overdue-family-gathering extravaganza. We'll be spending a week on Maui and 5 days on Oahu, where we'll hopefully be surfing and mountain biking amongst other things.
08/12/06 - We'll return to Denver, try to relax, and finalize all the "real world" things we have left to deal with during our last week with Anderson's parents.
08/21/06 - We'll travel to Iowa, to spend a few final days with many of our friends in Iowa City.
08/25/06 - Travel to Chicago, to see our friends Jenn & Brooke (Liz's old college roommates); we also have to go the Indian consulate that Monday to get our visas.
08/29/06 - Return to Wisconsin to spend time with Liz's fam before we head out of the country.
09/08/06 - Hit up our last US music festival for at least several years, Harvest Fest, in southern Minnesota, hopefully with a bunch of our friends from the mid-west.
09/14/06 - After much ado, we'll depart from the US, with only an internal-frame backpack each, flying from Minneapolis, MN to Hamburg, Germany, with stops in Chicago and Stockholm.
We'll be spending a week in in Germany, visiting with Anderson's friend Tom in Hamburg for some of our time, before journeying to the Netherlands, where we'll stay a few nights with our friend Nicole, before journeying south to France and Spain. We'll spend about 5-6 days in each country, just a brief overview, since we'd rather make our cash go further in cheaper parts of the world.
10/05/06 - We'll fly from Madrid, Spain to Athens, Greece, via London. We'll explore Greece for a week, and then head to Egypt.
10/12/06 - Cairo, Egypt: we begin a month-long investigation of ancient and modern Egypt, which will include (hopefully) a falucca ride up the Nile, as well as scuba diving in the Red Sea.
11/11/06 - Now our trip truly begins, as our scheduled plans end with us arriving in Trivandrum, at the southern tip of India. We'll work our way north, exploring India, with eventual plans to cross into Nepal. At some point, after months (?), we plan on visiting South Korea, Thailand, and Indonesia, before ending up in New Zealand where we would like to get work visas for a year. But all that is just tentative, we'll see where the winds blow us...!