Chris and Debbi's Adventure

At Vienna’s Music Museum (Haus der Musik), I got to virtually conduct the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra’s performance of a waltz. I had to almost shove aside a couple of eager 10-year-olds who wanted to skip the line and take their turns before me, but for three minutes I controlled the orchestra’s tempo, volume and instruments using an infrared baton and a responsive video. I recommend you give it a try -- arrive early to the museum and rush to the third floor so you can do it a few times before any one else shows up to wait in line. Click here to watch me conduct the orchestra. Chris and I have visited dozens of museums during our seven months of full-time travel. And we've found that many offer much more than a chance to browse through halls of specimens and exhibits and read information on placards. Hands on activities and interactive quizzes are fun and have been around for a while, but we’ve also seen amusement park type rides, virtual reality, holograms and physics demonstra...

Last year when Chris and I described our plans to sell most of our possessions and travel for a year, the most common reaction we received was “You’re so brave!”. We didn’t feel that we needed extra bravery for our venture, but after our first day of wandering around Marrakech, Morocco on our own, I definitely felt like we had been brave. So much was unfamiliar – not just the language, the currency and the clothing, but the mix of animals and people on the street, the sounds of calls to prayer, the unfamiliar products and the endless narrow, winding alleys and streets. We felt like we had accomplished a heroic feat when we arrived back at our family run riad hotel at the end of the day. One of our first sights after arriving in Marrakech, Morocco. One of our first experiences at a Morocco medina market. It was a bit overwhelming at first, but after visiting similar markets in nine more communities we felt we had seen it all - local markets with everything from food and fabric to nail s...