Yup, Still Alive - Fort Lauderdale Edition.

Hey Friends! Sorry for the absence, we arrived here almost 5 weeks ago (5 weeks?!?!) and life kinda got away from us before I had a chance to process what was going on around me... never mind write it down for the blog. Anyways, I seem to have acclimatized myself to life here a bit, and hopefully I'm back in the saddle!

When I last left off, we were still getting ready to go. We had some great going away parties...

And we (well, maybe just me...) were doing some last minute shopping, and skyping our lovelies...

We spent our last night at home at my mom's house. It actually just turned into a packing explosion. We came down here carry-on only.

 INDEFINITE TRAVEL, CARRY ON ONLY.

 I'll let that sink in for a second while you contemplate my crazy level. (I'll post more about what we packed, and how it's working for us soon!) But, before we left, it looked like this:

Next Stop: Waterworld. 

As we flew over the everglades and into this city that would become our new home for now, all I could see was water. There are canals and bayous and ocean and lakes and canals and rivers and pools. Even the air is wet. I'm pretty sure that alligators live everywhere - but now I feel like i've moved into their habitat, not the other way around.

We arranged a ride to our crew house and got picked up at the airport. It was the first of a series of "OMG. This is my life now" moments. When you don't have your own car or home, you end up getting rides everywhere and staying in odd accommodations. It's a strange combination of becoming more independent and more reliant on strangers.

We walked into a giant house, with slight travel-hangovers from the long day and say a scene that looks  something like this:

It's a giant house, it's boisterous, busy and full of people who all know each other. I've never travelled and stayed in any kind of hostel or crew accommodations before (married young!)...so this was all new for me - and to be honest quite overwhelming. We snuck up to our cozy private room to get settled.

Before going back down to the main section of this house, which houses between 18 - 32 people...

It's crazy here! 

But as it turns out - 

I love it. 

Living with lots of people is really fun (most of the time). We make 'family dinner' about once a week, and we're all working towards similar goals (for the most part). There's always someone putting on a movie, or going out to a pub, or making dinner. My new crewhouse family helps me out lots. We work together and we hang out together. They know where to get the best tacos and what agencies to sign up for (more on job gettin' later). They lend me interview clothes, and the girls all get overdressed and go out to ladies night on Wednesdays. There's an amazing sense of camaraderie that, having never really played on teams, I haven't quite experience before. It's so fun.

We got ourselves some bikes, and started checking out Fort Lauderdale. Our strange new home.

 

More to come soon, thanks for your patience and thanks for all the support we've gotten already!

High Five!

We're on our way!

Early morning flight, stop over in Dallas and we're in our way... So excited to finally be going!

Yep. That is ALL OF OUR LUGGAGE {we're both wearing small backpacks in this pic}. We're travelling carry on only - and I'm stressed already that I've brought waay too much stuff! It's going to be an adventure.


Ps. We're having a debate on the value of upgrading to first/business class. I vote it's worth about $100/hour of flight time. {So a 2hr flight is worth it of its a $200 upgrade.} Buuuut... I haven't quite shifted my mindset to someone with no job! What do you think??

Long Term Travel Insurance for Albertans

The mixture of being Canadian residents and full-time employees with additional health insurance has afforded us the luxury of never really thinking about our health in terms of money. Everything has always been free. We pay nominal fees for some prescriptions and travel immunizations, but not much.

To be honest, I can't even really relate to having to pay for healthcare. You have to pay if you get hit by a car? You have to pay to have a baby in a hospital? This doesn't make any sense to me. I'll keep my politics to myself, but my views are based on my experiences with this system of healthcare.

Venturing out into the world, we had to consider our health coverage internationally. We're both certified SCUBA divers and plan on continuing to dive - so that was a concern as well. Luckily, through the power of the interwebs, most of the research was already done for me.

Yeay to blog friends! Yeay to being lazy!

Steph over at 20 Years Hence, wrote an amazingly detailed post Better Safe than Sorry about her experience with Canadian, American, and International health insurance. I won't even try to recap what she has to say, because most of my posts are rambling diatribes about drinking too much, not information packed learning experiences.

Point is: I agree with all of it, and have had many of the same experiences looking into insurance.

There are only a few differences we have as Albertans. AHCIP requires that you be in Alberta for 183 days out of 12 months to maintain coverage. Since we will be gone for longer than that, we can call to extend it out. But even that will only bring us up to 12 months of coverage for AHCIP basics {this is free coverage that all Albertans get}. If we lose this coverage, we will have to insure all of our coverage independently, and not just the additional insurance that we would get with most plans.

World Nomads and Bon Voyage are two companies that provide international insurance. After some comparisons, World Nomads looked more like the insurance that we would need, as it included more extended diving and 'adventure travel' coverage.

However, we had two more factors to consider:
{1} We wanted to add onto our current AHCIP coverage, not double it up
{2} If we do end up working soon, many boats will include medical insurance as a part of their package, and we don't want to pay for something that could be offered for free!

We went to check out AMA Travel Insurance options, and they provide some shorter term extended coverage. This is what we went with in the end. We bought insurance until December, which is 71 travel days and cost us $486 for both of us. Not the cheapest, but it's what works best for us.

**Side Note: All of these policies are health insurance that we carry on top of a personal life insurance policy that we pay monthly. Look how grown up we are! Multiple levels of insurance!**

When our AMA coverage runs out, we'll most likely purchase the World Nomads package if we still need it. What about you fellow travellers? Did you purchase any insurance? Have you had any experiences making claims worldwide?

If you have any specific questions about Alberta/Travel insurance - let me know!