Sailing Broken Compass in the South Pacific

I feel like I’m always surprised about how quickly time flies: honestly, some days you look at the calendar and have no idea how it’s 2012, or February, or Friday! Yet here we are: Friday, February 10, 2012. What strikes me most about today is that it’s the one year mark from an incredible adventure I went on to Tonga. (Aka Kingdom of Tonga, comprising of 176 islands scattered over 700,00 square km of ocean in the South Pacific. Thank you Wikipedia!)
How I ended up in Tonga is pretty incredible: my friend Bret and his twin brother, Chad, both quit their jobs in 2009, bought a boat and started on a journey sailing around the world. No, I’m not kidding–this really happened. You can read all about it on their web site and follow their adventures on the Sail Broken Compass blog. While I was really sad to see my friend leave Portland, I knew it was the opportunity of a lifetime–one that I would benefit from as well as I now had friends to meet in foreign countries!

Since they left on their trip, I always said I would visit them. One day. Someday. And then all of a sudden they had been gone for a year! So in December of 2010 I decided that I was going to meet up with them–in Tonga. A country I had never heard of let alone could point out on a map: that just made it all the more exciting! Icing on the cake: the twins got a gig “island sitting”. Seriously. Island sitting. Our own private island in the middle of the South Pacific. There’s no way I could say no to that, so off I went!

I had the time of my life and while I could sit here and write the longest blog post known to man about my trip, I’ll share the video I made about my trip instead. Music, pictures, captions: it does a pretty good job of sharing my adventure.

[wpvideo EMgodB8g]

10 days away (disconnected and off the grid-I even got my work email inbox down to ZERO before I left!)

900 plus photos (and videos too)

8 different flights (international and domestic)

7 different activities (skydive, snorkel, canoe, swim, dive, scuba dive,  sail)

6ish hours of sun (Yup, it was rainy and cloudy most of the time I was there. I’d like to think that the sun didn’t want to compete with my sunny personality. The fellas humoured me and agreed that that was definitely the case. It was still enough to get a little bit of a tan!)

5 days with the Van Rodens (and 5 days spent in transit)

4 Broken Compass Crew members (The twins + Makai (their dog and the queen of the boat) + me!)

3 items checked off the bucket list (travel alone, go skydiving and get SCUBA certified!)

2 survived earthquakes

1 unforgettable trip

P.S. This is the friend who inspired my Bucket List. Can you tell why?