We’re going to Bali!

By we, I mean Christina and me, as opposed to the Royal We, which would include Situation Normal subscribers. I love my subscribers, but bringing 1,350 friends, fans, and internet randos to Bali just isn’t in the Situation Normal budget. Sorry.

But YOU can come along for the adventure by reading Situation Bali, a limited series travelogue featuring dispatches from the Indonesian archipelago.

Here are the details, along with some thoughts on my incurable case of wanderlust and our coming adventure.

How do I receive Situation Bali dispatches?

Simple. Situation Normal subscribers will automatically receive Situation Bali dispatches. In other words, you’re already a winner!

I created a Situation Bali section to give this adventure its own home within the Situation Normal mothership. If the tech gods favor me (a big if), this new section should accomplish three things:

The emails should say something like “from Situation Bali,” which should help clarify that the situations are set in Bali, rather than Los Angeles.

There should be a link on the header of the Situation Normal homepage that will lead you to the Situation Bali archives, so even if you miss an email (or a post in the app), you won’t miss a beat of this adventure.

If you’re not up for this adventure, you should be able to unsubscribe from Situation Bali without leaving Situation Normal. But if you choose this option, you will miss all the fun.

When is this happening?

We leave for Bali November 1. Because international flights are like time travel, minus the opportunity to make a fortune on sports betting, we arrive in Bali November 3. I’m not sure what will happen to November 2, but it wouldn’t be time travel if it wasn’t so confusing, right? ANYWAY, expect to begin receiving Situation Bali dispatches somewhere in this window.

How long will Situation Bali last?

Three weeks! Unless, we decide to move to Bali, in which case I’ll need to rethink everything. But let’s just say three weeks for now.

How often will you post?

Great question! The answer is, I don’t know. When there’s something to share, I’ll share it. But there won’t be a rigid posting schedule for these dispatches. That said, if you’ve read my travelogues from Alaska or Cleveland, you know travel really inspires my writing. So, I’ll probably write a few times a week.

Why do you call them dispatches?

I call them dispatches because “literary postcards” sounded too high-brow and “posts” sounded to mundane. Also, I like the word “dispatch” and I think it more-or-less captures the shortish reports I plan to send from the Indonesian archipelago.

Got it. What’s the story behind Situation Bali?

There’s a lot to that story, actually. Let me start from the beginning. With any luck, some of the markers I put down here will become themes for further exploration in Situation Bali.

A very brief history of our wanderlust

I was born with a case of incurable wanderlust. I come by my wanderlust honestly. My father usually spent at least six months out of every year on the road. Sometimes, if the stars aligned, we’d go with him. Summer vacation in the Estrin household often meant working as a PA in places like, Seoul, South Korea; Hong Kong; Indianapolis, Indiana; New York, New York; Barcelona, Spain; Sydney, Australia; Athens, Greece; and Raleigh, North Carolina.

After college, I used my dad’s frequent flier miles and my PA earnings to backpack through Southeast Asia, Central America, and Eastern Europe. I even wrote an email newsletter about my adventures, which just goes to show you that I was super-early on the whole newsletter trend.

After law school, I worked more and traveled less. That was a bummer, but I managed to take a few trips. I visited Ireland, Chile, and Easter Island, which is part of Chile, but unlike anywhere else in the world.

In 2008, I met the love of my life. I told Christina how important travel was to me. She told me that she had always dreamed of traveling, but so far, she’d only been to Mexico and Canada.

In 2012, with one year of marriage under our belt, the production company Christina worked for went tits up. Some people might’ve panicked in this situation, but I celebrated. Since Christina no longer had a job and I was a freelancer with a flexible schedule, we decided to seize the opportunity to travel. We went to Thailand and Cambodia, where Christina caught an incurable case of wanderlust too. Since then, we’ve traveled together to Singapore, Amsterdam (twice), Belgium, Canada, Costa Rica, Belize, and Mexico (three times).

What does it really mean to value travel?

In 2021, as we approached our tenth anniversary, Christina and I knew we wanted to take an epic trip to celebrate, but there were a few things standing in the way. First, some of the places we wanted to visit were still subject to travel restrictions because of the pandemic. Second, Christina had a demanding corporate job that made longer trips challenging. It was a difficult choice, but we decided to put off international travel until 2022.

Throughout 2021 and 2022, we made several domestic trips to New York, Las Vegas, Cleveland, Alaska, and Florida. These were great trips, but they didn’t exactly speak to our wanderlust. For some reason, our wanderlust is an international kind of deal.

During the pandemic, we also spent a lot of time talking about where we’d go when international travel came back. Actually, that’s not quite accurate. We talked a little about where we wanted to go, but we talked a lot about why we value travel so much. Three things stick out from those conversations.

We both enjoy exploring new places and learning about different cultures. In fact, we both consider the things we learned on previous adventures to be among the best experiences of our lives.

We both like how travel forces you to grow and see the world in a new light. Sometimes that growth can be challenging, like when we visited the killing fields in Cambodia, but neither of us would trade that growth for anything in the world.

We both draw inspiration from one of my parent’s friends, an 80-something woman who has been traveling the world, often times solo, for decades.

Those wise words from another human with wanderlust have stayed with us. In fact, those words shape how we think about the rest of our lives. Christina and I aren’t old (yet), but we’re not young anymore. We’re somewhere in the amorphous middle of life. When we’re old, we both want to have the same attitude as our 80-something inspiration. To achieve that goal, we know that we can’t put off the future. Instead, we must make conscious choices to do what we value now—and keeping going as long as possible.

How we decided on Bali

Late this year, the stars aligned for us. Most of the places on our wanderlust list had lifted their travel restrictions. Meanwhile, Christina decided to leave the corporate life and begin a new chapter in her career. She even managed to secure a severance—a first for both of us. For the first time in our marriage, time and money have intersected.

“What do we do with this gift?” I asked.

“We go big! Obviously.”

We set our sights on a November departure—exactly one year, one month, and one week after our 10th anniversary. Then we bought some travel books for inspiration and talked things over.

I threw out Harbin, Manchuria because I’ve always wanted to visit the city where my grandfather, Sam Estrin, grew up.

“Isn’t it crazy-cold there this time of year?” Christina asked.

I checked the weather. November is a cold month in Harbin, but if you wait another month you can see the Harbin International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival.

“So, you want to go when it’s even colder?” Christina asked.

We tabled Harbin.

“What about Peru?” Christina asked. “We could see Machu Picchu.”

“You got altitude sickness in Denver,” I said.

“Fuck, you’re right. That one might have to be a solo trip for you someday.”

For a time, we were both drawn to Egypt. The Pyramids of Giza. Karnak. The Valley of the Kings. But the more we talked about it, the more we realized that our vision for the trip was actually just clips from Death on the Nile.

“We could go to Colombia,” I said. “If it was good enough for Jack T. Colton and Joan Wilder, it’s good enough for us.”

“Joan Wilder? The Joan Wilder?”

“Or, Bolivia! We could do a whole Butch & Sundance thing!”

“Didn’t they die at the end?” Christina asked.

“Yeah. Kinda. I mean, it depends on how you interrupt the final frame of the film. Personally, I like to think Butch and Sundance are eternal—two outlaws, frozen in time.”

Christina rolled her eyes.

“On second thought, I don’t know if South America qualifies as going big,” I said. “The flights aren’t crazy-long compared to some other destinations we’ve considered, and the time zones align with North America. Honestly, South America is probably the easiest continent for us to visit.”

“Ditto for Europe,” Christina said. “It’s the second easiest for us to get to. Plus, it’s cold in November.”

“What about Africa? We could do a photo-safari. Plus, you’ve always wanted to try glamping.”

“I already priced out some options there.”

“And?”

“Africa might be going a little too big for this trip.”

“How big is too big?”

“Twentieth anniversary big.”

“Wow. OK, that’s big.”

“Yeah.”

We were stumped. Really stumped. Then one day, Christina asked me if I had any travel regrets. Now, I try to avoid regret because that’s the kind of shit that turns into major baggage as you age. Still, I’ve accumulated a few travel regrets over the years. Here are my top five:

To renew my Korean visa, I went with my dad on a 36-hour trip to Tokyo. A friend of my father’s offered to introduce me to Japanese cuisine. I could’ve tried sushi, or ramen, or yakitori, but naive 12-year-old that I was, I asked if he knew any good Italian restaurants. I haven’t been back to Tokyo since, and I’m still kicking myself.

Feeling homesick on my post-college walkabout, I passed on an invitation to stay with a distant cousin who was living in Jakarta, Indonesia at the time. That was dumb.

Tagging along on one of Christina’s work trips to Singapore, we skipped an opportunity to extend the trip by adding a week in Bali. That was shortsighted.

I’ve missed countless opportunities to take the road to Zyzzyx on one of our many trips to Las Vegas. This is complacency, and I need to work on that.

In college, I skipped a road trip with some friends to see Mitch Hedberg perform in Ohio. Mitch is no longer with us, which just goes to show you that sometimes you don’t get a second chance.

“Two of your regrets are related to Indonesia,” Christina said.

“I guess I owe the Indonesian people an apology.”

“I also regret that we didn’t fly to Bali when we were in Singapore,” Christina said. “Everyone in the Singapore office said we should’ve added a vacation to the end of that business trip. Why didn’t I listen?”

“Live and learn, I guess.”

“Oh, we’ve lived, and we’ve learned, babe.”

“Huh?”

“Honey, are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

“That regrets suck?”

“That we have a second chance to go to Bali.”

Christina was right. This was a second chance to go to Bali. Or, maybe a third chance in my case, since visiting my distant cousin in Jakarta would’ve likely brought me to Bali too. After the Mitch Hedberg fiasco, I knew I couldn’t pass up any additional chances.

“Bali certainly is as an epic adventure,” I said. “Plus, there’s great snorkeling in Bali. We love to snorkel.”

“And cultural and historical stuff,” Christina said. “I know how you love to do that. Also, I can bliss-the-fuck-out in Bali.”

“Wow, Bali sounds like a paradise.”

“It is paradise,” Christina said. “At least, that’s what all the TikTokers say.”

“Well, the TikTok crowd knows everything about everything. Let’s go to Bali!”

Just kidding! We don’t take the TikTok crowd too seriously; otherwise, we’d stay home and make NyQuil Chicken.

But we are serious about Bali, especially the aspects of Bali that don’t make it onto social media. That’s why we’re traveling 8,615 miles from home, instead of scrolling social media’s travel hashtags and binge-watching old episodes of Anthony Bourdain.

We want to see the sights, smell the smells, meet the people, taste the food, and soak it all in. We want to know Bali, and if you want to join us over the next few weeks, we’d love that too!

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A few discussion questions.

What’s a trip you took that you’ll never forget?

What’s a trip you’re dying to take?

Have you been to Bali? Any recommendations?

If you haven’t been to Bali, is there something you’ve heard about that you think Christina and I should check out?

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