According to former Chamber of Commerce President Mimi Lamp, it took her husband Don only a day after receiving an inheritance to decide he wanted to go around the world. Mimi resigned from the Chamber, which she had helped to revive, to begin with Don their all-continents-but-Antarctica trip. They left in February 2011 and returned in February this year.
“We intended to hit every continent except Antarctica,” she said. “Our goal was to stay as close to the ground as possible. You get a different view of the world travelling overland.” During the talk, Lamp will explain some of their most colorful transportation, including East Africa’s Overland Truck network at their presentations.
They will present evenings of slides and stories in two parts. The first is at 7 p.m. this Sunday, April 15 at Silver Pines Lodge. Attendees are asked to bring a dessert to share to this free event.
Neither Mimi nor Don is a stranger to foreign travel. “We were both missionary kids,” said Mimi, “Don in Nigeria and Lebanon and me in Jordan and Lebanon. We met at the Beirut [Lebanon] Overseas School.”
But even so, Mimi said the experience was tiring, exotic, and extraordinarily wonderful. “We were welcomed everywhere,” she said. Highlights of the first half of their journey include Don’s seven-day climb of Africa’s Mt. Kilimanjaro, northern Greece and its islands; the welcoming attitudes of the locals and Don’s interviewing “all taxi drivers,” everywhere they went about local political, social and economic conditions.