Actually getting out of town is hard work. Trip preparation has taken far longer than planned, all sorts of unexpected delays have cropped up, and we kept wanting to see our friends and loved ones “one last time”.
Without going into gory detail, over the last few months we updated our house to code and got it rented out, moved into a transitory apartment, purged unnecessary items, filled a storage unit to the brim, cared for and rehabilitated our pet bird Midori who got cancer, mostly finalized and acquired our travel gear, went through piles of papers and personal projects that we’d been meaning to work on forever that had to be dealt with before we left, and visited and provided assistance to suddenly ailing family members. Ironically, I feel like a lot of things I worked on to get ready for this journey could have been done years ago to make my stationary life more sane. Now that they’re done I’m happy about it, and I’m glad this trip provided the impetus for my to stop procrastinating and actually do them!
Every one of these obstacles has made us reconsider the wisdom of this trip, but we’ve stubbornly tackled them one by one. We are grateful for all the help and support we got from friends and family along the way. We’ve had to work with the practice of letting go of “perfect preparation” so that we don’t end up preparing forever. As our nomadic friend Kai said to us a couple months back, “Getting ready for your trip will take exactly as long as you have.” Shortly after that we bought tickets for our first leg of travel, which gave us something concrete to schedule around.
We are finally out of town, and last night was the first night our little flock (Heather, Midori, and me) had on our own. It’s exciting to feel underway!
our car mascot
our giant pile of stuff
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