The clock is forever ticking. Eight weeks from today we will be boarding an Amtrak train and heading to Chicago, starting a three-week journey to the West Coast to eventually fly to Bangkok out of San Francisco. 56 days left of routine home living, working, paying rent, watching baseball games at the same bar every week. 1344 hours left of reading other’s stories of incredible travel tales, waiting for the feeling to be ours. The wait is almost over.
We have a few things left to do. The vaccinations and travel insurance issues need to be dealt with soon. Also our stuff, the accumulation of years of living in the same place: piles of books, clothes, random shiny objects and furniture. It all needs to go somewhere. Massive craigslist sale? Perhaps.
And then there is the constant fighting of that urge to spend; to go to movies, grab a few beers, eat a big breakfast. All of these things taking little bites out of the travel fund, the big goal.
What about Living In Transit? What’s in store for the blog, over the next two months, while we’re tying up all the final loose ends? The weekend trips to other East Coast cities are most likely out of the question. It’s all part of the budgeting issue. Living In Transit will likely become a place for us to share our thoughts, hopes, fears, uncertainties and questions with the rest of the travel community.
Because in this final home stretch before we leave, the questions are piling up.
Are we going about this the right way? Will we be bringing enough money?
Have we really packed all of the “essentials?”
What are those “golden rules,” the laws of the road that the veterans had to learn the hard way? How can we gather as much intel as possible?
Travel and Life are the same in this light, there are never an end to the questions. However many questions we ask, they will all get answered one way or another.
With eight weeks left, I’m getting antsy. I’m ready for the wait to be over. I’m ready to leave right now.
How do you keep your sanity during the home stretch?
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Wow, that gotta be exciting and overwhelming at the same time.
Please share any intel, I’m sure I have a lot of the same questions even though I have much more then 8 weeks to go. I’m so jealous …
Such an exciting period of time; every emotion you’ve ever experienced will hit you. Happiness, stress, anger, sadness, elation, jealousy etc.
Then you’ll go travelling, and you’ll discover every emotion you never knew existed. So excited for you both, looking forward to seeing where life takes you.
@Nick – You’re right about that. Exciting, nerve-wracking, overwhelming, it’s everything. You’ll get to read about all the lessons we learn and little (or big) mistakes we make, trust me!
@Ant – Thanks, it’s great to hear from somebody who’s out there doing what we want to do. We’re at the point where we just want the waiting to be over with. Let’s go, already!
Very exciting, only 8 weeks left! For me, pretty much I didn’t have much time to be anxious about the trip. I planned to have 4 months of no working time, sorting out my life a little because previously I had no personal life at all taking care of my degree accomplishment. Turned out that I was working in my old lab until a few days before we left. It was a chaos between closing down my grad student life, still doing experiments, and get rid of things in the apartments. It was chaotic until the final 48 hours in which we didn’t sleep at all, dealing with the last bit of our possession and patching up the apartment so the land lord won’t ask us to pay for any kind of damage. And Ryan still went to office a few hours before the departure.
There’s no 1 right way of doing this anyway
People are talking about their idealism in traveling, but people are doing different things from each other. I’ll say, decide a number of money for emergency. Enough to bring you back to wherever you can call home, and live for a few months. Don’t touch that money, it’s your security. But the rest of it, you can use. Or you can even gain money by working out there.
Great post
Don’t worry about learning from others mistakes, you’ll make the same ones anyway, learn from your own experience and enjoy