all we can do is keep breathing

Months! Months have passed without a peep here. Yes, we are still doing this. Yes, we have been working toward our goals. We're packing, packing, packing. We're purging as much as we can bear. We haven't sold anything yet, but that's mostly a lazy thing. We'll get to it, hopefully.  We've also realized that it isn't the end of the world to pack something rather than sell or purge it, although we're still trying. And if the stuff we don't want to keep doesn't sell, we'll just give it away. I'm trying to let go of selling things as a money-making proposition to fund our trip.

David has a countdown timer for the number of workdays and work hours left until his last day. And I think he'd gladly walk out tomorrow if he felt he could. I've urged him to just hang on, think about the paychecks, and breathe.  And he's trying. 

I, however, have more mixed feelings about leaving my job. I like working here. I like the work, I like the people, and I've realized that my bosses are really good. Which is a skill, and a rare one, I might add.  I respect them, and I'll miss them. But I love my family and my husband more (I am a big bag of love) and now is the right time, and this is the right plan for our little family. I just today realized I have six more paychecks to go until I'm out of paychecks for a while. That's when I need David to remind me to breathe. And I'm trying.

We're meeting with a property manager tomorrow morning about putting our house up for rent. Everyone except for me is confident that we'll get it rented soon, but I'm hopeful.

These months have been hard--it's been long enough out, and so much work between now and then, that it's hard to look beyond What We Have To Do Before We Leave.  But part of that is the planning of the trip, which gets us prematurely excited all over again.  I'm going to do a whole separate post on the trip planning stuff. I'm trying very hard not to plan too much. I find myself in the education phase, trying to study up on all the places we're going, and all the options of what to do, which adventures might be our style. I've checked a lot of books out of the library, which has been so helpful, and so very cheap.

For every thing we check off the list, it seems like we add three more "to dos" to it. But we're getting there. I can see a little progress has happened in the last few months. Books have been packed, passports have been renewed. We are breathing.

I don't want anyone to get the impression that we're not excited to be taking this journey. We are So! So! Crazy! Excited! But there is a lot to do between now and September, and with that comes some amount of stress, which I am feeling. And, for that matter, eating. I've given myself  the task of losing 10 pounds in the next 10 weeks before we leave, which seems reasonable, if I just stop the stress eating. We've got mountains to climb (literally) in the next few weeks, and David's beginning to join me on a run occasionally, so our plan is to be fairly fit when we leave, and maintain that fitness on the road as much as possible.

 If I can just quit the stress eating breathe.

Spring is a time of renewal

We went ahead and got the 52 page passport book. Here's to filling each and every one of them.

Twenty years from now...

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.  –Mark Twain

I love this sentiment.

Home Sweet Car--or Subedroom?

We've been planning on car camping for portions of our road trip in North America. Fortuitously, we also need to discard the fold-away bed portion of a sofa which I modified, replacing the fold-away section with simple (light) plywood. The bed portion has been in the way in the garage for months, and today I decided to try the mattress in the back of the Subaru--it's a small full-size mattress, and it's a perfect fit! We were worried earlier that the bump where the back seat bottom folds up would restrict our headroom, but it actually works very nicely as a pillow bolster.

Now, this definitely would not work for a 6' tall, back- or front-sleeper, but we're both side-sleepers, and it was quite comfortable with both of us in there. Ruby even hopped in and settled down. It did get hot pretty fast, so we will need magnetic bug screens, and some way to regulate the window opening without clambering into the front seat to turn the ignition into the ON postition. Definitely an instance where crank windows would be convenient.

Anything can be replaced

This is part of an advertising campaign that is in the window of the advertising agency that created it.  The campaign is to prevent teenage suicide in Wyoming.  There's something so resonant and true to this statement that it always catches me off-guard when I walk past it.  You can sort of see that they've used a school desktop, and a giant statue made of crushed cans, as well as a couple of other wood carvings, all of which say the same thing.

ANYTHING CAN BE REPLACED EXCEPT YOU

I don't think that I need to tell you that, given my state of mind these days, this (or an adapted version of this) is my mantra.  Jobs can be replaced. Houses can be replaced. Things can be replaced. But you can't get back time, you can't buy more days on this planet (although maybe we can debate the vagaries of this point).  

People are always telling me how they would love to travel more, if they had more money. That they can't afford it.  I always respond that I wish I had more time.  Always admitting, of course, that time buys money.  And that is what we're doing.  We are buying a year of our lives.  I think it's a worthwhile purchase.