Day Minus Seven

Seven days and counting. It's hot, humid and not exactly ideal conditions for packing, moving and piecing the worth of your existence into a 10'X10' cube. By my count, there were nine cries of "It's not going to fit!" and nine equally as emphatic replies from my husband, John, of "Yes it will!" In the end, everything from our two bedroom apartment did fit; a jigsaw puzzle of chairs, bureaus, lamps, vacuum cleaners and countless boxes into a storage bin, with not an inch to spare. In two years when we break the seal and open up our cubical house again, I'm going to wonder why I kept any of it. Now only the cleanup remains before John and I bid the landlord good-bye and embark on what I expect to be a journey of a lifetime, a trip around the world.

We began planning our adventure six months ago. The planning for such an endeavor being an adventure in itself. There were lists of things to do, lists of things to pack, lists of shots to get, lists of bills to pay, lists of places to go, initial lists, middle lists, final lists, lists of lists. I was going to keep them, each item neatly ticked off. But in a frantic moment of list madness, I threw them all away and conceited to the fact that no matter how many lists I wrote and re-wrote, I would inevitable forget something and in the end, when we locked the door behind us for the last time, it wouldn't matter.

How does one decide to take a trip around the world?

For me the decision to take a trip was easy. I love to travel. I love to see vastly different cultures and I love to hike. I don't like to sit at a desk eight hours a day and this trip seemed like a perfect fit. John likewise loves to travel and hike and his enthusiasm coupled with my own got the brain juices flowing.

We planned to spend three months touring the United States National parks and then fly from California to our first international destination, the South Pacific. Our decision on where to begin was based more on the seasons than anything else. By starting in the South Pacific we could follow Spring and Summer around the globe.

But despite an easy initial decision, we had doubts. Could we leave behind everything that we owned? Could we handle so much unknown? Where would we sleep every night? How would we get around? Could we live without plopping down on our own familiar couch at the end of a long day? Could we handle the physical stress that goes with hiking day after day? Although we continued to prepare for the trip, we vacillated back and forth on the answers to those questions for months. It wasn't too late to pull the plug and tell our family and friends that we had changed our minds.

Relief for my anxiety came in late March when John and I were investigating water purifiers. A Scottish couple over heard our discussion and came over to offer advise. As it turned out, they were on the last leg of their own two year journey around the world. We were full of questions. What would they have done differently? What should they have packed? What shouldn't they have packed? Did they experience any problems? How did they feel about going home again? And perhaps the most important information to me at that time, how did they feel about leaving it all behind when they started?

I was surprised to learn that they had felt many of the same anxieties that John and I were feeling now. Fear of quitting their jobs, losing their benefits, of being homesick, of getting travel weary, of losing stamina, hitting the three-month-wall. Their answers helped me realize that it was ok if not normal to have doubts. They helped reaffirm for me that traveling was exciting and worth the risk of the unknown. That it is the unknown that provides the mental fuel for survival. And that through experiencing different cultures, you learn about yourself. Perhaps the familiar comforts of the things in my life now would be replaced with a comfort that comes from within.