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24 days to go…
By Laura | July 5, 2009
The past few weeks have been consumed with all manner of “other stuff” - wading through unemployment details, celebrating my birthday (and friends’ birthdays), logging a few hundred miles on misc “test” rides. It’s been great - except that now it’s July, we’re leaving in three and a half weeks, and we have a mountain of stuff to deal with.
For the most part, since we set this trip in motion, we’ve been focused on two things: the gear we’ll need and the stuff we’ll need to get rid of. Now, all the other tasks are starting to settle in - like finding a “permanent” address to put on our misc accounts and finalizing all the technology equipment and my organizing all my jewelry stock so that I can continue to sell online while we’re on the road.
All while we continue to figure out what to do with the furniture and other stuff that’s still lingering in our apartment (hint: if you’re an alley-hunter, there will probably be some really good finds out back of our place in the next week or two).
As we get closer to our leave date and it becomes more and more real in my mind, I find myself having strange thoughts about the stuff that I’ve surrounded myself with over the past many years. On the one hand, I’ll see the big Calphalon soup pot and think that it’ll be a shame to have to replace it at some point. And on the other, I’ll see the plastic measuring cups that I hate because the markings noting if it’s a 1/3 or 1/4 cup have long-since scratched off, and I’ll be ecstatic that I can get rid of them without seeming “spoiled.”
But, most of all, I’m finding that I can’t really envision what this trip is actually going to be. Like visiting the Grand Canyon and standing at the edge and not being able to really grasp just how huge it is and feeling, instead, that it looks like some giant postcard - I find myself thinking about the beginning of this trip as if it’s just some long vacation.
I guess that means it’s time to start clearing out the furniture so that this apartment stops looking like someplace we live and begins looking more like someplace we’re leaving.
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