We’ve by no means become experts at this long-term travelling thing, but now that we’ve been at it two weeks or so, it is starting to feel more like a journey instead of just a vacation. The coolest part may just be getting out and walking in quiet places each day. We don’t have a routine to follow, and we’re usually not in a hurry. In order to not burn out, and also to match our preferred rambling pace, we aren’t trying to see too many things in a day. There are so many interesting looking spots that we aren’t getting to visit, but we can generally stay as long as we like at the places we do choose. Most every location is new to us, and we’re enjoying seeing the different scenery as we move from place to place. If there’s a convenient country highway, we’ve been taking that instead of the interstate.

Without a routine though, there is a lot of research and decision making to do each day. We don’t have any convenient fallbacks to save time or energy, unless you count McDonald’s sweet tea and fries. We’re making extensive use of, and also wishing for improvements in, google maps and navigation, and also trip advisor. Where is the nearest post office on a route we might take? Do any of these small town restaurants have decent reviews or will we be served rotting tomatoes on our salad, despite decent reviews? (true story) Do any of our next couple of lodgings provide onsite laundry, or do we need to find a laundromat?

Sorting through photos is also taking up quite a bit of time (we both take a lot of photos). This was true for our weekend adventures in our previous life, but now we have new pictures to process almost every day. I now understand why photographers need assistants. Between all of this, we’re ending up with surprisingly little down time. We’ve started intentionally making time for management of the trip instead of just slipping it in here and there.

This weekend, we swung by our storage unit for a planned exchange of items, now that we have a somewhat better sense of what we actually want with us. We forgot a couple of things, but mainly we put gear back into storage. It was really convenient that our particular path wound down Florida and then back up so that we could easily include a return visit. Opening our storage unit door now, it looks like so much stuff, despite having gotten rid of almost all of our furniture and a good chunk of the rest of our belongings. We’re now much more aware of what it takes to carry what we have with us in and out of each place we stay at. While we’re nowhere near ultralight, we’ve slimmed down to things that have a planned purpose, nothing obnoxiously bulky (full-sized Scrabble) or that we have multiple versions of (five USB 3 cables?!). We also didn’t leave ourselves any time to pack our traveling gear properly when we were busy moving out of our previous home. Hopefully now we’re better organized, with our less frequently used items stashed out of the way.

So, we agree with all of the travel advice, bring only the the things you need, and you probably need way less than you think you do.

We’ve really done it; our trip has begun. We’ve handed back the keys to our previous home, taken our last load to the storage unit and driven off with all the items which we want to have near us for the next year loaded into the pickup.

Much of the stuff I am glad to be rid of: a computer chair that was falling apart but wasn’t worth replacing for a few months of use, an annoying alarm clock, a lawn mower brought from our prior home that sat unused in our garage for a year.  Without a next home to go to, we couldn’t just throw everything in random boxes to be sorted later (without getting a house sized storage unit anyway), so every item had to be looked at and weighed for utility, sentimental value and packability.

We’re still tired from moving (yay for not having to move that TV stand again), so we’ll be taking the next few days slowly, in addition to just figuring out how to do this long term traveling thing. We’ll clearly need to do further reorganizing to make our stuff easier to access and transport, and swap out things that don’t work out well. So far, staying hydrated and having paper towels available have been most important.

It is a good beginning to the many adventures ahead of us.

It’s down to the wire now.

We’re in the last phases of packing, storing, selling and throwing away. This is the hardest part of the entire trip: pausing an entire life so that it can be picked up again when the journey is over.

We sold my GTO today. Sad to see it go as it’s my second-favorite car I’ve ever driven (the other being my old orange GTO), but I didn’t want to store it and it was getting a bit old.

Right now, my arms are aching and my brain is fried from figuring out where to put things, what to throw away, and from dealing with Craigslist buyers who say they will show up and never do. Great, now what are we supposed to do with a TV stand that weighs 137 pounds?

But we’re getting there.

Now, back to packing.

Basically at this point if I can’t find it on a map, it doesn’t exist.

I’m so humble, I know.

But it is amazing how looking at tens of thousands of points, parks, conservations areas, trailheads, trails, campgrounds, paths and tiny, unlabeled and unnamed forest roads can re-arrange one’s brain and optimize it for certain tasks.

The other day my partner was looking for a place on Google Maps. She’s actually better at navigation than I am, but now I am better at finding things (two slightly different skills). I looked at the map for about two seconds and said, “The trailhead is right there.”

And sure enough, it was.

A year ago I might have had to look for it for 10 minutes. Maybe 15. And I might never have found it. But now, I can just “see” in a way I couldn’t before.

It might be a fairly useless superpower, but hey, I’ll take what I can get.

On a a trip this long and complex, there’s a lot to keep track of.

We’ll be making a lot of reservations and obviously spending a good bit of money. For where we need to be and when, we’ve started tracking everything in a calendar (Thunderbird) with the data stored locally as we won’t always have internet access. We’ve heard calendars are useful for such things. Turns out to be true. ;-)

But a calendar is not a good place to track expenses, so we’ve also started a spreadsheet to know what we’ve spent, and what we still owe as some reservations only require a deposit. Later, we will use it to track other expenses.

All of this is good, but it means that we are doing more paperwork (or, rather, the computing equivalent of paperwork) than you’d expect for what is essentially an extended vacation. It’s developing into a system so the time spent to keep track of things will decrease, but right now a surprising amount of effort goes into organizing it all.

Aren’t you glad you read this fascinating blog post about doing paperwork?

The place will get more exciting — a little bit at least — when we’re actually on our way.