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.