Start Your Engines!

When we go to the airport tomorrow… oh wait. Tomorrow is today!

Today started in the witching hour of the early morning. We needed to finalize packing our backpacks, straighten up the apartment, put the finishing touches on our website, and prepare ourselves mentally for the journey that lay in front of us.

I remember that we both kept saying “When we go to the airport tomorrow… oh wait. Tomorrow is today!”. It slowly and steadily began to sink in that we were both so close to embarking on this epic adventure that we have been planning for months.

Of course, the hours leading up to us traveling internationally were not without some nervousness. It seems like those jitters are always there until the moment of truth; when they transform into action. When you start moving and doing, there’s no time for thinking or worrying.

In order to make sure that we both weren’t forgetting anything, we laid out all of our supplies on our living room floor so that we could take inventory and document in a single snapshot the culmination of our gear planning efforts.

Logan’s Gear

One by one, we called out the items on our packing spreadsheet (yes, we have a spreadsheet that details the weight of every single item that we are taking). This was a great exercise because there were a handful of items that were lost in translation and needed to be included in the collages we were assembling. There were also a few items that we agonized over whether to include, even though they were only 100 grams (cough, Logan’s mini-kite).

Elyse’s Gear

As we checked off all the boxes on the sheet we crafted, it felt like we were finally seeing a well oiled machine come together right before our eyes. It’s working!

Placing our packs in the back of our Honda CRV, we took our seats, pushed the start button, and the trip finally became real.

Ready, set, go!

Celebrating one of our last moments stateside!