“All my bags are packed I’m ready to go
I’m standin’ here outside your door…
I’m leaving on a jet plane
Don’t know when I’ll be back again.”

Well, this isn’t completely true. The bags aren’t totally packed. We’ll be back March 15. I’m certainly not standing outside any doors. But all in all, we’re ready to go. I’m happy to say this is the last post I will place in the “Planning” category.

It’s been a strange week. I have been riding an emotional roller coaster all day: one moment I can barely contain my excitement for the journey ahead, and I feel calm, cool, and collected. The next, I am panicked and nervous and just about ready to leap out of my skin. I guess this is to be expected at the eleventh hour; at least that’s what I keep telling myself.

We’ve said a lot of goodbyes this week, mostly over duck eggrolls, fancy grape martinis, Saggio’s pizza, sangria, and the best Mexican food in town, which we will miss dearly. It’s strange to say goodbye to people, knowing we’ll be back but that things will be different when we return. Most times in life, change just happens. We don’t realize until we’re in the throes of transition that things are different, and usually we never could have predicted it. It’s an odd feeling, then, to embark on a process that you know will most certainly result in coming out the other side a different person, not unlike having a gypsy tell your fortune.

As I’ve said my goodbyes and begun shedding the tangible trappings of my everyday life – cell phone, date planner, garage door opener, house keys – I’ve noticed a strange thing. With each item I give up, I compensate for the loss by adding another to the bag. I’ve found myself sneaking in extra razors to my toiletries bag, and wondering aloud if I shouldn’t buy just one more shirt. I think it boils down to an issue of control. Most of the things I am about to face in the next eight months will be out of my hands, but I have some say as to whether I add another item to my scant wardrobe. I am reminded once again of the powerful pull of stuff.

And yet, I look at the meager piles of items that we’re packing. It’s amazing to thing that I have pared down my life to 3,500 cubic inches. I’ll probably regret packing half of it by next month. Even today I found myself clutching pieces of paper, wondering, “Do I really need this?” To ensure that gender stereotypes don’t run rampant, I’ve included photos of Maikael’s pile and my pile of items to be packed. As you can see, they are nearly equal in size.

Signing off from Albuquerque, New Mexico, on the eve of a journey of a lifetime. See you in Madrid! Buenas noches.

I could be wrong, but I imagine the most joyful part of the trip will be somewhere towards the midway point, when we’ve had sufficient time to fall into a routine; or, if nothing else, become comfortable with the fact that we’re traveling for a living. The part I am dreading most is the next month. I’m sure, as most people have mentioned, that boarding the plane on Sunday will help me to breathe a huge sigh of relief. But then we get to the business of actually starting this new life, which will be hard. Not only will our surroundings be constantly changing, but everything will be new: clothes, equipment, technology, credit cards, processes for just about everything imaginable. There are no familiar touchstones; everything has to be learned anew.

I always imagined that starting a RTW trip would feel like flipping a switch. In one moment I would be a resident of my regular life, and in the next I would be comfortably ensconced in my RTW trip life. But I think it’s more like passing through a veil. There’s a transition period that occurs between those two phases, a state of limbo that is neither here nor there. While we are setting off on Sunday, I’m not sure that it will feel like we’ve fully begun this journey. I’m beginning to realize that the first month is more likely to feel like a long vacation than the beginning of a RTW adventure. But rather than fighting it, I’m going to try to embrace it for what it is. Like most challenges in life, there is no way around this uncomfortable adjustment period; it has to be faced head on. I’m sure there’s no more beautiful place than Portugal, though, to feel completely out of touch with one’s own life.

What’s keeping me grounded this week is being able to stay in touch with the online community that is RTW travel.  I’m beginning to understand why support groups are so effective.  Since Maikael and I are the only people we know who have embarked on a trip of this scale, it’s great to be able to find others like us, with the click of a mouse, all around the globe, who are experiencing the same trials and tribulations.  These are people who know first-hand the stresses of buying a RTW plane ticket and can weigh in on such lofty topics as the relative merits of money belts and wool socks. 

I love it when I open my inbox and discover that a stranger has stumbled upon our website and taken the time to send me a message.  Such was the case a few months ago when a woman from Seattle, who was about to embark on a RTW trip with her husband, found our site.  Since then, we’ve written back and forth about lots of things, from how to arrange a trek on the Milford Track (which they did earlier this year and we hope to do in November), to sharing tips about airline ticketing systems.  When I was hemming and hawing yesterday about buying a PacSafe, I thought, “Who would have an opinion on this?”  I immediately turned to my online community of fellow RTW travelers, enlisting the kindness of strangers.  I think I felt my nails grow a bit in that moment.

Check out Jodi and her husband’s website at:  www.chrisandjodi.net

We thought we were done dealing with complicated ticket purchase processes when we bought our RTW tickets in April.  We’ve been avoiding buying our South American Airpasses (SAA) knowing, deep down, that it was going to be harder than we wanted it to be.  By means of explanation, the SAA (offered through LAN Chile, who partners with American Airlines) is used to supplement our RTW ticket.  Because we only get four stopovers per continent, and expect to explore South America extensively, we are able to add on additional “a la carte” flights at a relatively low cost. 

One of the reasons we bought our RTW ticket through American Airlines is that it made us eligible for deep discounts with the SAA.  However, after spending too many days this week charting our course through South America, we learned that there are actually two SAA options:  one offered directly through LAN Chile and the other offered through American Airlines vis a vis LAN Chile.  Both were different birds, offering different fares, routing options, and rules.  Comparing the relative pros and cons of each plan quickly became a classic exercise in comparing apples to oranges.  (We eventually purchased our Airpass directly through LAN Chile, which cost a bit more but was ultimately a more feasible transaction that involved less hair-pulling.)

The only saving grace of this process is making phone calls to LAN Chile, which is probably the only time in my life that I will say ”fun” and “airlines” in the same breath.  The phone rings once, like it normally does when you’re placing a phone call; then, the tone modulates down a half step, giving the impression that you have now crossed international waters.  Strains of pan flute music waft over the phone line as you hold for the next available representative. Their reservationists are kind, polite, reserved, and competent.   But the best part is the woman whose voice appears on the recorded message.  We’re not sure what accent she might have, but she seems to be channeling some cross between Fantasia Barrino from Season 3 of American Idol and The Girl from Ipanema.  All of her “s”s sound like “sh”s.  She kindly asks us to “presh sheven” if we have already purchased a ticket, or to stay on the line for “more optionshs.”  She also warns us that our calls may be monitored to “enshursh quality ashurish.” 

I’m sure none of this would seem so funny if I wasn’t completely exhausted these days.  But last Wednesday night, when we called at 9:45 pm, only to discover that our reservation had been cancelled due to a misunderstanding of Zulu time versus Miami time, I needed to laugh.  So Maikael and I called over and over again, listening to the recorded meshage, laughing great guffaws until tears streamed down my face. 

• We’ve hammered out our route in Turkey, thanks to a friend from Turkey who has been a tremendous help.  We will stay with his parents for a week in Istanbul, which should be a culturally enriching experience. 
• Rather than hiking Machu Picchu, we’ve decided to take the train from Cusco.  We’ll be there during rainy season, and the trail will likely be closed or impassable.  We’re meeting Maikael’s mom in Cusco and not doing the backpacker thing (a welcome break by that point, I’m sure). 
• With the time saved in Peru, we’ve decided to add Bolivia to the itinerary.  I was lucky enough to meet the Peace Corps recruiter from UNM, who did her term of service there, and was completely won over by her stories. 
• We’ve cut Brazil from the itinerary.  We really wanted to go, but just ran out of time.  It will have to be another trip altogether. 
• We’ve added some additional days onto Easter Island.  We both agreed that, given the amount of time and effort required to get there from just about anywhere in the world, we should really take our time with the experience. 
• We’ve shaved time from Buenos Aires and Santiago and added it onto Mendoza, Argentina, where we’ll spend Christmas with a friend of Maikael’s from high school (can’t wait!). 
• We’ve chosen our general route through Patagonia.
• We’ve decided to throw caution to the wind and do The Galapagos, even though we can’t really afford it (unless, of course, we’re severly in debt, the weather is terrible, and/or we can’t get reservations on a boat).  Because who knows when we’re going to be in Ecuador again?!

Our life is being stripped down to the bones.  The phone was one of many pairing down moments we’ve recently been faced with.  Gone are the tangibles: cable, car insurance, magazine subscriptions, memberships, and most of our wardrobe.  There are intangible things we’re sloughing away, too.  Routines and schedules.  To-do lists.  Professional identities.  States of mind. 

As a result, I feel a little naked and emotionally exposed.  The stuff of life is slowly being shed, and there’s nothing but the yawn of space stretching out between me and the world.  I’m beginning to understand agoraphobia.  Each goodbye I’ve had to face this week has been increasingly difficult.  Not because we’re never coming back; simply because it’s one less attachment I have to my familiar life. 

When we return, we will be in a position where we will be forced to make intentional decisions as to what elements we want to add back to our life.  This is a rare opportunity.  Most of us are professional collectors.  We take on all sorts of obligations, habits, services, things; we don’t often give much thought to what we collect.  It’s not until we polish off the veneer that we see the layers of life we have accumulated.

I have started a “Things to Do When We Get Back” list.  Most of it involves adding back all the things we have taken away.　Call the YMCA.  Call AAA.  Call insurance company.  Teeth cleaned.  Hair cut.  Get cell phone.  Cable?  But I wonder how different my perspective will be when we return; if these things we regard as must-haves and must-dos will seem inconsequential (or, at the least, not vital).   I don’t see myself “going native” over the course of eight months, and I hope I don’t turn into one of those people who too-proudly touts that they don’t own a TV.  But I wonder how important it will be to get Bravo back so I can catch the newest episodes of Project Runway. 

In the world of shopping, socks rank right up there with the easiest possible purchase. There are no sizes to worry about; you just pop into the store, pick up a few pairs, and you’re on your way. But, again, in the world of RTW trip planning, socks became one of the most difficult items to make a decision on.  It took three trips to the store to get it right. While socks sound incidental they are a wardrobe essential, given the amount of terrain we will undoubtedly be covering by foot over the next eight months. Never in my life have I spent so much time evaluating the relative merits of a strip of fabric that covers my feet. One must consider the bulk, the color, the length, the support. I am now accustomed to walking into a store, scanning the premises for trip-appropriate clothing, and immediately clutching a fist of fabric, quickly calculating how much weight this might add to my pack and how fast this garment might dry after washing it in the sink.

It’s moments like these that stop me cold in my tracks:  I am afraid.  Not of traveling around the world, but of leaving to travel around the world.  Over the months, I’ve tried to prepare myself for what these last two weeks before the trip would feel like.  I imagined that I’d feel exhausted and utterly overwhelmed, racing around trying to do a million things at once.  All of this is true, but despite my best efforts to ready myself, the whole experience seems to have left me reeling.  I suppose there is a difference in the mental rehearsal versus the actual emotional performance.  For months I was able to pacify myself by pushing those thoughts to the dark corners of my mind.  “I’ll worry about it when I get there,” I told myself.  But now there is here. 

I am usually a heavy sleeper, nodding off in minutes and weighed down by delicious rest.  Now I spend nearly an hour tossing and turning before finally drifting off, only to wake an hour later when I hear the neighbor’s cat scuttle through the backyard.  I am wracked with nightmares, most of which revolve around being woefully unprepared for the trip ahead.  Last night I dreamt that I forgot our passports at home; the night before I dreamt that I simply ran out of time.  I awake from these dreams heart pounding and beset by panic.  The feeling is so intense that it takes me full minutes to shake off the idea that those things haven’t really happened.    

The nature of my dreams stem from knowing how I operate in these situations: when I am tired and overwrought I am likely to get mired down in minutiae, forgetting the important details.  This leads to second guessing myself:  if I’ve forgotten something as fundamental as the passports, then what else have I forgotten?  The Absent-Minded Professor act is foreign to me.  I am also a planner who is accustomed to finishing tasks well in advance, something that is nearly impossible to do when tackling a goal of this magnitude.  In other words, I am out of my comfort zone.   

I am reading Anthony Doerr’s Four Seasons in Rome:  On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World.  While it’s essentially a memoir of his family’s year of living in Rome, there’s a great deal of his emotional world that I can relate to.  He is a man who is always out of his comfort zone, be it navigating language barriers at his local grocery or trying to figure out how to be a father to six-month-old twins in a new city.  He says, “We need habit to get through the day, to get to work, to feed our children.”  I realize that, as much as I enjoy change, I, like most people, am also a creature of habit.  In fact, when I talk to people about this trip, one of the comments I hear most frequently is, “It would be fun to travel for eight months, but I’m not sure what I’d do without my routine.”  I’d be lying if I said the thought of not having one for eight months doesn’t freak me out a little. 

But here’s the other side of routine that Doerr discusses:  while we need structure and order, we can become so complacent in our everyday lives that we forget to see things afresh.  This fear I am grappling with comes, I think, from being shaken from my patterns.  In this sense, the trip has already started for me:  there is nothing normal or routine about my life anymore.  But if I can push through this fear, the lack of routine will soon become familiar.  Doeer encourages us to,

Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar.  Only then can routine experience – buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello – become new all over again.

This is the flip side to my fear and one of the things I enjoy most about travel.  It’s a chance for the pedestrian to transform into a novel experience.  Getting out of our routines is vital to our growth as humans and reaching our next stage of development.  If we’re not a little uncomfortable, then we’re probably not pushing ourselves enough.  So if these next two weeks don’t kill me, they’ll make me stronger. 

 Over the years that folder bulged, eventually forcing me to organize it into regions of the world.  It was discouraging to see the file growing; we didn’t seem to be crossing many locations off the list.  Seeing our ambitious travel goals in black and white helped us solidify our dream of traveling for an extended period, and when we began putting together an itinerary for this trip our first steps was to revisit our New York Times file. 

Needing more time to plan our trip, we reluctantly cancelled our weekly subscription early last fall.  Last Sunday, Maikael picked up a copy of the Sunday Times for a coworker and brought the remains home. I immediately flipped to Travel; it felt like visiting an old friend.  I was delighted to see an article about viewing Goya’s art in Madrid, a city I would be visiting in just under three weeks!  For once I was able to clip the article and, rather than stuff it into the folder, tuck it into my travel guide for Spain. 

Editor’s note:  Even if you don’t subscribe to the New York Times, you can access their fantastic archive of travel-related stories and guides via their website at www.nytimes.com  (click on “Travel”), allowing you to search by region or country.  We have consistently found their recommendations to be spot-on, and the writers always seem to have a fresh perspective and unique take on whatever location they’re highlighting. 

Try as I might, I find I have very little energy for engaging myself in anything that doesn’t pertain to overseas travel. This has become particularly true for reading preferences. For months, the only thing I’ve read is travel-related literature, including memoirs, novels, and guidebooks. Here is a list of a few books we’ve read recently that we’ve really enjoyed:

Chasing Che: A Motorcycle Journey in Search of the Guevara Legend by Patrick Symmes. This memoir follows one man’s journey by motorcycle through South America, retracing Che Guevara’s famous, epic journey over the same terrain. I bought this book for Maikael for Christmas and he loved it. He would often read me passages out loud, my favorite being Symmes’ experience at a Bolivian border crossing (he and a border patrolman have an entire conversation that goes like this: “Cuzco?” “Cuzco.”).  Highly recommended for anyone planning a trip to South America, or interested in learning more about this region of the world.

A Small Death in Lisbon by Robert Wilson. I am embarrassed to say I knew very little about Portugal, and wanted to learn more before we went. I had a hard time finding a travel memoir for Portugal, so, at the recommendation of Lonely Planet’s Portugal guidebook, I opted for a work of fiction set in the country. Billed as a crime novel (it won the UK’s prestigious Gold Dagger award in 1999), it reads more as historical fiction, providing a fascinating look into Portugal’s history from World War II to present day. An intriguing read with a complex narrative, whether you’re planning a trip to Portugal or not.

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. This book needs little introduction, given its placement on the New York Times Bestsellers List week after week, but I can’t speak highly enough of this travel memoir. Gilbert recounts her travels to Italy, India, and Indonesia, and I was particularly intrigued by her experiences in Bali. In fact, our inclusion of this country on our itinerary is due solely to reading this book.

In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson. One of the best travel writers out there, Bryson writes poignantly about his experiences traversing Australia, from large coastal cities to obscure outback hamlets. I walked away with a greater understanding of what this wonderful country is all about, which really got me in the mood to visit and learn more.

Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World by Anthony Doerr. I picked up this book on a lark at the University of Washington Bookstore, and am just a few chapters in, but I’m already hankering for delicate pillows of pumpkin ravioli.

One goal I’ve set for the trip is to read at least one book that pertains to each country we’re visiting. What recommendations do you have for books for us to read? Send us your ideas!