World Tour Beginneth
“Aw man, I forgot to eat the last sausage and rest of the potatoes!”
As we pulled on to Santa Fe and out of my in-law’s neighborhood, embarking finally on World Tour with car loaded with camping gear and fancy bikes strapped to the back, the missed opportunity to finish the remnants of the morning’s breakfast was apparently foremost on my mind. At the slightly-seasoned age of 32 my metabolism remains cartoonishly high, and with the road trip into Kansas ahead I sought simply to be well fed.
“Do you think we should go back?” I turned to ask Tracy with as dead-panned an expression as I could muster. She laughed and said no, thankfully calling my bluff.
There would be no hard feelings about one or two things falling through the cracks when measured against the sheer amount of details and preparations tended to during the last 2 weeks (and really the last 4 months) by Tracy and I. Actually when it came to getting us moved out and transitioned logistically to nomadic living it was 90% Tracy: cancelling services, selling, giving, and donating our stuff, packing the few (8) boxes with what little we kept, rerouting mail, booking flights, making the most of our miles (one free ticket to New Zealand, two business class to Peru), and more–this was all Tracy, handled with grace and wicked-high precision.
The last few weeks I spent largely getting my consultancy ready for the road: wrapping up projects, earning a little more nerd fame on Slashdot and Hacker News, setting up my stand-in for my clients’ support issues, and laying down the foundation for my next vocational adventure, version 2.0 of CoachAccountable (just the day before move-out I launched the alpha version to two people I’m coaching, who graciously volunteered to be my guinea pigs for testing and fine tuning).
So our exodus from Denver was rather smooth sailing, considering the degree of life-uprooting it entailed.
For those of you not familiar with this plan, World Tour is where we get rid of most of our stuff, put the rest in storage, and go travel & live around the world for a year. Our first 3 months, now currently underway, constitute the US phase where we road trip around visiting friends and family and attend a few weddings. Then on July 26th our third wedding of the summer, being held in Cancun, beckons us to fly on out for the international phase, taking us to parts of Central and South America, Australia/New Zealand, Oceana, Southeast Asia, and East and West Europe1, and then the plan is to fly back from Ireland around September 2013 to lay down roots in Denver once again and make little people.
And it’s all in motion now. On Saturday, April 29th we moved out of our place and transferred the things we are keeping to Tracy’s parents’ place (a bed, a dresser, a couch & love seat, the aforementioned 8 boxes, and Ozzie the kitty2). Sunday morning we rearranged the car and loaded in a big brown cooler on loan from the Lee collection. With our car loaded for camping mode and containing all of the possessions we’d be enjoying the coming 3 months, we proudly bid the parents goodbye and were on our way.
To have the luxury of a sausage and potato snack on my mind at this point and amid these happenings suggests we were in a good place. About 20 minutes later as we merged on to I25 to leave Denver, we remembered a few more things forgotten, including folding chairs for the camp fire with those great little beer coozies. So we had reason enough to double back after all.
Thus the journey began, and yes, in case you were wondering the breakfast remnants did indeed make a lovely 1pm snack.