Countdown to Departure

The countdown begins. 4 days of work left. 16 days until departure. 10 million things to do. We are slowly but surely organizing our lives here in Toronto only to turn around and abandon them. We will be living as transient backpackers for (we hope) at least a year. Over the next two weeks we will be leaving our jobs, moving out of our apartment, putting all our belongings in storage, selling our cars, and packing our bags for a world tour. The budget has been set. The first flight has been booked. We are actually doing this...

After many months of planning we’ve hammered out a tentative (and I stress tentative) plan for the next year. If all goes according to plan (which it probably won’t) we will be travelling to Eastern Europe, Northern Africa, South America, Southeast Asia and India, and Australia/New Zealand – in that order. We are truly travelling on a whim: the only thing we’ve booked is our flight from Toronto to Vienna. We’ve been to Vienna before, but it was the cheapest flight that I could find and it makes a great gateway into Eastern Europe. Plus, I have some Austrian buddies who might put me up for a couple nights. The plan is to buy an old beater car (say, something like a Skoda Felicia circa 1996), get it insured for all of Europe (with 24 hour roadside assistance of course), buy a tent and other camping gear and drive ourselves up to Prague then down to Turkey and back again, zigzagging back and forth across Eastern Europe. We plan to make refinements to our route as go along, but we definitely want to see the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Croatia, Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria and Romania. If time (and money) allows, we might spend stay a few days in Hungary, Bosnia, Serbia and Slovakia. After that we will return to wherever we bought the car and sell it if it is still worth anything – that is, if it still exists at all! Then, we will get ourselves to Cairo either by air or land/sea. We would love to stop by Morocco on our way to South America (great surfing), but I think this might be prohibitively expensive and out of the way. It will be interesting to come back and read this in three months to see if any of it actually went as planned!!

Until now, one of our biggest worries has been what to do with our giant monstera plant. It has been with us for 4 years now and we can’t bring ourselves to throw it out. A plant that started with a few modest leaves has grown into an actual member of the household. Luckily my sister will take care of it in our absence. Time to get used to leaving possessions behind…