How do you pack a suitcase for a year of travel?
We spent the month of July preparing for the year ahead: Getting health insurance, getting life insurance, making sure all outstanding bills were paid, updating mailing addresses, canceling Amazon Prime, selling the car. Obviously planning had started long before, but the prep work needed doing and it got done, one way or another, in July.
But there is so much minutiae to everyday life and those tasks also took on special urgency: The drawer handle that needed tightening (loose since we bought the house), the leaky faucet (same), the repairs to the driveway (nice-to-have now promoted to mission-critical, in July). I think this urgency came from a desire to complete our life in Somerville before beginning this new phase. Of course that’s silly. Life in Somerville will resume when we return, and modern life with its endless todo lists is never completed.
Eventually, urgent tasks or not, the time “before the adventure” ends and the adventure itself begins.
One weird place my brain went to before we departed: Setting up a travel laptop (really, two). They say when traveling “you pack your fears.” Apparently I have a debilitating fear of hiking to Machu Picchu with insufficient compute.