Hoppy New Beer!
01/02/2009 at 19:50 from (47.683479, -122.266725)
Our family and friends know how to celebrate the holidays and ring in the new year correctly: with plenty of alcohol and food. 2008 was the year of the Davis Family Liquid Christmas. We begged my family to resist buying us material goods and focus on the food and company. They exceeded our every expectation. What gifts we did receive were either alcohol, food, or truly useful. There was much rejoicing and toasting.
However, in the aftermath of all the imbibing, Marijana and I woke up on the first morning of 2009 with an eerie sense of urgency. Nothing brings home how little time we have left to prepare for our trip than that subtle incrementation of the date.
The year of our departure is here and we're nowhere close to ready.
Since we first decided on leaving for this trip, we've always told people that we'd be heading off "in 2009". Last year it became "next year". Then, mid-way through 2008, we started being more specific: "Next September", we'd say.
At each little milestone, we'd delight in how much closer the trip sounded, even if it didn't feel any tangibly nearer. The one year mark, for example, should have felt important, but the trip was still a whole year away! A year is not a unit of time that impatient people regularly associate with "short". For the most part, we just tried to put our heads down and keep working, avoiding the inevitable depression at the thought of how far away our goal was.
Yesterday was different, though.
It was 2009. We aren't leaving next year. We're leaving this year. All the little appointments and TODO items on our calendars are starting to pile up closer and closer together as we approach lift-off. Immunizations, visas, taxes, sales, and purchases all loom a little larger. And they're no longer sitting in the far-off distance, they're here, now.
As tempting as it is to panic, this is also a good time to take stock of the progress we've made. In retrospect, 2008 was a good year for us as far as the trip is concerned.
- We saved up a sizeable pile of money for our travels.
- We notified everybody of our plans and started material preparations.
- We set up this site so that people could keep us honest and we could keep our families up to date.
- We started sorting our many varied possessions into "sell", "keep", and "toss" piles.
- We've both started honing our Spanish skills and learning more about the people, places, and cultures we'll be immersed in.
- We had perhaps the least expensive Christmas possible in the developed world.
- We managed, just over the past few days, to sell $150 worth of unneeded stuff and catalogued much more for future fund-raising.
There's a long road ahead, but I think we're off to a good start. We couldn't have gotten even this far without the help and understanding of our family and friends.
Thank you.