The Scramble of Departure

Greetings from Minneapolis!

...For now, at least. I brought Dejan home with me to stay in my parents' house for a solid three weeks, and it's flown by. He got to meet all the family (which, in case you haven't met my extended family, is HUGE and probably overwhelming/terrifying), and some of my friends as well.

But soon I'll be back in the world of chaos (aka travel). In approximately three days Mariah and I will be departing on our travel adventure to New Zealand, beginning in Christchurch. We have a few nights booked in a hostel there, and after that we're heading out to a dairy farm that we found on HelpX.net, where we'll do about 4 hours of daily work in exchange for lodging and maybe some food. This job is going to be a quick 9 days long, and after that we have no idea where we'll go next. I'd say we've done a dang good job arranging things in advance. I even have a pretty good idea of which phone service we should use for our new NZ SIM card. If you're not impressed with my lack of procrastination, you don't know me well enough.

To be fair, I still haven't cleaned my room (which is worse than you can imagine) or packed. But I already know from experience that I'll never really feel ready, and that nagging feeling of forgetting something is unavoidable. My one most consistent fact of travel: no matter how much I prepare ahead of time, the departure will always be a scramble.

So why not embrace the chaos? We've basically designed this trip to be spontaneous, so the sooner we accept the fact that we can't be prepared for everything, the better. I can't wait for this adventure to begin.

Wish me luck!

By the way: Mariah is keeping her own blog as well. Be sure to watch for her updates because they're sure to be epic.