Phu Quoc Island, Vietnam 23-12-2018

We planned our trip with a general arc, details to be hammered out along the way. This is a blessing and a curse. We booked three weeks at a family-run resort on this tropical Island, with an eye to hammer out some details for the coming months. And hammering we are! Work expands, they say, to fill the time allotted, and so it has. We’ve been spending a handful of hours each morning poring over maps, searching the web, trying to decide what we want to do next.

Glenn and I tend to labour over each decision. The big debate has been where to go in Europe – North or South?  After a good two weeks of debate waffling, we’ve decided on the North. Whew, a decision has been made!

But where to go in the North? Northern Europe in the winter – do we brace ourselves against the winter cold with gnashing of teeth and fear of frost, or do we embrace the winter, and revel in the wonders that winter can bring? We like to brand ourselves as revelers and embracers, which is how we find ourselves in 30C weather among palm trees and geckos and fresh coconuts looking at pictures of snow-covered mountains in Central Europe.

Trip Prep

The itinerary for the first few months is shaping up – see photo. The amount of effort it takes to do this is enormous: cleaning the house out (24 years of dust does not go gently), getting rid of possessions, extricating ourselves from work, from community, from projects. The guilt I feel about leaving my band is staggering.

I now understand why more people do not do this. For many months I have been preparing myself mentally for the hardships of living long-term out of a back-pack. What I hadn’t prepared for was the angst involved in getting to that point.