T minus 24 hours and we’re off!

Wowza, the time has really come! It’s T minus 24 hours to take off. How do we feel? Excited? Yes. Anxious? Yes. In shock? Yes. We’ve been talking about this trip for over 6 months now and we can’t believe the time has gone by where we’ve gotten married, gotten approved leaves from work and are actually about to take off to go around the world!

I’d say I’m feeling about 92% excited and 8% sad. There’s been this weird feeling of “homesickness” that I’ve been feeling over the last few weeks. The days have been filled with visits, dinners and other fun times with friends and family, and every time when we say goodbye it ends with “well, I guess I’ll see you in December!”. I’m so used to seeing my friends and family on a regular basis, especially since Damian can travel quite a bit for work, that it’s a strange thought to know I won’t see them in person for such a long time.

In today’s technology we are lucky – we can talk on the phone, text and Facetime, all over wifi, regardless of where we are around the world, but I’ll still miss folks! Originally our plan was to move out of the city when we returned, but we’ve decided to stay living here for a while longer (we’ll have to find a new apartment though). This has definitely eased the burden, as the thought of not ever having my day-to-day life in New York City happen again is very overwhelming!

The other part of the sad is that there just was not enough time to see and/or talk to everyone we wanted to before leaving. With me traveling last week and then Damian finishing work on Thursday, we just didn’t have enough hours to pack in QT with all our loved ones. We will have to make sure we do a kick a** job of staying in touch while we are on the road, no matter where we are in our around the world journey.

We just about finished packing up today (phew), with a few errands to run tomorrow. I read a ton of blogs and posts about packing (duh, of course I did) and I’d say my packing style is more like Ecocult’s and Damian’s is more like Our Big Fat Travel Adventure’s but we ended up meeting kind of in the middle. I’m taking a rolling suitcase plus a daypack and Damian is taking a 50L backpack plus a daypack. We made judicious use of packing cubes and everything seems to fit without too much ado.

The interesting part is that there are quite a bit of “consumables” we are carrying – we both are doing Invisalign so we have all our sets of retainers for the next 5 months, plus I wear daily contacts so I have a huge supply of those. As those dwindle there will be lots of room in the suitcases, but I’m sure we’ll find souvenirs and other fun things to fill it up with. Regardless, we’ll check in after a month or so and let you know if we’ve done a yay or nay job on high-quality packing, especially for the craziness of an around the world adventure. (Edit: here’s the update on packing!)

So where do we take off to? Brazil, yay! I am so excited to visit Damian’s home country for the first time. As we were planning the trip we just kept finding more and more to do, and I know we’ll eventually have to come back to get to everything we want. But, for this trip, we only have 6 weeks and I think we’ve done an awesome job at planning a diverse and fun itinerary.

The first three weeks are quite jam packed – we hit up 4 cities in those 21 days, 2 of which are more remote and difficult to get to. We start at Iguazu Falls, then head to Sao Paulo (where Damian grew up, yay!), then to Bonito (a remote area in the south of the country with lots of beautiful outdoor adventure activities to do) and then to Rio. It’s probably a little busier than we are anticipating the whole of our trip being, but it’ll balance out overall.

Now, I doubt we will ever get a picture of Iguazu Falls like the above, but I am super stoked to see one of the new 7 wonders of nature in the world! The Falls sit between Brazil and Argentina (much like Niagara Falls sits between the US and Canada). We’ll be visiting both sides of the falls both by foot and by boat, we’ll be seeing Itaipu Dam and I’m sure doing a bunch of other things that I don’t yet know about (the Brazilian in our duo has planned our Brazil trip :)).

We are SO EXCITED to start on this grand adventure (just imagine the above as our faces right now)! We’re so happy there’s a place we can keep our friends and family updated, and we love you all and miss you already! And please let us know if you have any tips or tricks or suggestions of places to go to or see along the way.