Trails and Errors

Setting off on a new trail is usually intimidating. Who knows what shadowy figures lurk in the unknown (even if those figures are just flying out of your account while none are coming in)? Our little journey to the Americas entailed the sacrifice of most of our belongings to the whims of the used goods market and the metal containers of the Salvation Army. Whatever essentials left (paperwork, a few books with emotional attachments too deep to throw away) are entrusted to valuable friends in a plastic box. Not that our friends live in a plastic box. No, the things will be in a plastic box. (sigh…) English is a ridiculous language, yet I wish I could learn it…

Moving on (literally!), we are now in charge of dragging two 40 liter backpacks weighing 10 kg each. Within said backpacks lie all the treasures of the world. OK, our world. We have done our best to trim the weight down to 10 kg, but it’s been a tad difficult – mostly due to all the cheap cameras, laptops and chargers/cables/external hard drives and whatnot.

Here’s a brief rundown:

North Face 40 liter backpack: 1.8
Clothes+Chargers/Cables (yes, they’re going together. I like my underwear buzzing): 3.7
Laptop+Kindle: 2.7
Digital Camera: 0.5
Trinkets (small notebook, tiny tripod, etc): 1
= 9.7 kg

There’s still a few items to be purchased in the lands of good ol’ Uncle Sam (provided the Euro manages to keep afloat until then), but they’ll hopefully be light to carry. Plus, I can always throw another t-shirt to the wind…

Summing up:

The good news: most transportation will accommodate our bags as carry-on and we are sort of able to walk with 10 kilos on our backs without developing a hump and hearing church bells (but for how long, you ask? We ask the same, and we don’t know).

The bad news: if something happens to our bags (stolen, hit by a meteorite, eaten by a squirrel) we are totally f***ed.

I am curious to see how much of our items we’ll be able to keep hold of, and which ones we’ll eventually look at and mumble “why did I bring you with me? why?” (I’m hoping they’ll be socks…). Although we have always prided ourselves in traveling light, we are newbies at this long-term travel thing, and still have a lot to learn. Whatever we do learn, it will be posted on this most silly of websites, for your reading pleasure and occasional bout of schadenfreude.

And so it begins; and so it goes…