Family Gap Year Post #15: The Final Month of Preparation (May)

I wish I could say that the month leading up to our departure was smooth. Spoiler Alert: It wasn’t!

Even though we had been planning the trip for a very long time, there were many things that had to get done at the last-minute. And the last-minute things were pretty major things, such as finding someone to rent out our home and moving the entire contents of our home into a storage unit.

To make matters worse, we agreed to let our tenants move in a day after school got out. As it is, the end of the school year is a very busy time. So we were attending graduations and birthday parties and hosting our own parties and trying to get our foster dog adopted.

I am normally a very organized and orderly packer/mover. But not this time. I took an emergency trip to visit with my grandma who recently entered hospice. So my packing plan timeline went from five days to three. And we didn’t pick up the house before we started packing it, which was a major mistake. It looked like a disaster zone the entire time.

But in the middle of a very stressful packing situation, I stopped and gave myself a mini-lecture. It went something like this: “You’re not getting ready for the journey to start. You are already on the journey. Every day with your children is the journey. So treat it as such!” That’s when I decided we would take a break and get blizzards from Dairy Queen and sing our heads off to Top 40 tunes in the car.

In the end, we made it out of the house just four minutes after the tenants were set to move in. (We made time to sit in a circle on the floor and say goodbye to our house and our life in Austin.)

We fit our entire lives into one 10′ x 15′ storage unit, as well as 4 carry-on suitcases and 4 personal backpacks.

Then we spent four nights at our vacation house before launching our Grand Adventure.

In the end, I’m glad we left when we did because toward the end I found myself adding more things to the To Do List, just because I could.

Here’s a quasi comprehensive list of what we had to put in place to go on a Family Gap Year:

1. Establishing our intentions for the trip and figuring out where we wanted to go, when we wanted to go, and for how long
2. Working out the plan for remote work with my job
3. Booking the majority of the housing for our trip (for example, this involved multiple exchanges with a property manager in New Zealand in order to secure a place for three months)
4. Making reservations in advance (for places like Pearl Harbor and Alcatraz)
5. Getting physicals for everyone (this included a colonoscopy and a mammogram for me)
6. Visiting a travel clinic for vaccinations
7. Going to the dentist one last time (this included dental surgery for Tate)
8. Figuring out what to do with our cars
9. Renting out our house, which included making several updates, getting professional photos, listing our house, showing it, and putting a contract together
10. Finalizing our packing lists—we made detailed lists for each carry-on and each personal backpack. We also did a trial-run and moved several items to the “Removed” category.
11. Making a plan for homeschooling our boys: this one was a doozy! It entailed thinking about our daily rhythm, our goals, resources, ordering materials, trying to talk with our kids about their goals and wishes, etc.
12. Figuring out our budget for the year
13. Purchasing travel insurance
14. Checking on our passport situation (they can’t expire close to the time you are trying to return)
15. Figuring out a plan for our medications
16. Withdrawing our boys from school with an official intent to homeschool
17. Switching all of our bills to paperless and figure out the mail situation
18. Figuring out a property manager situation for the short-term rental we run

For some reason, that list does not do the process justice! It felt way more intense and challenging than an 18-item list!

I think part of the disconnect is that this list doesn’t include all the regular things that continued happening during this time. May is usually such a busy month in our family life, but, for some reason, the busy-ness crept into April this year.

Also, so many stressful things were continuing to happen in the United States. Trying to hold my own joy alongside the suffering of others is difficult.

And leaving Austin was bittersweet. On the one hand, I am incredibly excited about the adventure that lies ahead. My brain craves novelty. I am so eager to see new sights, meet new people, eat new foods, and experience new cultures.

On the other hand, I am nervous about becoming a 24/7 family. I’m nervous that we will get sick of each other and that our boys’ bickering will bloom. And it’s difficult to leave behind the community that we have worked 10 years to build.

I’ll be back next month to share how our first month on the road went! If you want daily glimpses into our trip, you can find us on Instagram. For weekly updates, you can subscribe to the Feeding the Soil newsletter.

Otherwise, I’ll see you back here at the beginning of July! Wishing you well between now and then…