Remember being a child and trying to fall asleep the night prior to something you were really looking forward to? Just looking at the clock as the hours pass, unable to fall asleep. That is exactly how we have felt for over a month. Excitement, anticipation, stress and fear all rolled into one and on the forefront of our minds, at all times. Finally, the time has come to hit the road and leave all that behind! We have done our best to position ourselves for success and now all we have to do is go. These are the feelings, in no particular order, that we have felt leading up to our departure.
1-Excitement: Lets get the obvious one out of the way first. This is one of the most exciting times of our lives. We have talked about doing something like this for years and its exciting to finally have the balls to do it. If we weren’t excited about leaving, then there wouldn’t be a reason to leave in the first place.
2-Accomplishment: To stay organized and to avoid the inevitable feelings of senior-itus we made many to-do lists. But every time we checked something off, something else came up. That being said, checking stuff off the list felt pretty damn incredible. Its important to celebrate small victories as if they were huge milestones. If taking the dog to get her teeth cleaned was checked off a list, we celebrated like rock stars!
3-Fear: This ugly bastard of a feeling kept rearing its head throughout every stage of preparation. We second guessed almost every decision we made for no reason. The fear of the unknown is what kept us awake at night; Where will we go? Where will we sleep? How will we make money? Will we like it? Are we making the right decision? We can read all the how-to books we can find but nothing can prepare us for the adventure that awaits. There will be undoubtedly be bumps in the road but you live and you learn… or at least we hope to.
4-Stress: Remember playing a video game as a kid and having it freeze on you? It left you with the difficult decision of waiting it out or hitting the reset button and losing all of your progress. We were tired of waiting it out, but hitting the reset button on life is not easy to do. It’s also an even more difficult decision to make. But once you do, you will be left with a long list of BS to take care of and a whole bunch of loose ends to tie up. Days will seem short and to-do lists long but the excitement kept us going.
5-Relief: This one was our favorite feeling by far. We spent months downsizing and kinda-sorta planning and sometimes we caught ourselves arguing over the most ridiculous details. The feeling of shifting the RV into reverse to set out on our new life is a feeling we cannot explain. It is a feeling that we wish we could bottle and share because we would be millionaires.
For the first time in our lives we are truly in the drivers seat.