Getting Ready

Okay...tomorrow's the day!! The movers are coming to take away the potpurri of stuff we are keeping. Actually, we have done a really good job of purging our decades of packratting (I use the plural...Nadine would point squarely at me...guilty as charged!). Now we only require two 18 wheelers to fit what's left . Nadine was kind enough to make large piles of my stuff to go through to purge...I never saw any piles for her!

It has been a long road to getting ready in the relatively short period of time. We learned our house sold about the third week of July and reconfirmed our commitment to take Alex, Gabriel, and Nicolas on a world tour before it was too late. In that time we have been planning the tour, packing the house, having garage sales, becoming the Salvation Army's Donor of the Month (self-titled , ending our jobs, becoming the Dunmore dump's Client of the Month, developing a home schooling plan for the year, and so much more. It has been a heck of a month and a half.

Oh yeah...getting ready also involved getting shots! The pictures accompanying this entry speak for themselves.

Things we have learned so far:
* you throw alot of large business and government agencies in disarray by not having an address
* do not work right up to the last work day (there is way too much going on!)
* auto insurance companies do not want to put just fire and theft on idle vehicles
* garage sales are a lot of work and you still have a bunch of stuff to deal with after
* kijjiji is a great site to sell stuff
* you will never have a need for the university notes and textbooks that you kept and lug around with you
* saying farewell to family and friends sucks!

So the movers are coming Monday, September 14 and then we begin our drive to Montreal that afternoon. We will be towing our tent trailer to camp along the way and hopefully get a chance to smell the roses enroute. Our flight to Paris leaves from Montreal on September 25. We will spend a week in Paris and then fly to Barcelona for a week and then head north of Barcelona to a friends house for a couple of weeks and then south of Valencia to a resort in Alicante for a week. From there we fly to Tunisia for a couple of weeks and then to Burkina Faso. After Burkina Faso we fly to Egypt for a couple of weeks and then to Greece for Christmas. That is as far as we have planned. I am waiting to hear if I will be teaching a business course at a Chinese College in February. We should know in October if that is going to happen and determine our visits to Thailand, Vietnam, and the Phillipines. Australia will round out our tour before returning to Canada.

We do plan to post often to capture our tour and share with family and friends. Please subscribe to this blog and you will be alerted to any new posts. Until the next post!

Dana, Nadine, Alex, Gabriel, & Nicolas

Our Planned Route

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