Well, it’s really happening! Mark and I are both officially out of work at the end of October. Mark had less difficulty giving notice than I did. I really wanted my employer to understand why I was leaving. It’s not exclusively about the trip but serious problems with the job and how they managed my particular situation. Regardless, it is done now and we just have a few more weeks of wrapping up the loose ends.

The rest of our planning is continuing to move forward. We’ve given notice to our landlord. Mark had the conversation with her (all in Dutch) and he basically gave her the impression that his had job ended which is why we needed to move. It’s not exactly right, but it did the job! We’ve been researching travel gear and checking expiration dates on things like credit cards and drivers licenses.

And, of course, we’ve been dreaming out destinations. We have a good idea of where we want to go – EVERYWHERE! And narrowing the options down to a reasonable relaxed trip that fits within our budget is the difficult part. Mark would love to start with a long beach holiday – so we’ve been looking at The Gambia in Western Africa.  And over the longer term we will need to decide where we want to end up because we're now confident that it won't be the Netherlands. At some point we are going to have to make some painful choices.

My planning spreadsheet seems to be getting longer rather than shorter. We’ve been busy getting  this website up and running and preparing to post all the old entries from our year in Europe. We’re pretty much done with all of our travel purchases. We broke down and ordered a few things from an online travel supplier and had them sent to Mark’s parents. We will pick them up when we head over to the UK the last weekend of the month.

We finally booked the Ferry for our weekend in the UK and have started packing the remaining boxes. I’ve been busy cleaning out my closet. Nothing fits me anymore anyway… so a bunch of it is headed to the charity drop. It’s funny how it’s easy to get rid of clothes that are too big for you… but I still have boxes of clothes in storage in Seattle that I hoped I would fit into one day!  We’re
trying to get our finances in order, and have been busy sorting out the administrative details for our rental property. I’ve also finally located a travel clinic in Amsterdam, so we’ll be headed there next week.