Our trip is approaching fast. Like all major events, it seems like it’s months and months away until you wake up one day and realize that it’s only weeks. All of the planning and ideas are now becoming reality and things are happening that are now, well, tangible. Or at least as tangible as can be in our computer driven world.

I’ve bought almost all the first batch of plane tickets, from New Zealand to Australia to Bali and to Cambodia. The order of locations has changed somewhat to be a bit more linear and I’ve cut out some of the initial small stopovers. I’m also choosing to spend more money to only fly direct from one point to another. I think we’ll be happier in the end and I usually find that when push comes to shove in times like this, you’re almost NEVER happy you saved the few hundred dollars.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the rhythm of our life here, and how much that’s going to change. Weekends I’m not working (and almost every day now that it’s summer) we all wake up rather lazily, make coffee, and sit around the house and on the back patio reading for a few hours until we think it’s time to do something. Usually that “something” involves the kids running down to the neighbor’s house to play while Eric and I go workout or get some stuff done around the house. Or we decide to go for a bike ride or maybe go swimming. After that we make more coffee and repeat the morning.

If  I make it sound idyllic, well, sometimes it is. Not that there aren’t plenty of times when the kids get yelled at for not doing something or another or other such normal life annoyances, but most of the time now it’s pretty relaxed. I’m almost fearful to say this out loud for fear that there will be some cosmic retribution to equalize this goodness. Or maybe this is the equalization for all the tough years when everyone was up at 5 am and trying to keep the kids from injuring themselves all day.

So I think of this as we get ready for our trip, how the overall timbre of our lives will change. I know that there will be many days where we’re up early and moving all day, and those will be fabulous. And I also hope that we are able to have days where we try to replicate our slow Saturday mornings here, getting coffee somewhere and lazing about, all of us with a book in our hands, and giving ourselves time to savor the experience of just being somewhere too.

–sf