The Queen of the Long Weekend Meets the King of the Long-Term Adventure

I have always been a fan of traveling light. Keeping it simple. I like to be able to carry all my crap by myself in one trip. Backpacking is great. Car-camping with a tent, also great. Car-camping in Jumbo - Brent’s old camper van - superb. As far as I can remember, I’ve always been this way. I remember even, as a child, watching my mom pack in and out all the crap to the motorhome that we needed to go on our family camping trips, knowing that most of the crap she was packing was for the sake of her two children, and I remember thinking, gee, that doesn’t make me want very badly to have children. Look at all that crap you have to pack around.

I’ve also been the queen of the long-weekend get-away. I don’t recall ever taking more than ten days off for a vacation. The idea of a longer vacation is romantically appealing, but on my own, I’ve never made it happen. I’ve preferred the shorter get-aways that fit easily into my life and schedule, without disrupting things too much. Five days in New Orleans... road trip to Seattle... a week in Arizona. Brent, of course, is the king of the long-term adventure which can be savoured… like taking a half a year off to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro and then ride his bicycle across the country with Doug Bird.

Tonight, Brent and I are leaving for Australia, taking our bicycles and our panniers full of all the crap we’ll need for an entire month. The cycle touring part itself – Brent, me, our bicycles, and our panniers full of all the crap – will be an awesome adventure. What is less enjoyable (for me) is packing all that crap to the airport, making sure it gets on the airplane, making sure it makes all of its connecting flights and makes it (hopefully in the same number of pieces it left in) to its (our) final destination. Thank goodness Brent has done most of the work. He broke down our bicycles and put them in cardboard bicycle boxes, including assessing and mitigating weaknesses in the packing. He figured out how to pack and get the panniers and other crap all the way to Hobart (Tasmania) – our first stop - including all the rules for the airlines. He researched the allowed dimensions for luggage, and we’ve packed all that crap into moving boxes which will be discarded on the far end, to be (hopefully) replaced with boxes that we will find in Sydney for packing all the crap back… including the bicycles.

This vacation is, indeed, a departure for the light-traveling queen of the long weekend. Wish me luck as I savour the adventure!