Packing up life for a 3 year global adventure

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Imagine packing up your entire world, your life, for an extended trip around the world. Imagine holding every piece you own in your hands and thinking, what do I do with this?

That’s what I did, six years ago.

I wrote this piece back then as Adrian and I were getting ready to leave. Back before the world was upended by Covid, before my mum’s cancer really took hold and before our travel plans were derailed.

It was a plan we’d held for some time, to have no real fixed address, to see as much of the world as we could, to not have to work while we travelled.

This is one of the final pieces I wrote in the lead up. I found it last week as I was going through my online folders and travel journals and figured it was probably time to share it…

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Shit’s getting real now.

I uttered those words the other day. Adrian’s friend Nige came to pick up our sideboard and ended up taking the barbecue and the outdoor table and chairs as well.

So, what began as a dream 16 years ago, random goals scratched into a notebook on a flight somewhere between the Serengeti and Victoria Falls to take time out from the work force to travel, is now becoming a reality.

Back then we thought we’d go for 12 months, but somewhere along the way Ade figured one year wouldn’t be nearly enough time to see the world, we needed three years. And so a dream became a goal and a plan was created.

You would be forgiven for thinking we’d already set out on this grand round-the-world adventure, after all we’ve been lucky enough to travel pretty consistently for the past three years, and of course I did take that little old mid-life Gap Year back in 2016.

But no, that was all just a precursor to the grand adventure.

Back to my point though, this year we started packing up the apartment, which seems so easy when you say those words, but not actually so easy in reality.

We’re moving into a spare room at mum and dad’s for a couple of months before we actually go and they’ve agreed to let us have a base there for random trips back over the next three years (which I think really is a way of them ensuring we’ll come home for a visit).

But what that means is that as well as working out what we want to store, what we will take with us and what we want to get rid of, we’re working out what we want to have around us in our Australian ‘base’.

Friends, like Nige, have been putting up their hands offering to look after our stuff or to take it off our hands permanently – we’ve now had three requests for the wine fridge, four for the sideboard, a request for the fridge.

All of this, to be honest, makes the packing a lot easier.

Our television gave up the ghost about three weeks ago, simply stopped showing any images, we could listen to it, but couldn’t see anything so it effectively became a 48-inch flat screen radio.

We didn’t want to buy a new tv, so my friend Sam came to the rescue with a spare tele.

Now we’re surrounded by bags and boxes with scribbled notes on top ‘For Richard’, ‘For Julie’, ‘Op shop’.

And a growing pile of stuff that is coming with us.

This getting rid of stuff, of culling our collective life’s history in stuff is not easy. There’s the sentimental, the ‘what if I need this’, the not wanting to have to replace everything when we eventually come back and settle back in our apartment and quite simply the what do you with stuff that no one, not even the op shop, wants.

Neither of us wants to add to the amount of rubbish going to landfill if we can help it, but what do you actually do with all this stuff?