Saturday 9 December 2006

Moving forward

One quick question before I start this entry officially... Is it safe to spray disinfectant on the screen of a laptop computer? Let's just say I have a bit of a cold....and... uh... well, sneezes aren't always cute dainty little things, okay? Sure it wipes off okay, but being a nurse, I recognize that doesn't do much more than, well, make things look nice again. Anyways, ahem...

Well we are getting closer and closer to this travel goal. Round-the-world tickets were purchased as of today. Yikes! Do not want to see the sum total of my bank account and credit card bills. Scary, exciting, and very much of an "I can't believe we're really doing this!" moment. But with a departure date, it feels so much more real somehow. January 19th. Six weeks and counting. 41 days to be more exact. Here's a quick rundown on what we have and have not (done or obtained):

Have:
Passports
Working Holiday Visas for Australia
Jobs lined up in Australia (so long as the registration goes through as promised.)
Sent off all documents for Registration as nurses in Australia
Bought round the world tickets.
sent off applications for volunteering at the orphanage of our choice (hopefully... we were all aiming to have that done by now)
set up appointments with a travel health nurse (some of us have been to one already)


Have Not:
Bought tickets for local travel in India
Bought travel supplies (still determining what all that includes)
applied for India visa (well, I think I'm the only one who hasn't accomplished that yet hehehe oops!)
and a bunch of other stuff we'll figure out along the way

Tomorrow, I will send off what I hope to be the last of the paperwork I will need to do before we leave. This weekend, I will spend cooking and baking a wide variety of foods with my friends. Two things that make my top ten list of favorite things, spending time with friends, and baking/cooking. I'm a simple girl really, not so much the city girl you'd think I would be, growing up in a city as I have. I don't believe I'd have had any trouble living comfortably 300 years ago with what they had then. I'd be just as content living a simple farm life as being a city-girl nurse, so long as I could spend time with friends... etc.

I've been trying to keep track of what I do to occupy my time, what items I use the most, to get an idea of what I'll really need when I travel. I'm beginning to conclude that I will miss my books the most, but I will be able to live without them (as far as material possesions go.) books are much too heavy to travel with. One large backpack... can I do it? My what-if nature is going to be stretched to its limits.

And so, we press on, moving forward, and looking back all at the same time, wondering "what if we didn't go", yet wanting to see the road ahead...

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