What our condo looked like 5 days before we left the country.

Five more days to go until we take our one-way flight out of Canada. This will prove to be one of the most grueling “pre-vacation” times of our lives. You know what I mean by “pre-vacation”. The two most stressful periods of time when it comes to taking time off work is right before the vacation and right when you return.

Pre-vacation stress: Packing for your trip, making sure your “Out of Office” is turned on for your work email, closing or transitioning all your work projects, finding someone to water your plants…

Post-vacation stress: Realizing you forgot to take out the garbage before you left and trying to air the rotten garbage smell out of your house, catching up on the 12,634,752 emails that were sent to you in the one week you were off work, getting up to speed on all the gossip work that happened while you were gone….

What I’ll be wearing for the next 6 months

NOW, multiply that by a million and that’s how stressful the 5 days were leading up to our travel start date. We had to-do lists by day (practically by the hour when it came closer to T-2 days)

Our colour-coded To-Do list (by day)

“Pre-6 months travel stress”:

• finalizing the rental agreement with our subletter that we found just 1 week before we left
• packing up our condo
• finding long-term storage
• booking movers
• finding someone to rent our parking spot 12 hours before we left
• Dropping off our 7-month puppy at our buddy’s place (who graciously agreed to care for him for 6 months)
• packing clothes for our 6 months of travel that will cover everything from Mt. Everest climbing to Amazonian rainforest trekking
• Unpacking and repacking for our 6 months of travel after I realize I can’t fit 1/3 of what I had planned to bring
• cleaning the condo and getting it tenant-ready
• making a last minute (i.e. 5 hours before we leave) trip to SAIL to pick up hiking shoes after Jason accidentally packed it into long-term storage. AND the long-term storage facility is now closed for the evening.

By the time we were done and ready to begin our 20-hour journey to Bogota, Colombia we looked like we had already been traveling for 12 hours. I was too tired to even pretend to be happy for the camera.

Finally ready to go!

Although, I have to admit – all this “pre-vacation” stress is going to make the time off from work feel all the more satisfying.