Two Backpackers

Are We Really Doing This

| by Aracely on June 22nd, 2024 | 2 Comments » | Reflections

How many times have you had conversations about doing something crazy, adventurous, new, exciting, or different?  How often do you actually follow through, satisfy that urge or as they say, ‘scratch the itch’?  How often do you instead, forget that conversation and just carry on with daily life? What if one day, after one of those conversations, you decide to actually do what you said you would someday love to do?  Now, you have to face your family, friends, and co-workers with your decision.  Now, you actually have to plan your great idea. Imagine that.

Our particular idea is probably a bit extreme; okay, it’s probably very extreme (relatively.)  I mean, how many people (in their late 20’s to early 30’s) do you know have the great idea to quit their jobs, sell everything they own and go backpacking?  How many actually do it?  Regardless of how extreme the urge, following through or scratching the itch, is quite intimidating, scary at best.  Now I know why most people don’t execute on those conversations.

I must admit, we too have failed to launch a number of ideas.  Over the past 2.5 years Jason and I (mostly Jason) have had a large variety of ambitious desires to pursue some endeavors that have not come to fruition.  For example, buying a house, moving to Philadelphia, woodworking, opening a sneaker store, and creating a non-profit just to name a few.  Luckily (in my own selfish opinion), the previous have come and gone and this has stuck.  We are so backpacking!

In retrospect, once we began to put on paper the different tasks that we needed to accomplish to make the trip happen, I realized why most people don’t make it this far. Holy planning!! I’ve put the numerous pre-trip tasks in the following major categories: liquidating our possessions, trip budgeting, itinerary building, gear buying, credentials research, and other (endless minutiae of long trip planning.)  I must confess, there was a point when I thought telling our families about this would be the toughest part of all. I was wrong.  Building a website that satisfies Jason’s requirements has been the toughest task yet.  Did I say, “Holy planning?”

Although we did have that, “I would love to do that one day,” conversation in late March, I didn’t seriously think we would be going through with the trip until quite recently.  Now, here we are less than two months to our departure date and we have accomplished the following;  we’ve told our families, our place is an absolute mess, and we are actually getting somewhere with the website (great job Jason!).  To answer the question at hand, yes, we are absolutely doing this!

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed!

Tags: backpacking, Reflections

Related posts

• Press (0)
• Preface (0)
• My Typical Vacation (13)