Three weeks from today I’m gone. I’m no longer measuring my time before departure in months, but in weeks and days.  I’m so excited to hit the road and for the adventure begin. At the same time I’m leaving behind a way of life that’s comfortable and familiar and throwing it all up in the air.   Well, why the hell not right?  We all get a fairly limited time on this planet and  I’m pretty sure no one ever said ” I wish I spent more time in my office” when they looked back at their life.  I have such gratitude for the people who’ve given me the courage to do this.  I know they’ll be with me every step of the way.

I keep getting asked how long I’m going for?  Where are you going?  What made you decide to do this now?  The answer to the last part is because it feels like the right thing to do.  I’ve kind of always lived my life that way.  I guess the idea has been percolating for a while.  When I told a good friend what I was planning to do his response was “I’m not surprised, you’ve been talking about this pretty much from the first day you came back from the last trip”.

The last trip started out much the same way as this one. I just decided it was time to shake it up. Many of you know how that trip just blossomed into a massive adventure!  The initial plan was to meet a friend in Spain and drive around for the month of August and then to meet up with another friend and do a trip through Ireland, the whole thing was supposed to last for about six weeks and then I was going to come back to New York and figure out what was next.  Well it didn’t exactly go according to plan. I was gone from 1998-2002 a full four years!  I spent the first  fourteen months in South East Asia then a year in India and Nepal with various visits to Australia, Africa, Europe and North America.  The last year was spent living in Prague.

So when people ask how long this adventure is going to last my answer is, “As long as it lasts” The spirit of the journey is to let it take me where it takes me. One of the huge challenges for me is going to be the ability to immerse myself in what I’m doing and know when to disconnect.  Last time I did this no one had a cell phone or a “smart phone”  there was no such thing as Facebook or Twitter and if I wanted to call someone I had to go to something like the STD booth in India.  It took me a few weeks before I realized that STD there did not stand for sexually transmitted disease, but for Standard Trunk Dialing.  I was a little confused initially why there were so many STD clinics, glad I cleared that up fairly quickly.  There also wasn’t all the inter-connectivity there is now.  I’m happy it will be so easy to communicate with friends and family along the way, but I’m really going to have to know when to put down, the devices, step away from the technology and be in the moment of where I am.  I’m pretty confident I’ll get the hang of it!