One month to go

In just 30 days and 12 hours, we will be boarding Korean Air flight #24 out of San Francisco, bound for Bangkok, via Seoul. The past 10 days have been exceedingly busy. We have had a house-closing party, our first truly successful party in the Bay Area, with enough people from different circles meeting and enjoying each others’ company. We had a map of SE Asia up on the wall, which sparked several conversations with folks who had been to the area with suggestions on where to go.

We cleaned the house and packed up most of our clothes and valuables, moving them into a 5′x6′ storage unit a few miles away. Tetris skills came in very handy. However, the biggest challenge was simultaneously setting aside clothes for a month of couch-surfing, Burning Man, backpacking across SE Asia, and Christmas in New York.

On Wednesday, our three subletters from New Orleans arrived in two taxis, 15 minutes after we’d cleaned the last corner of the kitchen in preparation for their arrival. We took them out to our favorite local Ethiopian restaurant to welcome them to their new home. Afterwards, we gave them a tour of the house and an introduction to our cats, before handing them our keys and heading off to our first home-away-from-home.

Except it isn’t. We don’t have a home for the next 4 months. Our lease effectively ended, and doesn’t begin again until December. Our stuff and our cats are currently in someone else’s home. When we returned the next day to pick up some more of our things, it was a somewhat odd experience to first arrange a convenient time, and then to walk into a house with all of our things, and yet already see the ways in which the subletters had made it theirs. To be a visitor among one’s own possessions is a curious feeling.

For now we are house-sitting for some friends currently vacationing in Eastern Europe. Next week we go to Burning Man. The week after that we have no plans at all. Then we spend a week with some other friends. Then we leave, to begin the real adventure.

Stay tuned!

Tags: Preparation, RTW

T-40 days

After months of knowing what needed to be done but not being able to take action, life since we got back from Cape Cod has been all action, all the time.

The last four days have included ToodleDo items such as;

• Book return tickets from NY – We fly out of SFO to Bangkok, but we’re returning to New York for Christmas. Jetblue to the rescue!
• Modify and re-order business cards
• VCS Post – This week’s guest vagabonders, the Candy family!
• Order tape for yurt – yes, you read that right. We’re building a hexayurt for Burning Man this year.
• Sign storage contract – found a $24/mo 5×6 space, and at least half of what we’re putting away has already been moved.
• Set up new wireless network – I did that at the same time as writing this post. About time I set it up right, just as we’re leaving of course.
• Party reminder – Oh ya, in the middle of everything we’re having a party on Friday. Why not?
• Place the following Amazon order, $32 of which came from spare change;
  

  Items Ordered
  2 of: Mountainsmith Rain Cover, Black, Small, Black, Small
  1 of: Moleskine Squared Notebook Soft Cover Pocket
  1 of: Eagle Creek Travel Gear Pack-It Wallaby, Black
  1 of: InCarCables Car Stereo Ipod/mp3 Auxiliary Aux-in Input Cable 3.5mm (1.6ft)
  1 of: Fisher Space Pen Black Non-Pressurized Fine Point Refill

• And of course, packing and cleaning, in preparation for handing off our house, and our kitties, to three awesome folks from New Orleans a week from today.

Tags: Preparation, RTW

15 minutes shy of 85 days

Today I moved the first boxes into a steal of a $24/mo storage unit 10 minutes away.

In just 8 days, we will be homeless.

We’ll still be in the Bay Area, but we will be house sitting, camping, and couch surfing until the end of September. We may even get to visit our cats in our house that we’re not living in.

Phrao, Thailand, just outside of Chiang Mai

Then, 6 weeks from today, we get on a plane bound for Thailand, via a stop in Korea. Our return to the U.S. isn’t until mid-December. Assuming a perfect world of ontime plane departures and arrivals, there will be 84 days, 23 hours, and 45 minutes between when we land and take off again from Bangkok. That’s 12 weeks of living by whim alone. That’s just over a year’s worth of a 9-5 job (2039 hours).

After exceedingly busy months of the metronome tipping ‘is-it-going-to-happen-or-not’, everything finally fell into place over the last month, and our vagabonding trip throughout Southeast Asia is GO FOR LAUNCH! We are now in full preparation mode, with just over a week to have a party, pack everything away, and live out of what we can fit in the car for a month. And we’re very much looking forward to it.

We were able to sublet our flat, find cat care, and secure cheap storage. Unsurprisingly, the biggest factor of all was our cats. We knew that they would be the hardest logistical problem to solve. While we were lucky in finding subletters willing to both take care of our place and our cats, we had a 4th cat who was a local stray that we had been fostering for six months. Finding a home for Snuffles – a sweet, skittish, FIV+ cat that courted us for six months before we even let him in – proved much more difficult than we could have anticipated. Finally, just as we were thinking we might have to give up, we found the North County Humane Society, an all-cat no-kill shelter in Atascadero, south of Monterey. With some sadness, we drove 7 hours last Saturday to take him to his new home. We are so glad to have found them, and they are worthy of your donation. Now our efforts are on cleaning, organizing, and packing. It’s going to be a very busy week!

Stay tuned for our continued Countdown to Homelessness!

Tags: Bangkok, RTW, Southeast Asia

Oakland, California

Today’s bike ride took me up to a new area of my hometown. The destination was the North Oakland Pharmacy, a community pharmacy.

As readers might recall, I was out in gold rush country last weekend. On Wednesday morning, I noticed a suspicious “bulls eye rash” on my left leg. Needless to say, I wanted to get it checked out as soon as possible. Unfortunately, being underemployed, we don’t enjoy subsidized health insurance. Thankfully, there are services in the East Bay that serve the many financially challenged people in the city.

You may have heard Oakland being mentioned lately in a different context – the verdict for the BART Police shooting of Oscar Grant was handed down yesterday. If you were here, this caused quite a stir. Last night I was sitting in the waiting room of the Save A Life Wellness Center, hoping that the rash on my leg wasn’t Lyme Disease. The city advised businesses to close, and many did. When I called the Wellness Center to find out if they would be open, their simple response was “We serve the people sir, we don’t close.” They did have a TV tuned to the live coverage of the court building area, which showed typical newsroom sensationalism, overblowing the scene. Do I agree with the verdict of involuntary manslaugher? I lean towards not. I personally couldn’t see not knowing the difference between a taser and a pistol. However, the key phrase is always “beyond a reasonable doubt“, and presumably there was.

Oakland gets a bad rap a lot of the time, and things like this tend to reaffirm that. However, having lived here for over a year, I can say that I love Oakland. It’s unimaginably diverse, in culture and geography. It has great food, beautiful parks, and is convenient to San Francisco and tends to cost less. The city government frustrates me often. But there are times when I have been proud, such as Oakland being a leader in decriminalizing pot by passing a landmark marijuana tax, or having services that will see me, for free, to diagnose Lyme Disease (or not) and prescribe, and fill, an antibiotic for the cellulitis that I do seem to have.

Tags: health services, Mehserle, Oakland, Oscar Grant

The heart of America

Thanks to the windfall of some friends – the use of a summer home for a couple weeks – we spent the July 4th weekend getting a taste of gold rush country.

Copperopolis is a small town nestled in the Sierra foothills, just over two hours east of San Francisco. It is located in Calaveras County, made slightly famous by the tale of an unwitting frog, told by that uniquely American troublemaker and storyteller, Mark Twain. While Angel’s Camp is the only incorporated city, dozens of small towns are scattered throughout the rolling hills, some as small as Carson Hill with only 37 people. Steeped in the history of our westward expansion and entrepreneurial spirit, we connected with our new Californian roots.

The weekend was filled with such wonders as Natural Bridges, where a forest creek has cut through a ridge of limestone deposits creating watery subterranean caves. The first cavern is the most impressive, sporting a high ceiling crenelated with stalactites. Halfway through, there is a bend with an outcropping one can stand on and jump into a deeper section of the slowly flowing creek. The downstream end is the most magical, as one navigates around sheets of rain falling from the ceiling, fed from another creek above. I spent at least half an hour in an innertube with my legs crossed, pushing off the sides with my hands, crisscrossing the cavern. When one starts to get chilly, just crawl back out and lay on any number of large rocks that line the creek. One of the things I love most about California is her diverse geographical beauty, and Natural Bridges is one of the most striking places that I’ve seen in my year and a half here in the Bay Area, and it’s completely free. There’s a part of me that wants to hide this secret place, but instead I’ll just caution those who might feel inspired to treat all natural resources with respect and to Leave No Trace.

As if that wasn’t already a great way to spend a Saturday, we went from there to Ironstone Vineyards, where we joined a couple thousand revelers relaxing on the grass waiting for the sun to set. Once it was dark enough, the sky erupted above us in a star-spangled shower of fireworks. I have seen flashier individual explosions, with longer trails or intricate shapes, but I have never seen a choreography so well executed. The timing was flawless, taking the audience on a roller coaster of fiery joy. Every time we thought the show would end, there would be another volley of light over our heads.

Yesterday, the proper 4th of July, we stepped back 150 years into the wild wild west, wandering up and down the streets of Columbia. With mid-19th century storefronts and townspeople in historical dress, it felt like walking through Frontierland at DisneyWorld, only more authentic. There were watermelon and pie eating contests, gold panning stations, horse-drawn carriage rides, and Sarsaparilla flavored shaved ice. We watched more than a dozen kids try to climb two greased poles, which was more entertaining than any of us expected. Both collaborative and competitive, it was exciting to see different techniques being used. Some kids would wrap their hands with their shirts to wipe off the grease, others would throw dirt on the pole to provide traction. As one technique was shown to work, others would copy it. Since I could not climb a pole, greased or otherwise, every child had my respect.

Eventually it was time to leave, and we made our way back to Copperopolis, spending the evening drinking, grilling, lighting fireworks, and stargazing. Between stunning natural beauty, immersion in gold rush history, spectacular fireworks, and the making of new friends, it was the most truly American celebration of our Independence Day that I have ever experienced.

Tags: Americana, Calaveras County, California, Frontierland, gold rush, July 4th, Mark Twain, natural bridges