Magical World

First of all: Happy New Year to everybody! That all your wishes and dreams may come true!

Ever since this miraculous number “7” appeared in the signification of the current year, friends and family have been mentioning, that 2007 is for sure going to be a great year for us, as this year we are starting our trip around the world! And yes! Of course we are very excited about it also, especially as we are considering changing our departure date to the first of August, which would make that from today, exactly 200 days are left until the BIG DATE.

But what most people do not consider is that undertaking a project like that demands an important share of organization (probably more than some people get in their entire life). Now this article is especially dedicated to Rachel, who thinks that organizing and doing a world trip is “just the same thing as organizing your holidays”. Let’s have a look at this statement a little closer in this article.

Attention! This warning is emitted for your safety. The current article might be extremely shocking for people who are suffering from the “general-laziness-syndrome”, the “let’s-take-it-easy-syndrome”, the “don’t-stress-me-syndrome” or people who think that preparing/doing a world trip is just a “regular holiday preparation”. It is highly recommended for those people to lie down before continuing reading this article.

Now maybe the easiest way to explain why we think that organizing/doing a world trip is not “a regular holiday preparation” is to use an example:

Let’s say, that we would like to do a world trip in 200 days, and let’s say for the sake of simplicity, that we would BOTH be French and have our parents in the same town, had only one apartment (where we would of course both live) and one car. What would that imply?*

– Getting all the vaccinations and take of other medical necessities (you better leave in good health…)
– Give notice to the telephone company, the internet provider, electricity and gas providers
– Give notice to the renter
– Let the whole administrative world know that you are going to change of address (this implies a LOT of letters to write and a lot of phone calls to make)
– Move from the apartment and move all our stuff into a temporary furniture shelter
– Get insurances for different casualties (a special travel insurance, health insurance, insurance against theft to mention a few)
– Sell the car
– Organize plane tickets (and in order to do that: make a big plan of the route we would like to follow)
– Organize visa
– Take care of financial issues (you don’t want to find yourself in Timbuktu with your bank account blocked or even worse: empty)

Now, that seems already like a pretty long list to you, making you sweat only to THINK about doing all this stuff? Well then let’s now get out of this “hypothetical case” and get back to REAL life, where we indeed have 200 days left, but where we have 3 apartments in 2 different countries at distances going from 400 to 1100 km between them, we have 2 cars (both in different countries), we are not from the same country (let alone town), don’t live together and our parents live at about 600 km from each other. Starting to feel a little bit sweaty yet?
To put it into other words: if you put all that in an Excel-sheet and use one line for each action, at the end you have a file with about 100 (in words: one hundred) actions to do (for those interested, we can send you this little file).

So anybody else interested in discussing about “organizing/doing a world trip is just like any other holiday”???? We are ready for it! ;o)

Vera & Jean-Christophe

PS: Dear reader. Don’t worry, you are not having a nightmare, you are only READING this article, you are not really DOING all this, so calm down and breath normally. You are just reading about some “regular” holiday preparation… ;o)

* The list presented here is extremely simplified in order not to shock unprepared readers…