Down Under from the Beginning

In May I opened a mini Dove bar and saw the message: When life isn't going right, go left.

Life wasn't going right. I had decided to leave my job of four and a half years, but didn't know the next step. All I knew was I did not want to sign a contract and commit to another school year. 

I took the advice literally and started to plan a trip as far left as I could go without going right and landed in New Zealand and Australia.

From that thought came a lot of back and forth with Don. Would I go alone? Would he come with me for the entire trip? Would I go alone? Where exactly would I go? What did I want to do? What did I want to see? How long would I/we be gone? What would happen to the house? The pets? What dates would work out best for everyone? 
 

In the end, the trip was almost exactly perfect. Along the way there were a few tweaks that might have made it a little more perfect, but considering I put a four-week trip together in barely twice that amount of time, it was perfect.

I spent over a month trying to figure out the basic parameters. Once I figured those out, the rest fell into place. In no particular order:

• Don would join me for the first three weeks, I retained the option to stay longer
• We would visit Andrew and Jo in Brisbane (we had to wait until they returned from their European vacation)
• We would not rent a car and attempt to drive on the other side of the road
• We would only use carry-on luggage
• We would fly from city to city and stay in cities

Each day of our trip was vastly different from the others, and included many firsts. We hardly ate the same food twice, and only repeated one restaurant (I needed a quick meal towards the end of my adventures and knew I could count on a Thai restaurant). To me, the variety was the best part of the trip.

As for the house and pets, a friend stayed in our house for three weeks and took better care of our house than we take care of it. Thank you Bart and Megan!

I still don't know the next step. I knew leaving my job was the right move, what we didn't know was that Don would be laid off the day after I returned putting both of our futures into God's hands.

Update: I have finished blogging. Start at the Table of Contents. The rest of the posts appear on the day they took place.