And away we go!

Bags packed and repacked, thrice. Goodbye parties, cheeks kissed, tears shed. Zero hour has arrived. As we are about to finally leave I have this feeling, did I leave the oven on?

I know that there will be something I forgot. Oh well.

All the clothes are clean, heads and faces shaved, and hopefully we can get a bit of sleep. Our departure is early. New York awaits us: the city that never stops. In a world filled with so many different peoples and cultures, New York has probably the biggest mix of all of them.

To be in New York and then the world. Here we go.

Butterflies?

Gulp!!

You know that feeling you get standing atop a cliff. Looking down into a deep clear pool, knowing you can swim, and that the jump most likely won't kill you. You're excited, nervous, apprehensive.

If you wait too long you won't jump.

An old Jamaican security guard told me one night at Roots Bamboo Beach that sometimes you just have to jump off the cliff. That bit of advice has served me well and led me to the most wonderful, horrible times I have experienced. Sometimes when you think about it too much you may decide, "Wait, this cliff is way too high, there are definitely alligators in that water, I just ate like 10 minutes ago, there will be another chance, right?" then boom, the chance is gone. Congratulations, you just talked yourself out of it. Had I listened to that voice (reason right?) then I most certainly would not be where I am in life. Good thing there are Type A's out there to balance it all out.

Well this new cliff is a doozy.

I think the hardest part about our journey will be the first step. We have such a great network of friends and family here. It will be difficult to be away from them for so long and I think it will be even harder to say goodbye. However, it really is the hard things that build our character. The easy road is just that, easy, and sometimes not really what we want to do. We are told to follow our dreams from a very early age... turns out that some of those dreams are scary in real life. But don't look back; what one can do another can do. Follow your dreams, prepare for the worst, hope for the best. Do your best at whatever it is you do. Love and live as though it were your last day to do so.

And try to learn Greek, Bulgarian, Turkish, Arabic, and Italian, like yesterday. Right.

So it looks like our nasty little Schengen problem has turned out to be quite a nice dilemma to overcome. It has opened the door to places we otherwise would not have looked. On the menu now are Gotse Delchev Bulgaria, Istanbul and Bodrum Turkey, Marakesh, Essouira, and possibly Fez Morocco, and maybe the southwest coast of Ireland. That is some pretty good scrambling!

Honestly wow. It seems amazing just to write it down.

So after a bit of mild panic and a couple beers, I think a thank you is in order to whoever came up with that whole Schengen baloney in the first place. Without it we wouldn't have so many cliffs to jump off.

The Schengen Dilemma

So much happens between each post. This week we decided to pare down our bags even further, tossing out almost half of what we thought we couldn't live without. If we aren't careful, pretty soon we will be walking out the door with nothing but a toothbrush and passport in our hands.

Insert bombshell here.

So, we thought all our ducks were in a row with a bit of room here and there for adjustments, if we needed. Come to Europe! Backpack through the Alps! Don't worry, no special visa needed... just don't stay more than 90 days in each particular country and you're fine. Need to stay longer? Just pop out to any neighboring country for a weekend and come back; like magic, you can stay another 90 days. Well that's just what the guidebooks tell you. Dig a little deeper and the Schengen states rear their ugly heads. Yep, turns out there is this Schengen Agreement that treats all members of the EU, excluding a few, as a whole when it comes to visas. Americans can stay for only 90 days out of 180 and no more than 6 months out of every year. Basically, we are able to stay 90 days in the Schengen area and must then leave for 90 consecutive days before returning again for 90 more.

Check out http://www.immihelp.com/visas/schengenvisa/ for more info on this fascinating topic.

Whoa really?! This would have been good to know like 7 months ago. (Remember, we are leaving in 12 days with one way tickets to Spain.) Now we have a bit of a hole in our itinerary. A veritable wish sandwich with Spain and Greece on one slice of bread and Italy on the other, with a 6 month question mark in the middle. Well, let's go make some lemonade! So how do you fill that gap on the fly? Well here's the rough outline. Check out Turkey, Bulgaria, or Croatia for a few months or maybe Ireland and some of GB. Then find some place to rent in Morocco for a few months?

And that's all we have so far. Anybody got any connections in Turkey, Bulgaria, Croatia or Ireland?

Excited now? Well you wanted an adventure, right? Stay tuned: up next - departure and New York. JFK, the Big Apple, Wappingers Falls and who knows?

What should we take?

What would you bring? Ever wonder what you would take from your life if you had to up and split? For a year. Now make sure you and your family can take and carry their share, even if they happen to be 6 and 8 and may weigh less than most of the bags. Of course you will have socks, shoes, hats, that kind of stuff. What about vitamins, scissors, pocket knives, first aid kit, towels? You can see how the list grows to immense proportions. Now fit it all into 8 bags that you can all carry up stairs, through subways, on buses, anywhere. It is such an intense exercise. Although if you succeed it feels good to know you can leave it all behind. Except for that really nice perfume and a few comics.

Our winter months have come through, and it looks like most of the time will be spent house sitting and fixing up a house, I'm thinking carpentry, on the French speaking island of Corsica near the town of Ajaccio, help me with the pronunciation Frenchy! This is the birthplace of Napoleon and his childhood home is now a museum. These months may see us in Portugal as well with a possible 2 or 3 weeks in Morocco. We will round out our last 30 days here filled with lots of family and friend celebrations as we prepare to say goodbye to a huge network of people here. Hopefully a few of you will find the need to seek us out on this adventure and pay us a visit. A welcome treat for sure!