Traveling across Mexico and Central America for a year?? Woah, that’s super cool.

What’s not super cool is getting a ton of stuff done in order for that to happen…

The Many, Many Steps of Preparation

Alright, let’s say you’ve gotten past the big step of deciding where and even when you want to vacation. We’ll ignore, for the purposes of this article, the countless hours you spent on Facebook, Instagram, Lonely Planet, TripAdvisor, and all the other scroll-through social media sites, magazines, websites and even travel books in order to decide where you’re going.

You’re even ahead of the curve and have booked your flights, your hotel, and – gasp – even your itinerary! So, all the work is done, right? You can relax, bust out the bubbles in your glass and in your tub, and build your secret stash of clever Instagram hashtags you’ll be using.

#SorryNotSorry to burst your bubble. Depending on how much time you’re going away, there could be mountains of preparation and, basically, ‘sh** you gotta handle.’

This can include: packing, getting a pet-sitter, putting a mail hold, notifying the credit card company, tying loose ends at work before you turn on the out-of-office message, clearing out your fridge (preempting this is wayyy better than coming back to growing, smelly mystery stuff), and so much more! It’s so much more, it deserves its own article!

Our Ambitious (Crazy? Masochistic?) Situation

Imagine that instead of 10 days of PTO, you are instead planning to leave for an entire year!  To go out of the country, too.  And you’ve got to purchase and convert a van before you can go, because #vanlife speaks to you, and you don’t want to pay someone else to suffer and toil when you can do it yourself 😉  Oh, AND you’d like to sell your house too because the return on equity from renting it out isn’t as high as you’d like.

Does this sound familiar? If so, join us for the ride! This is exactly what we plan to do, and oh man is it a lot! We are now one month in, and here are my reflections on this “preparation stage.”

Doing Not-So-Fun Stuff to Get to the Fun Stuff

For me, the not-so-fun stuff of vacation is packing. I don’t enjoy the process of packing. (Does anyone? Probably these guys like packing!) I get anxiety when standing over an empty suitcase, trying to figure what out should go inside it. But, I push through this not-so-fun process so I can get on with my adventure. (Also, I have to admit, my wife does a lot of this for me.)

For this adventure, packing is 1000x as stressful! We had (thankfully past tense) an entire house to purge in order to 1) reduce our belongings to what was worth storing, 2) clearing out the house for sale, and 3) identify what we needed for our van and our trip.

Job prep is another not-so-fun but very necessary part of making a vacation happen. It seems funny to have to work more just so that you can “take time off” but the sad reality is it’s unavoidable, especially if you’re a salaried employee.  When we took a month to visit Southeast Asia, I had a lot of office work to get in front of. That meant a few 12 hours days.

For this adventure, because we both left our jobs, we had a good amount of quitting-related tasks. Thankfully, we decided to put a hold on seeking remote contractor work, just to focus on our ambitious plan. If opportunity knocks though, this might change!

I’m not sure if this falls into not-so-fun; sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. There’s a lot of shopping involved in a big transition like this. And, because we want the biggest bang for our buck, and we don’t want to spend too many bucks, that entails a LOT of researching. Reviews, price comparisons, technical specs, and so much more!

For our adventure, these are things like:

• The van!!!
• Materials and supplies for the van conversion
• Gear for the blog (and for our own entertainment, of course)
• Recreational items like a surfboard and a guitar

But . . .

I must remember: getting all of this done is part of the process. It’s part of earning those long, lazy days hanging out on the beach in Mexico. It’s not “a necessary evil.” It’s much more than that. The not-so-fun prep stuff is part of the trip, it’s the first part of our adventure.

When we made the decisions to sell all our possessions and move into a van and boondock from Mexico to Panama, we didn’t only commit ourselves to a beachy paradise; we also committed ourselves to the (journey of) preparing for that trip. Preparation and lounging on the beach are just pieces of the same big journey. We can’t have one without the other. When we signed up for one, we signed up for the other.

So, when I say:

Sign me up for a year traveling across Mexico and Central America in a home on wheels.

What I’m actually saying (or committing to) is:

Sign me up for interviewing various realtors, re-doing our flooring, scrolling Autotrader.com for days and days, selling/trading/gifting outgrown belongings, and the list goes on.

I say this not for your benefit, dear reader, but my own. Driving to Temecula early on a Monday only to find that the van we intended to buy was a hunk of junk is just one part of the journey that we’ve signed up for. It’s all part of the same process. It’s all part of the same journey.

We’ll keep you posted on our journey. In the meantime, what have been your memorable journeys?