T-Minus Thirty Days

Today is December 4th, which means at around 9am exactly 30 days from now I'll be aboard a plane slowly climbing out of Vancouver airport and heading towards Houston. I have a six hour layover in Houston airport, after which I'll be boarding an evening 10.5 hour flight for Buenos Aires, Argentina, arriving around 9am in the morning there. So, a full 24 hours of traveling from airport to airport.

This last month has been quite stressful. It's one thing to move from one apartment to another, but a different experience entirely moving from one apartment to no-where. Instead of transferring items such as tenant insurance, I am instead cancelling them, and the procedures are generally more involved. Same for cable, hydro, car insurance, etc.

The one thing I would have done differently is that I probably would have rented a U-haul truck and tried to get most of the move done in a single day. Instead I rented my storage locker a month early and made trips to it whenever I had some time or a family member with a truck was around. The problem with that is that it takes a crappy event (i.e. moving) and spreads it out over far too long a time. For the $50 or whatever it would have cost me to rent a truck, I think it would have been the better option.

I also have been having some hard times with my previous landlord. I'm not entirely sure what's going to happen with my damage deposit, but at this point I don't really care to be honest. I just want to have that experience behind me so that I can start getting excited about my upcoming trip.

I rented a nice hotel room in Vancouver from January 2nd until the 4th. I'm planning on spending my last few days in Canada relaxing in a hotel, and bouncing around Vancouver to do a little bit of shopping. I may even hit up a sushi restaurant or two, since I doubt I'll find good sushi anywhere else in the world on my trip, other than Japan of course (which I've been to before).

I would like to actually visit Japan again to be honest. Last time I was there I spent nine full days in Tokyo, and didn't get a chance to visit anything else. For some strange reason, I've always wanted to visit Hiroshima and pay my respects to the people who lost their life there. I'm not a huge history buff, and I don't know the entire circumstances surrounding any of the two world wars, but I've always found the amount of destruction and the loss of life that occurred in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to be extremely sad. So I would like to visit both of those cities if I can manage it.

I'm not fully excited about the trip yet - I still have a lot to do to tie off my life here in such a way that I can easily pick it back up again. But I'm started to think more and more about the actual departure date, which is quickly approaching. I'll be on holidays from December 18th until my trip, so I'm hoping the magnitude of the adventure will start sinking in during that period.

Four weeks to go.