Planning, planning, planning... but not too much

Ok, so all long trips (and even short ones) require some planning. I read a beautiful story about a couple from Montreal who went on a road trip very similar to the one we ourselves would like to do, and they say they spent years planning it. Indeed, you should never rush into those adventures... but then again, especially for this trip, we wanted freedom. So how do you do it?

The first big obstacle is a career. We both had good jobs, but you can't just take a 5-month vacation anytime. So, we warned our respective bosses that we would be leaving in May, and we planned all of our trip and workload around that.

Not having kids has also made it easier to just start selling everything until we had only our condo owner's sofa-bed in the living room for the last few days. Wasn't the best thing in the world, but hey, we could feel D-Day coming!

We wanted to make sure we had as much info as possible, such as opening-closing times, price, description, to help us choose last minute!

Then, there was also the question of where to go. So we just sat down, looked at a map of North America, and made a note of the cities we wanted to visit. Then I created a Word document to remember as much as possible about the different activities and restaurants in each place. This way, we can choose what we want to do on a daily basis, and if we need reservations, we can plan 2-3 days in advance. This trip is really teaching us to "let it go" and just act on our mood of the day!

Another point to consider was: how do we actually do it? A few criteria were: 1. we need something that's fun to drive (we'll be spending a lot of time driving), 2. that will allow us to sleep anywhere (for flexibility, since we don't want to book hotels in advance), 3. that will be big enough for our things, but small enough to drive in a city. And that's how we chose the Highlander from Toyota. The seats took up a lot of space though, so we removed the second row captain seats and made a plywood platform instead! You can take a look at the process in the pictures below.

The next step was just buying the bare necessities (cooler, foam mattress topper, camping stove, bear spray, bandages, etc.).

Goodbye, old life!

Finally, after making sure we had nothing but what's necessary, packing everything in the car, and bringing the superfluous stuff to the in-laws, it was finally time to leave Quebec City! Starting May 15th, we are now homeless and jobless, but hey, for us, in the following months, home is where you park it! ;)