BootsnAll Travel Community

I am now in the process of packing up my whole house and putting stuff in storage - we'll be taking of in two months to ride our bikes from Alaska to Argentina and expect to be gone for 2 1/2 - 3 years. I've been surprised at how difficult it's been to pack/sell some of our stuff.

One of the hardest was selling off the kids' trampoline. It's been a fixture in the yard for years now and the kids used it almost every single day - unless it was raining or there was snow piled on it. It's hard to see it go.

But by far the hardest has been to pack up my beads, knowing I won't see them again for another three (or more) years. I've been doing beadwork for 20 years and beads are such a huge part of my life - it just can't imagine NOT having beads all around me. Yes, I will take a small box of beads with me, but it won't be the same as having all my treasures from around the world surrounding me. I blogged about all my conflicting emotions here: http://familyonbikes.org/blog/?p=178#comments

So - have you found any surprises as you're packing up? Any regrets? I know that once we get on the road, I'll be just fine - it's just now watching all my lovelies make the journey to the barn in a box... it's tough.

I hear ya...just the thought of selling some of my stuff, leaving some with freinds is hard on me. I know its just "stuff" but the emotions behind it are real and I feel very very selfish at this point. I don't feel like giving my stuff away or sell it at loss.

I know in the end once i do it i will not look back but the process of even putting a list together of what to sell and what to keep is very hard for me. I'm leaving my future open..not sure when I will be back in the US ..so not sure if I will ever use this stuff again. I have to draw out a decision tree i guess.

I can relate to the packing though it's been some years since I packed everything up for the long trip.

I just remember the mistake I made. I was thinking to put breakable things near the tops of boxes, but I forgot I would be stacking them. I lost some hangable stained glass which cracked under the weight of boxes above it.

I'm trying to simplify my posessions now since I know I'll be moving from mainland US to Hawaii in 3-5 years (and hopefully an RTW around then if I can swing it.) I keep finding odd things I've forgotten in closets - lots of my son's drawings from his preschool years and notes from his preschool teachers just turned up last week.

One cool thing was that we turned in all our pennies that we'd accumulated over the years and it turned out we had $147 dollars - that's a lot of pennies.

Like you say, I'm sure you'll be fine when you're traveling though I'm sure you'll miss things from time to time. I have always missed my books when I'm travelling.

We've sold a lot of stuff because we aren't really sure when we will be back either. If all goes well with this 2 1/2 years, we'll probably keep going. A lot of the stuff we've packed down is stuff that we'll need at SOME point - I'm sure we will have at least an apartment at some point in the future. Given that storage isn't costing us anything, it isn't a big deal to store it. If we were having to pay, I'm sure I would be looking at things differently though.