You don’t need to be sure about everything but one thing: Whatever happens, you will be able to handle it.
Changes will always bring uncertainty, and depending on how big the changes are, they will lead to more or less uncertainty. Now, how much this uncertainty can limit you, it is your choice.
Philosophy apart, let’s get down to the details of “day 0”.
💼 Preparing the departure
The departure date was set to 11/Jan by the time we communicated to the landlord that we were leaving. It started with a To-Do list to be checked in 3 months.
- Renovate the apartment before moving out;
- Carefully select the things we would take with us;
- Sell or give away all the remaining;
- Turn the camper into a remote working station;
- Define the route;
- Go!
Seems a small list, but when you start to unfold you realize that each item above deserves its own blog post! 😅
🛣 Where to go ?
Well, we didn’t spend much time defining routes, only some guidelines.
- We don’t want to feel cold;
- We are not in a hurry so we don’t need to spend too much time driving — 3 hs top.
With that set, to run away from the cold we decided to go to Spain 🇪🇸
🚀 Departure
When we left the apartment we basically got everything that we thought we couldn’t live without, AKA ‘the essential’, tucked them in the car, and ‘adios’ Milan.
The plan then was:
- Go and get ‘Marmita’ 🚍 (our camper) in the remessaggio (parking) and
- Stop by in Pavia to delivery the car we sold (we had a Qubo Fiat).
Once we started loading the camper, that from now on I will call “Marmita”, we realized that things wouldn’t fit by any chance. It was time to leave, not too much time to think, so we just threw everything inside!
Load the water tank, get the toilet ready, run the final tests to check if everything is working fine and go!
- Marmita engine ✅
- Lights and heater ✅
- Gas ✅
- Water loaded ✅
- Testing the water pump and it didn’t work ❌
- Testing electricity connection and it didn’t work ❌
Again, we were running out of time, we had an appointment to transfer the car document and deliver it in the agency. I would care to say that the departure was a success, in the sense that we managed to leave on time, but not optimal since we left with some homework to be done.
The way to Pavia was pretty smooth, the car was delivered, and soon after we were completely on the road on our own. Despite the pending things to fix, and to put in place, what a nice feeling!
The good
We managed to departure on time with no show stoppers.
The bad
As always, in the nick of the time, we had so many things to do, and that created a bit of tension. Also, our dog Lasanha, that is a bit old (11 years next April) is now with backache, many visits to the vet before departing, which also added a bit of stress and worries on top.
What did we learn?
Stick to the plan
Despite the obstacles in the way, we managed to depart as planned — Getting things moving is important, when the initial inertia is broken, things inevitable will start to happen. Priorities will be adjusted by necessity until it stabilizes.
Shit happens all the time
Being prepared is not a guarantee that shit won’t happen, but can bring peace of mind once it happens.
For this trip we tried to plan as much as we could.
- Double battery system for work
- 2 water pumps
- A small camping oven, just in case
- Fuses
- And the list goes on with things we have a backup of
Day zero, the pump didn’t work, in my mind, I was pretty sure that I would have it sorted out by repairing or changing, but turned out that the pipes were only frozen, after a while, it started working.
What is next?
We have now been on the road for 30 days. In the next post we will describe how this first month looked like and what we expect for the next 30 days to come.
