It's The Final Countdown

I have been promising for a while now to start blogging daily and to be honest I had the best of intentions starting last week after the amazing event thrown for Sunrise Day Camp by my drama club Alumni.

However, my once carefully crafted plans went awry and with all the preparations for our departure this Friday I wasn't able to get that going until this past weekend.  But to say we're only six days away from seemed sort of anticlimactic so I decided to wait until today so I could say we only had five days to go! 

Now this is not to be confused with the group Five for Fighting whose single "100 Years can be seen here.   Of course to be hquite honest, after 74 days in a mini van, we may have to rename the Connor Clan to "Five for Fighting"!  Its already getting a little tense around the household as we realize we are nowhere near as ready to do this as we had thought.

I don't mean the cycling part.  I've been logging hundreds of miles a week since the beginning of May in order to get myself fit.  I've been riding in all sorts of weather - including the rain - to get myself in condition.  The bike is tuned up and supplies have been purchased to make sure Pearl is ready to go.  Its all the other things that need to be done and as the clock tickes inexorably closer to departure, we find ourselves (okay, just Amy and me) sleeping less as we wake up in the middle of the night remembering things we need to do, staying up much later trying to pack or plan or reroute and generally realizing that we have no idea how to live in mini van for a summer.

This past weekend was pretty much spent doing all the little chores that should have been done a long time ago.  For instance, I finally fixed the sink in the downstairs bathroom.  Its been leaking for a while but if you twist the handle to the left just right it stops.  Well, since we have someone house sitting for us (another source of stress that was finally relieved as we FINALLY found a wonderful young lady who will be taking care of our cat with the magical purr) who won't make this action an automatic reflex, I had to fix the cartridge that was inside.  But on Saturday I got the wrong part at the local hardware store so EARLY Sunday morning I had to go to Home Depot and get the right one.  Once that was finally finished (which entailed taking the one upstairs apart to see how the model went back together because I couldn't remember where all the little parts went that I took out) I tackled drywalling the ceiling of the upstairs bathroom, yes, the same drywall that has been living on my porch for two months when I first started THAT project.

After enlisting Amy and then first Marci and later our friends Rita and Carla, two sheets of drywall were finally screwed to the ceiling of our upstairs bathroom.  And it was 8 o'clock at night - where did the weekend go?!?!  So much for separating all of my bike tools into what is going and what gets left behind.

And the other problem has been trying to book all the hotels/hostels/motels/friends' houses where we'll be staying where we'll be staying this summer.  Amy has pretty much spent most of her time since Saturday morning trying to take care of this task and she's only a quarter done.  And yes, we both realize we should have done this earlier.

I guess we were both living in a state of denial and disbelief that this would finally take place as a family project.  Up until about a week ago when we found someone to take care of Lily , we were sort of thinking I would have to do this by myself in an unsupported fashion.  Although I am so relieved and happy to say that won't be the case, I guess we didn't really plan for all the things we should have if we had just been planning on it all along.  I can't be totally certain about Amy, but I know that for me there are moments when I am running around shrieking at the top of my lungs like a total lunatic - at least in my head.  Which I'm sure is probably crazier than if I actually physically did it.

So we leave in five days and we are feverishly trying to take care of all the little things.  I'll keep you updated as to how that is going!

The other part of this blog post is to tell all of you who have been expressing an interest in following us that this will indeed be the place where you can stay aprised of our journey.  Starting with our next entry, I'm going to start paring down my verbage to a basic update of the day's events, hight points, perhaps include some photo or video of our journey and that will pretty much be how it evolves.  For those of you who have enjoyed my stream-of-consciousness meanderings, I thank you for your support and I'm glad if they entertained you in some small part.

Even though the new entries will be a much more straight forward log and record  of the day's events, I hope to still keep your curiosity (especially those of you who have the morbid kind) piqued by engaging in two logs that will be updated at the end of each blog entry.  One we are calling "Flattened Fauna" and, per my environmenatlly conscious daughter's suggestion, through it we can keep track of the particular migratory challenges faced by particular species as they "try to cross the road".  Sarah figures this will be a great record of what wildlife is native to a certain area and perhaps see if roads have made incursions into their natural habitat, thereby causing a danger to their survival.

 The other log we will be keeping we don't have a cool alliterative term for.  If any of you think of one, let us know but here is what we are tracking - the unuusal household objects we find abandoned by the side of the road.  Think of all th things that fall off of the tops of cras, the backs of trucks, off of scooters, what have you that just get left there - sofas, mattresses, refrigerators, chairs, etcs.   The idea being to see what we could have brought back to Long Island had we been pulling a trailer and loaded it up with all of this ecologically damaging stuff.

So that's it in a nutshell - I've already used up my allotted time to update this blog and my cruel taskmistress is wanting me to go back to work - there is lots to pack before we leave, and lots to pack before we leave (with apologies to Robert Frost).

Aaaaannnnddd, being a somewhat reluctantly admitted child of the 80's, here is the song that keeps playing over and over in my head - it IS the final countdown - five days to go!