Always en route

Some couples meet, fall in love, have children and live happily ever after. We're unfortunately not one of those couples. We met, fell in love, felt no desire at all to reproduce and thus pass on our admittedly superior genes, but we did fall in love again. This time with traveling... And what an expensive passion it has turned out to be.

We may not be funding private school fees, au pairs and occupational therapy, but we have been funding flights, cruises, train trips, snowmobiles, scooters, buses, boats, quadbikes and many, many adventures. And the problem with going on wild adventures? They make you want to go on even wilder adventures in further flung places. All of which can bankrupt you if you're trying to fund them from South Africa on the rand.

As much as we love our very beautiful country and everything (well almost everything) about it, we don't love:

1. Being trapped in planes full of germ-breathing strangers, hunched up in tiny seats for 10-18 hours to get somewhere new and exciting.
2. Constantly having to mentally convert every cent we spend overseas, back to rands just so we can get acid indigestion when we realize we're paying a hundred bucks for a beer.

Also, for two people who really want to live their lives to the absolute limit and experience as much as we possibly can, and see as much of our beautiful planet as we possibly can (before our time or its time runs out because, let's face it, life is damn short), living in Joburg is not ideal. Stephen is up before dawn every week morning so that he can miss the worst of the traffic. He gets home late too. We both work hard, are way too stressed most of the time, and are always counting sleeps until the moment when we manage to save enough to leave Joburg. Sounds crazy, doesn't it?

We thought so too.

Which is why we decided to take the terrifying leap and sell our home, quit our jobs, leave all of our (amazing, loving, supportive) friends and family, and sell everything we own in order to move to a city we've never visited, where we don't know a sweet blessed soul, and where we don't have jobs or a home.

All in the name of that elusive yet captivating harlot... adventure.

By starting off our world travels in Toronto, we get to:

1. Live somewhere that isn't Joburg. How sad that we're 36 and have never lived anywhere else. Not even Durban or Cape Town or Pitsonderwater. Okay, I lie... I lived I'm Cartonville as a sprog. Woo hoo!
2. Earn a strong currency to fund our travels.
3. Be an hour and a half from New York (our happy place) and shitloads closer to just about everywhere else.
4. Live in a beautiful country that we'll get to explore extensively.
5. Send many tearful texts and mails to all our wonderful family and friends telling them how much we miss them and begging them to come visit. The begging has apparently worked as we already have 3 confirmed visits to look forward to. Yay!
6. Get to say "ey" at the end of every sentence.
7. Pay with loonies and toonies.

Oh, and don't forget that we now won't just blog three times a year, we'll get to blog every day :-)

As excited as we are about this new adventure, we're also very, very sad. I don't think two people were ever so blessed with having such special people in their lives, and the thought of leaving them is especially painful. So we're not going to think about it for now.

Planning a move across the world is luckily quite time consuming, so we'll focus on the logistics of that instead. The next three months of blogging will focus on the planning and preparations (the agony and ecstasy), and then on the 2nd of July, the adventure will begin.

Damn, but we love being en route :-)






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