I think this has been the most stressful run-up to a trip since Kate and I started traveling together. More than a month ahead of our departure we were both already so keyed up we were dosing on our favorite soporific - Tylenol PM, in the little blue pills - just to sleep through the night. I was concerned about whether I was going to get all the loose ends tied up with gear, bikes and electronics, and Kate was worried about stuff like paying our property tax bills from India, contracting Japanese Encephalitis or getting flattened by a TATA long-hauler.
I pulled my now-traditional all-nighter - why not, if we're flying through 12 time zones? - wherein I finally did the actual packing of my panniers, pulled the backup drives out of our computers for safekeeping, and squeezed in a few last minute crafts projects involving epoxy glue and our cool new Brother sewing machine. In the morning we both tried to eat some oatmeal for breakfast but nothing tasted right and we gave it up as a bad job.
The last thing we did before Stephen picked us up for the drive to the airport was to seal up the bike boxes, which we'd had to bring down into our warm basement since the packing tape wouldn't stick to the cardboard in the minus-digit overnight temperatures. In fact, the cold snap we'd had recently in the 20's with a dump of snow to boot really played havoc with our bike preparations, since we weren't able to do any test rides with them fully loaded on our new rack systems. So we're just crossing our fingers until we get to New Delhi - only 19 hours and one stopover in Newark away on Continental - where we've given ourselves a few days at a nice guesthouse to get our feet on the ground, discover what we forgot to bring and sort out the rest of the details - such as our itinerary!
