A quick update before writing about a couple recent trips to Magog, Quebec and Quebec City – both of which were terrific.
We started planning pretty far in advance and that has worked out great for us. It’s given me a chance to really work on the main online business – and that is now in such a state that we likely won’t need to rely on any savings. Revenue from The Hockey Writers has really taken off over the past year. Still, we’ve been able to put aside a nice cushion so that we shouldn’t have any financial concerns on the trip. Big relief there.
Just a little over 10 months away now and considering we started planning over a year and a half ago, it’s really starting to feel close. We’ve started testing some clothing & equipment, bought our packs, sorted out savings/credit cards and such, renewed passports, etc. Next steps will be learning about home schooling, getting our vaccinations and doing a couple more mini-trips to further look at our gear. Baharak & I discussed the fact that we’ll very likely buy and ditch a bunch of items a few weeks into the trip anyways, so we need to worry too much about getting all the clothing etc. right.
We made a great decision with our Osprey Farpoints, our backpacks. We’ve now tested them on a couple
small trips and they seem perfect for our needs. Just the right size and super comfortable. We walked a couple of kilometers, mostly uphill, from the train station in Quebec City up to our hotel by the Plains of Abraham and the bags were quite easy to carry.
Baharak has really started to enjoy photography with her iPhone and is getting into using Instagram. We’ll start focusing on building the website up and gearing up our social accounts. We’ll also begin our search for a couple families to join us on Great Let’s Go. I’ll write up a new post on that but in short, we’d like to have ourselves and 2 or 3 other couples or families share their travel experiences on this site. A perfect fit would be somebody looking for a website to use to share stories & images with family & friends, make some new connections and help us to build a strong resource for fellow travelers without having the need to worry about the technical side of running a site or the marketing. Fortunately I have plenty of experience on that front.
Everything is still a go for our 13 month adventure. Looking to depart from Montreal to New York City in early June 2016, then on to London and Europe around the 23rd of June. Starting to get very exciting indeed.