The Final Preparations (NEW YORK CITY)

Leaving is hard work, and soon we will be saying goodbye for now to New York.

The last two weeks have been hectic; finishing work, cleaning the apartment and purchasing the final gear which we assume we would need. With some great advise from our friends I think we managed to prepare ourselves properly, now we still need to fit everything in our car! :-)

Hester quit working last week Wednesday which allowed her some time to wander through the city and visit some places she wanted to go to before leaving. This weekend we decided to bring a last visit to some of the city's well known highlights: Times Square, Central Park, Flat Iron and so on. It's different now, because we start to feel more like a tourist again and feel ourselves surprised again when turning a corner to find a new spot.

Thanks to John and Josien we were lucky to have a place to crash while we sold most of our furniture and cleaned out our apartment. "Special thanks to you guys!". I've noticed that we collected quite some stuff over the past couple years. Despite what everyone is saying we sold almost everything via Craigslist. I now hope that everything we decided to keep will fit in the car. When I see it laying around in the apartment, it feels like a lot.

Tomorrow, on the day we leave, I'm also signing of from my work, which after 4,5 years has been a great experience and is something I look back on with a lot of positive feelings.

As you currently are experiencing, another thing we worked on is our Blog. We tried to set-up something that's easy to use and allowed us a little more features then just the standard travel blogs which are available. As you can see in the travel map section, we highlighted our global overall travel plan. It's not written in stone yet whether we are doing the full ride, but this is high level what we intend to do. We strongly encourage you to contribute, if there are spots along the route you think are great to visit then please let us know!

Another thing that I've been saying a lot is that I would start making some Vlogs. It's something slightly out of my comfortzone, but I'm definitively going to give it a try. I see myself (for the Dutch readers) placing the map on the hood of the car telling you where we travel to that week, just like in "3 op reis". We'll see if that's going to happen.

Tonight we will close off our New York chapter, by visiting one of our favorite restaurants. It's going to be the last time for a while that we'll be enjoying a more expensive dinner, because after tonight we will be living on a shoestring :-)!