Packed and Moved Out

Well, it's so long to the old apartment. At 2:30 PM today we closed the door behind us and left the apartment shining clean, with the keys on the mantelpiece for the landlord. It was a rushed goodbye, which was sad, but we were also ready to get going. It's been such a long journey to here, where we have only one more full day in the U.S. So it was in the gray rain of Portland that we said farewell to the apartment where I have lived for a year and a few months (only a year?!), and where Matt lived with me for the past two and a half months. My garden, tomatoes in full swing, was left behind, but we harvested two petite heads of purple cabbage and two Sunshine squash before we left, so we will be eating those tomorrow. It was such a nice place to live, such a beautiful house and a lovely garden space, and so convenient to my work and all my friends' homes. But life moves on, and now Matt and I are both officially unemployed and homeless! We had a good chuckle about that today, since everyone thinks it is so cool what we are going, but technically we have no jobs and nowhere to live!

After a rather trying day of everything running behind schedule, a run-in with an incredibly rude tow-truck driver who tried to tow away the van as we were unloading it into our storage unit, and several failed errands, we finally got back to where we are staying, showered, and then headed out to happy hour with a good friend. Now I am back here, and Matt has headed to his dad's to finish his last surfboard for awhile. A post on that will come next!

Here are a few photos of our whole packing process:

The apartment packed up and ready to be moved:

It is somewhat humbling and also surreal to see your entire life packed away into a very small room. It took quite a bit of work to fit it all in and manage to still close the door!:

The apartment cleaned and turned back over to the landlord. Sad, but we have a new road now:

Here are the packs that are coming with us to New Zealand. We are bringing these, plus my carry on purse/bike bag and a day pack. That is it, for eight months! Oh my. 

(My pack looks so small here. It will have quite a bit more packed into it by the time we get on the plane. And yes, I have a flag patch for every country I have been to).

We have been working so hard, and such long hours, that my job already seems a thing of the distant past, which makes me sad, and now the reality of the trip is starting to sink in, most especially the fact of how little we are taking with us! I am glad we have honed it down to packs and one carry on apiece, as it will make life much easier when we are not hauling around a suitcase as well. Tomorrow I will be making a trip to the central bank downtown for some New Zealand currency, switching the utilities on the apartment out of my name, sorting out all of our documents and making sure we have our passports and visas and such in the right places and copies of everything left with Matt's mother. We will have a family dinner with Matt's family tomorrow night, and then breakfast and lunch with various friends on Saturday. We will be at the Portland Airport around 4:30 PM on Saturday, and then it's off to the other side of the world! It's almost here!