The last time my townhouse was this empty (and this clean :)), was at the very end of 2017 when I returned from my last big trip. The cleaning crew spent five hours and did a good job. I also had carpeting steam cleaned.

I have moved most everything I won’t need on the road into storage. As shown below, I almost completely filled a rented storage locker including a backup bicycle. Surprising all those “things” I think are important for daily life. I donated and threw away a bunch but will have more on my return.

I have a sense of renewal on doing these trips. As shown in photo below, my badge, my laptop and everything from work has been labeled and saved away in a box. It was somehow satisfying to go through my work Outlook calendar and delete off all those various meetings I was attending every week – that calendar hasn’t been as empty since 2018 either! An important part of my role involves communication and in a matrix type organization there can be a surprisingly high part of my work week. I can wait until I return and then take a “zero based calendar” approach only adding back meetings as I understand how they help me or my team be more productive.

It was bittersweet leaving work. I enjoy the people I work with and they did a great job with a send off card and cake. However, also excited because it means the trip is one step closer. So the people/team part of work, I’ll look forward to returning in six months.

Also posed on that box is a pager that I’ve kept around since Y2K days. This was before cell phones were widely used so our group at work had two people on rotating “pager duty” in case any urgent problems were found with our product (a debugger based on gdb). Those calls never came and other than test calls or wrong numbers for previous pager users it was quiet. I didn’t really like being “on call” to respond to the wrong #s, but disliked assigning this duty to my team members even more – so carried one of those pagers most of the time.

To me, those pagers symbolized the always “on call” nature of some of our work. On a previous trip around Australia in 2001, I took one of those pagers and waited until I was far away in the outback and then chucked it away underneath a road culvert. I still have the other one below but am considering whether to find a similar symbolic resting place or keep it for a while longer.

Also started packing for my trip. One may wonder why wait to the last day to pack. There are three reasons. First, in a land of Walmart and Amazon Prime lockers, I am never very far from getting something I may have forgotten. Second, every pound I carry is extra weight to pedal up hills, so I don’t want to bring much. Finally, I already have most everything from past tours and trips. So when I was putting everything into storage – I also set aside some containers with bike stuff. So packing is mostly going through containers to pick what I want to bring.