And let's get going first...

The preparations for going on vacation are usually enough for me. Now we had to clear out our entire apartment, stack all our belongings in one room, leaving the necessary things outside for the last few weeks and of course the things we wanted to take with us. The last things needed to be bought for our 6-month trip and I don't know how we would have managed it all without the help of our neighbors. For the last few days before we left, our two children were almost exclusively with them, or of course at daycare and school. I will forever be grateful to our neighbors for that! It would certainly have happened that way, but it would have caused all of our stress levels to shoot through the roof more often than not.

The afternoon before our flight we actually started packing the things we had collected over the last few days into our backpacks. Our poor planning was already on our feet here, because the children's backpacks that we wanted to take with us as hand luggage were far too small for the things that were supposed to fit in them. Well, we needed a solution and since leaving at home wasn't really an option, as there were a ton of school books and very important electronics, Márton went out to buy three new backpacks and I continued packing while I did. We wanted to bring our luggage to the airport on the same day because our flight was very early in the morning and we had to get up very early anyway. Of course, this put additional pressure on us. In the end, as always with us, there was pure stress... unfortunately... and when our neighbors from the house stood in front of our door to say goodbye, or rather to say goodbye to us, we had no head, no time, no thought free to relax for a moment, really experience the moment and say goodbye the way I at least would have wanted. To our neighbors we must have seemed like a bunch of chickens who suspected the fox was somewhere, even though there were only two of us, because Márton had just returned with the backpacks. So there were our neighbors out of the house, our other neighbors were also bringing our children back and we were in the middle of it all. It quickly became clear to everyone that we were just functioning and trying to ensure that this trip didn't fail because we started traveling. So we were quickly alone with our chaos again and Márton was on his way to the airport with our luggage faster than expected. A weight was lifted from my heart when I received the news from Márton that he had actually managed to check in our backpacks. Now suddenly the distant journey became more and more of a reality.

We put the kids to sleep in their beds for the last time and tidied up the rest of the apartment until one night we found time to book a hotel room for the first night of our trip. Cartagena, Colombia. It felt so far away, our apartment, which had never been so empty and tidy since it existed... I missed it already.

So many things that we had planned, organized and done in the last few months, all with the aim of getting going. The huge mountain of to-do's had melted and lay behind us like the ocean that would lie between our home and us from tomorrow.

Now there was only one thing left for us to do, try to sleep. Three hours later we woke up our children, removed like thieves our last traces of the apartment that would serve someone else for six months, shouldered our luggage, silently left our apartment and took a taxi through the night towards our adventure.