Friends,
I am one day from taking a very long flight over the Atlantic to London and then down to Tenerife in the Canary Islands to see my cousin there. On Saturday, we will fly from Tenerife over to Grand Canaria where we will spend the night. Sunday, we will catch a short flight across the archipelago to Marrakech, Morocco where a Riad will be waiting. This 4-day excursion will be epic and find us wandering the Medina, taking a hammam, and riding a camel out through the Sahara to the Atlas Mountains. Our adventures will continue back in Tenerife for the following weekend wandering the city of Santa Cruz and exploring Spanish colonial architecture in places like Santa Helena, Puerto de la Cruz, and La Laguna. Surely, there will be time for a drive up Mt. Teide that rises up through 6 temperate zones to over 14 thousand feet. The views are spectacular and otherworldly.
I have traveled all over the world but planning for this trip has been unlike any other. For the first time, in all my travels, I found the need to prepare a last Will and Testament. I don’t know why, maybe prodding from my wife or just some deeper sense of mortality. Admittedly, I have slowed from the weight of years finally making me weak in the legs. So at first, I figured it made sense to create an emergency contact sheet, you know, with grandma’s phone number, and aunt Becky, and Shawna, and friends and other practical numbers like the vet hospital because we have two dogs and two cats. As I begin to form this list, it dawns on me that in the event that anything were to happen, there is other information that the kids need to have access to. Things like insurance and retirement accounts to level set all matters of business on a clean slate. Man! What a rabbit hole it turned out to be gathering account numbers, usernames, passwords, banking, investments, HSA’s… you get the picture.
The plan is simple: Pack light, get comfortable, be practical, think nomadic, and be cheerful and kind with gratitude.
~thompson