Not Even Gone Yet: Cindy's Perspective

The preparation stage is very telling of the trip to come.  Cheech and I couldn't have a more different approach to life!  I need to prepare for ANYTHING months in advance. I was that obnoxious conscientious student who always turned in my assignments early.  Cheech needs to plan hours days in advance.  This can be challenging for even the strongest of couples, hence my our brilliant idea:  I plan the first half of the trip, Cheech plans the second half of the trip. 

Here is what it looks like so far.  I have created a spreadsheet of the first 15 days of our trip.  It lives online, in each of our emailed in boxes, and as a printed hard copy reference page.  The spreadsheet contains each date, where we will sleep, the address and phone number of the person/place where we are staying, how many miles we will travel that day, how long it should take for us to get to our destination, and interesting sites along the way.

Now I realize that this makes me look highly neurotic organized.  Let me just say in my defense, as a former Girl Scout, I was trained to be prepared.  I was a quick study... need I say more?  O.K. I will, FEMA should come to me for training.

As per our agreement, I am pretending to throwing caution to the wind throwing caution to the wind and accepting that the second half of the trip will be an exercise in improvisation.   How am I doing with this, you ask?  I have secretly looked a possible routes, places to stay, places of interest, AirBandB possibilities, etc.  I am faithfully honoring the parameters of this grand experiment!  I will face the second (totally unplanned) half of the trip fearfully fearlessly.

We are but a few days away from leaving.  My mind is racing with a myriad of "to do's".  I sweetly ask Cheech, "Should I go shopping for some food/snacks to take along?"  Cheech responds, "Nope, no need."  (He 's very wordy as you can see.)  My response, "O.K".  (I am learning new communication styles from him every year that we are married.)

My second response to this lengthy conversation is to go to Trader Joe's and pick up not one but two bags of snacks for the trip.  In my defense let me just say that I consider consequences.   What if we get stranded in a snow storm along the way?  That has been known to happen in Southern California in July, hasn't it?   What if it takes longer than we expected to get from one isolated place to another?  I would hate to think that the California highway patrol will find our emaciated corpses somewhere in downtown Santa Barbara.  Now all I have to do is sneak load the bags into a convenient place in our car and we will be off on our excellent adventure.