When was the last time you felt prepared?

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I’m trying to think of the last time I woke up and faced a day feeling prepared, but nothing comes to mind.

We’ve spent months preparing. I can draw you a map of our route from memory. I can recite the cities we will visit in each state highlighting our excitement for Idaho and Montana and our lack of excitement for Fargo, North Dakota. We’ve had our motorhome inspected multiple times and talked over every aspect of rv living with our rv park neighbors. All of the wedding items are returned, all of my furniture removed from my apartment, and everything I own packed into boxes or carefully arranged into small white cabinets.

By all accounts, we are truly prepared to hit the road.

The past few days Heath and I exhausted ourselves trying to run last minute errands and prep the motorhome for take off. It took us a full day longer than expected. We still needed to do x, y, and z before we could hit the road.

And then suddenly, we were on the open road cruising through the hill country.  Somewhere in the middle of nowhere between Austin and Fredericksburg, we talked about how unprepared we felt. We slowly shook off the stress of our preparations, but we couldn’t shake the feeling of being unprepared.

Our dream is an actuality now.

We are on this road trip.

We are sitting at a picnic table in an rv park in Texas wine country writing and sipping on coffee listening to a full chorus of birds chirping.

None of it feels quite real. There was no grand send off with the masses cheering us into our new adventure. No theatrics, nothing spectacular, heck we didn’t even drive off into the sunset.

I have that feeling deep inside me, the same one you feel when you’re pulling into the airport parking lot about to go on vacation. Did you remember deodorant? Did you lock your doors? Where did you leave your keys?

And even if you did all of those things, you feel faintly unprepared for the days ahead. You don’t know what to expect next.

The uneasy feeling reminds me that we don’t know what will happen tomorrow, nor do we know how today will end. As hard as we try to prepare, we cannot control.

I cannot control if we will spend July 4^th in Portland. I cannot control if we are home by Christmas or if we run into car trouble or if we can’t make it up a mountain.

Maybe that’s why I never feel prepared and why we say things like we’re as ready as we’ll ever be. When walking into tests, or interviews, or leaving on vacations, regardless of preparation, you cannot control the outcome. You can only prepare.

Heath and I are as prepared as we will ever be for this road trip. We have a Tempurpedic mattress and chair massager, so there’s really nothing else we could even want. We don’t have plans for how to spend our day or how to spend tomorrow, but I think we’re both okay with that.

Every day we live, for the duration of our trip and hopefully beyond, will filled with whimsy and adventure. We’ll plan ahead, but we won’t try to control our days or force them to follow a schedule. It is terrifying and freeing and just the beginning.