And so the adventure begins…
Yuki and I spent the last week packing up all of our possessions into boxes for storage. What we didn’t want to keep, we sold — everything from large furniture to a can opener. In total, we recovered $1,700 for our travel fund. The big ticket items were the furniture, PS4, and TV, which we were sad to part with.
We are fortunate to have some very good friends who were willing to store our boxes while we travel. This is saving us an estimated $1,000 or more in storage fees.
Once we had moved everything out of our apartment, we spent the next day scrubbing it down. We helped overfill the dumpster in the building and the next day we checked out after a successful final inspection. We are leaving our apartment 4 years later. It is arguably the best place we’ve lived in Vancouver overall, considering cost, convenience, space, and landlord.
With 12 hours until our flight at 2AM, we went to the mall to purchase some gifts and do some banking. We also checked out the new Muji store at Metrotown, but that didn’t take long and so we read some books at Chapters. Perhaps for the first time in recent experience, we discovered that it is better to be a foreigner in BC because Metrotown refuses to store luggage if you’re a BC resident. I thought this was rather prejudiced, but for once, Yuki’s Japanese passport got us ahead in Canada.
We were able to snag Frances for the bus ride to the airport and decided to stop at Costco along the way for dinner. Bring on the large amounts of hot dogs and french fries! Frances not only took some of our boxes for storage but is also the only one who contributed to our travel fund with a generous donation! Thanks Frances!
We are now waiting in the airport for our flight to Bangkok, which will take the better of 15 hours and one 5-hour layover in Taipei. This is the beginning of something great; something we’ve planned and prepared for, and something we await with eager anticipation. This is our story, our narative, and our adventure arc. And so the adventure begins…
