Goodbye, Seattle!
We are on the road at last, in Portland, Oregon.  Portland is the capitol of indie bike shops and bike makers--the most famous possibly Chris King hubs--and also has no sales tax, so it's the perfect place for us to stop and equip ourselves before we drive across the country.
We were packing for ten days. We had no conception, when we began, of the sheer quantity of stuff we had managed to conceal in every closet and cupboard.  We shared a big, three storey, five bedroom house with a rotation of  roomates for three and a half years.  Most of our roomates came in with little furniture but what fit in their own rooms, and we had moved in just after a previous girl had taken nearly all the furniture from the common rooms with her.  We came in therefore to a nearly empty house, but with a basement filled with junk abandoned by previous tenents--our landlords never moved everyone out and to start new with a different lease, but left us to sublet on a continuing lease re-signed once every year; I think by the time we moved in the house had been going like this for ten years or so.  
 Since our other roommates were grad-students and hardly ever home and had no time to be invested, we became the house caretakers.  We cleaned out the basement, where we found a great deal of furniture and cool bits and bobs (along with a lot of garbage) and generally tried to make the house homey and comfortable.  It sounds like an awful task--sometimes it really was--but there was also a lot of satisfaction in it. We were setting up a house together, and since our roommates were rarely home, for much of the time we got to make use of the house as if it was just ours--though we were happy when they were; almost all of our roommates were really, really cool.  If only it hadn't been for the alchoholic one who would never leave the kitchen, where he sat finishing off several bottles of liquor every day, laughing at his own bad jokes and listening to Prarie Home Companion, I might be able to say all without the almost... but thankfully he left after just a few months... after drinking literally all the alchohol in the house.  You don't want to know.
So basically, we did our best to fill the house with stuff, so it felt like home.  The downside of that being, as we realized, that we had not just a room to deal with when we left, but essentially the whole giant place. When we set out, we had hoped it would take four or five days to pack, and we had quit our jobs just far enough in advance to leave time for that before we were to head out for Portland on Saturday morning.  We did not leave Saturday morning. On Saturday we weren't even close, still discovering boxes and boxes of stuff, and puzzling over the bits that are so hard to sort and to pack.  It might not have been so difficult if we hadn't at the same time needed to narrow our possessions down to only what we could fit in the van.  Many times I wanted to just throw it all in boxes and go, but we couldn't make multiple trips this time, or sort when we get there--because everything we kept we would be driving across the country to Florida, to store at Chris' mom's house.  My family has no storage areas, and since we might be biking for up to two years, renting a storage space would be expensive, much more than just replacing what we left behind. And frankly, most of our furniture was of the college type, cheaply purhased or found free.  The stuff that you lug along with you to avoid having to go out and buy new stuff, but which you never really like.
But the furniture wasn't difficult, except for loading it up and taking it to Goodwill.  The hard part was getting rid of the accoutrements.  Especially the kitchen stuff.  Chris and I cook all the time, and love to host dinner parties, so we had tons of appliances, bowls, pans, and utensils, everything from a culinary torch (which I kept) to a bagel-slicer (which I didn't).  And then there were my notebooks... boxes from when I was a kid to notebooks from this past year, studying Italian; notebooks filled with parts of stories, poems, journal entries, notes from class and to-do lists, all together.  I couldn't just bring that mass of paper with me, but I didn't want to throw away the journal entries and poems and stories either, as many I had never typed up, and a few were actually pretty good... So I had to sort through it all, tearing out the pages I wanted to keep and recycling the rest. That took a day all by itself.  In the end, I narrowed it down to just two boxes, and while I did so I got to discover that I have been, in certain times of my life, not too bad of a writer.  That was a bright part of the otherwise bleak and exhausting packing experience.  I remember telling Chris, "This is never going to end.  We're going to be packing for the rest of our lives." It didn't help that we were dragging our feet--not that we didn't want to start travelling, but that we didn't want to leave this house we'd loved so much, our first house together.  There are ways of working as hard as you can but still never quite finishing.  For ten days, that is what we did.
By Wednesday night we were physically and emotionally exhausted, but we were also almost done.  It had taken five days longer than we expected to pack what we wanted to keep, give or donate the rest, clean up after ourselves, and run the last errands that need to be done when leaving a place.  For three days my hands had been shaking and we hadn't gone to bed till we were half asleep already, swaying on our feet-- but we were, at last, almost done.  We had managed to pack up the van, giving up a good deal more stuff in the process, as we saw it couldn't all fit.  We went to bed knowing that finally it the morning, after all this time, we would be leaving Seattle.
I slept through most the of the three hour drive to Portland, and Portland is enough like Seattle that when we got there it felt to me like we still hadn't left.  On our second day here, it still feels much like we haven't.  The weather is the same--too cold and darkly overcast--there are the same adorable, multi-story houses with gardens, everywhere (though Portland has far more in the Victorian style than Seattle does), the same neighborhoods with their own little clusters of independently-run restaurants and shops.  It's the Northwest, where I've spent twenty years of my live, and Chris a few months shy of seven.  A beautiful place, but also a place that has, like all places, its own narrow perspective on the world.  I'm a product of the Northwest.  Though I was born in the Midwest, we moved here when I was a child.  I can see that in how I think and behave, and I want to be more than just one place.  I think Chris felt the same way, when he first left Florida.  To see the world is to see yourself, with perspective, perhaps.  Anyway, we want to see it.  And though it doesn't yet feel much like it at the moment, here in Portland which is different, but so very much like Seattle, still we have moved past our front door, we have begun our adventure.