Finally everything is packed, stored, sold, given away or trashed. The house is cleaned, keys handed over and the Smart found a safe place in a garage. All there is left to follow us around the world is 32 pounds of clothing, computers and toiletry separated into 2 backpacks.

On ferme tout! La Smart est au garage, la maison est vide et nous sommes pret a partir.

The last days: Time slips through our fingers. Cutting corners. How much is too much prep? We need to get out of here! The storage starts reaching it’s limits…

The last 2 days were packed with “last time” activities: Tai Chi class at Friday nights, having drinks with friends at Donna Rosa, dinner with friends, shopping at Trader Joe’s, BBQ…

We said good-bye with something which became a trademark of LA for me: A BBQ in a friends backyard. Coming from Berlin I always find it amazing that you can rent your own house with garden in the middle of a city where you can have BBQs all year around.

Thanks Shelley and Detlef!

The group photo shows only a few of our friends who stopped by. Thanks everybody!

How did people travel without online banking, credit cards and pay pal?

These days you just take a bunch of credit cards and ATMs and you are all set. Or so you would think: If you are a real world traveler you are always looking for an opportunity to safe a buck towards your next meal or accommodation. Longtime travelers like Nomadic Matt and Wandering Earl did some serious writing about this. The two guys from Voyage autour du Monde even analyzed their own budgets and other travel blogs and came up with an average daily budget per country. This way you can balance your itinerary around the world between cheap and expensive countries to make it fit your financial resources – and last longer.

We will find out if all the theory will play out as expected.