26 March 2018: I decided that I would leave D.C. with nothing more than what airlines these days will allow you to take on a short domestic flight for free: a carry-on bag and a personal item.

Well, I actually decided this well before March 2018. Back in October 2017 I began preparing to leave D.C. for good and to travel for an extended period. From that point on, I spent nearly 100% of my free time either preparing to quit my job, preparing to move, or planning my trip.

Planning my travel was the fun part — I borrowed travel guides — plus history and literature books from the countries I plan to visit — from the library. (Now I know that most of Dracula actually takes place in England, not Transylvania. And that medieval Andalucia in Spain was a place where, most of the time, Muslims, Christians, and Jews got along harmoniously together. Who knew?) This was what I was reading and listening to during my commute those last few months.

Preparing to move was, as you might guess, more of a slog. To defray some of the costs of my travel, I decided that I would sell every expendable item I own that was worth at least $5. I discuss the pros and cons of various selling platforms in a separate post, but in the end I sold over 90% of what I set out to sell, including every single piece of furniture I owned. In 79 separate transactions, I sold $1,863.99 worth of my stuff, beginning with my artificial Christmas tree ($60) in October and concluding with my Table-Mate folding table (as seen on TV! On sale second-hand for just $5!) on 25 March.

Selling stuff was the most stressful part of this whole operation for me. All the back-and-forth with some stranger (usually), arranging a time and place to meet and give the stuff away, worrying afterward if the buyer would complain to me afterward and want his money back (it never once happened) — that was a major drag. If I had to do it again, I might raise my threshold to $10, but then again, I’m looking at an indefinite period of unemployment, so every $5 counts.

For those items I didn’t think I could sell for $5, I gave them away. Starting on Christmas Day 2017, I began regularly raiding the recycling areas of each floor of my building, looking for cardboard boxes I could salvage. The Salvation Army came by with a truck on 26 March and took eight or ten boxes away, mostly dishes and utensils, plus a box of books, a box of tools left over from my homeowner days, and assorted saleable odds and ends. There’s a spot in my apartment building next to the freight elevator where tenants traditionally leave stuff they don’t want anymore; over the the last couple of weeks of my tenancy, I left all sorts of goodies there, including probably 1-2 dozen containers of organic spices (I think the staff at the front desk nabbed all of those). At work, I gave away stuff I thought my geeky co-workers would like — it was surprisingly easy to get rid of almost all of my old college and grad school Chinese textbooks, for example.

Of course, although I’m now living what is described as a “minimalist lifestyle,” I still kept a lot of stuff that I’m not bringing with me on my trip. I hemmed and hawed initially about whether to keep it in storage or ask my parents to keep it for me in their basement, but in the end frugality won out over pride. I don’t know if I’ll ever return to D.C. (and at this point, I think I’ll feel perfectly content if I never set foot there again), so paying to keep things in storage there, knowing I’d later have to pay to travel to D.C. and have them moved to wherever I’ll live next, just didn’t make sense to me. So on 22-23 March I shipped 8 boxes and a suitcase to my parents’ house in Maine, followed by one last box of essentials that I shipped the morning of 28 March 2018, the day I began my adventure.