January, February

January

On January 3rd, our owner and a possible tenant came to visit our apartment. The family seemed very interested and they were ready to buy our bedroom closet and our kitchen furniture.

The same day we went back to the Vieux Campeur store to try on shoes and backpacks for the second time. The sellers there didn’t advise us the same products than the first time. But after trying on different shoes and backpacks we were starting to have a pretty good idea of the material we would like to buy. We decided to give ourselves time to think and come back another time to buy.

Mary from the farm in North-West Lousiana told us she could host us for 2 weeks: this was great news!
Loïc wrote to Richard from Caceres Organic Blueberry Farms near Gainesville, Florida. Three days later, Richard wrote back saying we were welcome to spend two weeks on his farm. It will be blueberry harvest time. We were very happy about that because Richard seems a great guy and his farm a really nice place!

On January 10th, we went to the Vieux Campeur for the third and last time! We both bought our shoes. We chose low shoes that are supposed to be strong enough and good for walking in cities as well as hiking. Nathalie bought her backpack: a 60 Liters. Unfortunately, they didn’t have Loïc backpack in stock so he had to wait a bit before being able to buy his. We were both very happy to have finally made our choice and to have found shoes and backpacks in which we were comfortable!

We both had different medical appointments (dentist, osteopath…) to be sure everything was Ok before leaving.

On January 24th, we booked our insurances contracts with Globe Partner. Each of us had to have 3 contracts: a 3 months contract for the USA, a 6 months contract for New-Zealand and a 3 months contract for Asia. That’s because the contract is different depending if you are going only as a tourist or if you will be working with a Working Holiday Visa. So we will have medical insurance if ever something happens to us.

We booked 4 nights in New-Orleans from April 10th to April 14th with AirBnB. We will be able to enjoy the French Quarter Festival during 2 days after our 2 weeks of Wwoofing in North-West Louisiana.

After talking with a tropical medicine doctor in December and doing 3 vaccines, we decided to also do the anti-rabies preventive treatment. If you get bitten or scratch by an animal in a country where rabbies exists, the only way to know if the animal is infected is to catch it, kill it and look into his brain. If you get bitten and can’t catch the animal you have to go to an anti-rabbies center just in case because rabbies is 100% mortal for a human being! The interest of doing the preventive treatment is that you have 5 days (instead of 2 days) do go to an anti-rabbies center and the treatment is lighter: 2 injections instead of 5 injections plus a serum that is not always very safe depending on the country where you are. So we thought it was safer to do the 3 preventive injections. It’s a very strict protocol: you do the first injection on Day 0, then the second one on day 7 and the third one on day 28. Of course the hospital is open from 9 am to 4 pm so we had to choose our dates during vacations or take days off to go to the hospital. But at least, if one of us gets bitten in the middle of nowhere in Vietnam we will have more time and it should be less stressful!

After lots of research and hesitations we finally chose our camera a Sony DSC RX-100. This was also an important choice because we wanted a camera to take good picture but not to big/heavy/fragile. For a time, we considered buying a waterproof and unbreakable camera, but the seller told us it wouldn’t take very good photos.

February

On February 11th Loïc bought our laptop computer. So now we have all our major equipment! We just hope we will be happy with our choices!

During week-ends we started moving some of our stuff to Nathalie’s Dad’s house in Chatou. We moved two of our bookshelves to Nathalie’s bedroom in Chatou.
Most of our furniture will be stocked in Loïc’s grandmother’s garage. Loïc took some boxes of books and our TV furniture item when he went to visit his parents at the end of the month.

We also started changing our address and calling the bank, electricity and phone operators to get information about cancellations procedures.