We both entered funemployment back end of February and gave ourselves three weeks to square away our setups prior to launch… not to mention our lives. We had the impression that we knew what we were doing, had ordered all the right parts and that things would be a breeze… just smash out the work required, sip on mojitos and catchup with mates… high fives all round. Closer to the truth was a long series of one hour tasks evolving into half day sagas. Nonstop days were spent organising things in headless-chook styled fashion with nights spent in our 3m x 6m garage trying to find stuff we had put down five minutes before… and possibly even solve the problems at hand.
We barely scraped in to have things ready for our little Send Off Day. To the untrained eye it looked like we were fairly well all over it. Unfortunately we had some trained eyes rock up. Our mate John Hudson from APC Rally magically appeared as we arrived at South Bank. With one quick pass over the bike he points at the forks and says, “This is interesting,” which is polite code for, “You f#<*ed up there.” Fortunately he genuinely reckoned we had done ok. Marcel from Workshop 2000, a motorbike magician adjusted to setting adventure bikes up for battle, also called up to offer a hand… so final reinforcements and checks were made. Lets just say one or two issues were identified, including the bike’s ability to charge our well researched batteries… minor stuff.
In the end we had a one day window to pack our lives into a couple of 80L containers… Vinnies won that day. The minimalist lifestyle is not necessarily an easy thing to realise – I had plenty of sentimental items difficult to let go of including stuff Heid gave me. Laws no worries – he’d pretty much been down to a suitcase for a few years already. For anyone interested in giving a minimalist lifestyle a crack – live on a motorbike OR pack everything into boxes… then proceed to pull your stuff out of the boxes as you need them… toothbrush, toothpaste, etc… after a few months you’ve got what you really need. Not for everyone but if you’re tired of clutter give it a crack.
