Well, we’re down to the wire. In 12 hours, we’ll be on our first flight of our big adventure (to Portland – see ya soon Max!). With 8 months and countless hours of planning behind us, we’re finally ready to take off.

Somehow, we thought that this week we’d only have to spend one full day planning the final details of our trip. One day ended up turning into about 5, but now we’re pretty much all set.

Last Sunday we tackled the buses, and that wasn’t easy. Between our attempts to translate each and every website into English to trying to figure out what currency we were paying in to the companies who say that you can’t book more than 48 hours in advance or we can only make our purchase at the actual bus counter, it has definitely been interesting. We’ve successfully booked Iguaza Falls to Florianopolis, Montevideo to Mendoza, and Mendoza to Santiago (and it pretty much took us a whole day to nail these down), but we’re still stuck on Florianopolis to Montevideo and Santiago to Buenos Aires. Argh!!

On Monday, we turned our focus to India. It’s crazy, but with all the planning, we’ve hardly even had the time to think about our India trip. This is a one week trip to the Golden Triangle (Delhi – Agra – Jaipur) and we knew the gist of it, but hadn’t had the time to really focus our attention to all the details. Well, on Tuesday, India finally got the attention it deserved. Also, no easy feat. It took us a while to figure out the trains booking situation, which included Dave getting a fake Indian phone number emailed to him. Finally, after a few hours of looking into what station is closest to what, what time we can leave where, etc etc, we decided to hire a travel agent. For just a little more money than doing it ourselves, we were able to have someone book our entire trip for us AND hire a private driver to take us from place to place. We figured that right after 3 weeks of taking buses (85 hours worth to be exact), and right before a 3 week Everest Base Camp trek, it might be nice to not have to worry about making a bus at 5am or getting from airport to hotel to wherever. So, that was Monday.

For the rest of the week, we started filling in all the gaps. What were we going to do during our two days in Santiago? Where were we going to stay in Iguaza Falls and Florianopolis? By Thursday, everything had really come together.

Finally, we typed out our itinerary, packed up our bags, gave our parents an hour-long gmail/gchat/google hangouts tutorial, and now we’re just waiting for our last dinner (Linda’s chicken parm) with our parents and Tracy and Chris, and then for our limo to pick us up at 4am tomorrow.

So, for now we’ll say goodbye, and next time you hear from us we’ll be on our trip! We still can’t believe it’s finally here!