Last Night in the States til...

This is it...my last night in the USA til late March 2010 is finally here, and it STILL doesn't seem real.

Twelve hrs from now I'll be en route to the airport. Seventeen hrs from now I'll board the first leg of my journey.

Forty-seven hrs from now I'll be arriving in Mumbai.

I finished packing days ago. I've printed out all my train tickets, rechecked luggage, and packed away everything which is going back into storage here.

I've researched everything I can think of for my stay in Mumbai.

I can only "pray" that I get along better than expected with my old college friend there, whose emails and calls started as fun and frequent and over the weeks til now dwindled to barely a sentence in reply to my repeated queries.

I can only hope I am able to boldy face the strangeness and foreignness of a faraway land whose culture, traditions, food, even native language is not my own.

I am numb. I am not sure if I have remembered everything. I have been strangely unable to think, to focus on this adventure.

I am clearly in some form of denial...perhaps as a defense mechanism against panic.

At some point tomorrow I will probably break out in tears. I have been known to cry a lot while in flight.

But honestly, I have done all I can do as far as preparations.

Perhaps my atypical non-drama, this go around, is merely my own emotional evolution?

Whereas in past days I may have been in hysterics by this stage, tonight I am only tired and resigned.

Wednesday night I will land in the heat of Mumbai, meet a stranger I haven't seen since 1987, and embark on a part of my life I never expected to be facing.

My hope is to chronicle my experiences here on a weekly basis, as I explore bazaars, temples, and Indian trains.

Pray for me as you watch my journey unfold.

19 Days til Departure

Less than three weeks, now, til I board my flight for Mumbai.

It still seems very distant, removed, unreal.

My work season here in the Colorado Rockies just ended, and I am still living in my dorm room, not yet even entirely packed to return to Florida for the short rest in between adventures.

I am drained, emotionally and physically.

It has not quite sunk in yet (at least not completely) that I have survived yet another astonishingly difficult period of my life.

I have vowed NEVER to take on seasonal work in the park concessions system again.

I cannot pack for India until I get back and unpack in Florida...which is five and a half days from today.

So again, the theme is "limbo". I am stuck in some kind of middle ground.

Disconcerting.

Plans have been changed due to panic attack/mini-crisis, then changed back again. I now have all my inter-India rail tickets up until 31 December 2009...

I'll be ringing in the New Year on an overnight train between Delhi and Varanasi, and will start 2010 in one of the world's holiest cities.

It still does not seem real.