T-minus one week and counting.

Sitting here fixating on the Costco-sized bottle of Doxycycline before me, the enormity of this trip is starting to sink in. For well-seasoned travelers, this journal should provide a good laugh as you watch me prepare, rather blindly I might add, for seven months away from everything I've known for the past twenty-seven years. For the rest of you, I hope that my experiences and associated commentary are at least mildly entertaining, as they should provide a guide for what not to do when quitting your job and making a pell-mell decision to wander the Orient.

That said, I hope I'm at least starting off on the right foot. Attenuated Salmonella typhi has been ingested, Hepatitis A injected, and Cipro and the aforementioned Doxy obtained; if nothing more, I should be protected should I run into the 'thrax on the road. On a side note, I chose not to get a rabies vaccine, but as one friend put it, "it is one of the cooler terminal illnesses", so no worries there. I've also spent the better part of two months researching, purchasing, changing my mind about, and returning what I'll loosely call "travel gear"; that term defining everything from an iPod to The North Face pants.

Now, most experienced travelers will tell you to not go out and buy all new stuff as it's going to get crudded up or stolen, and that almost everything you can buy at home can be purchased cheaper at your destination; I say screw them, what do they know? Personally, I'd rather regret spending $20 on a t-shirt at home than be forced to wear a $2 Hello Kitty t-shirt because it's all I could find at the moment I need to change out of my elephant dung stained shirt in Phenom Phen. There is, of course, a certain irony to the $20 t-shirt:

That's about it for now. Since there's only a week left before I leave the East Coast, I'm going to start updating this journal regularly and hope to do so with the same frequency while traveling.