In the Good Old Days before PC (Political Correctness, not the Personal Computer!) my mother, rest her soul, made frequent use of the phrase, "busier than a one-armed paperhanger". That's exactly how I felt as we scurried around doing last-minute tasks the day before we left. We had basically packed our luggage the previous day, and it's a good thing we did because we really spent the entire day tying up loose ends. Fortunately, some of the loose ends came to me while I was finishing my packing in the morning: promptly at 9 o'clock the Terminix guy did our quarterly termite inspection ($50) and shortly thereafter the UPS guy showed up with our rail passes for Australia ($40). We were taking the slow boat East across the Atlantic Ocean to Italy, which is really in the opposite direction from Australia as that lies West across the Pacific Ocean, but we were trying to plan ahead for Wanderung 20 even as we embarked on Wanderung 19. Still we felt a bit like "Wrong Way Corrigan" as we prepared for Australia even as we set out eastward for our trip to the Mediterranean. That was confusing even to us! Still, a day later and we would not have been home for either guy, so we greeted them enthusiastically, much to their surprise.

To tie up the other loose ends we had to make a big loop, trying to minimize the driving while still hitting all the required points. First we stopped off at our credit union to drop off Monika's silverware and our unused credit cards in the safety deposit box, then we made a hit-and-run shopping excursion to Costco to pick up fiber tablets, occasionally necessary on the road, and then swing down to the library branch in Burke. The Burke branch doesn't give away free books like the Fairfax branch, but it has more desks where we can set up Daddy, our large laptop, and connect to the Internet (for free, of course). We used Daddy to download the last section of Wanderung 18 to the wanderungs.com website. We wanted to finish that to get mental closure on Wanderung 18 before starting off on Wanderung 19. If we still had that one on our mind plus the preparations for Wanderung 20, we would get really confused!

Uploading, testing, and correcting mistakes required several hours, so after that we hit Wendy's for a quick lunch before continuing on to Laurie's (our voice teacher) to drop off a book for her to read. Then it was on to the Micro Center to purchase a 2-gigabyte XD chip for my Olympus SLR, an otherwise great camera that unfortunately requires a special proprietary (and quite expensive!) memory chip to take the panoramic shots I enjoy shooting. On impulse we picked up some special sheets for printing our "business" cards. Whilst we were about these tasks, Border's Books called to inform me that my book about President Lincoln had arrived, so our last stop of the day was to pick that up.

Returning home, we took a break while watching the evening news and then worked on clearing out Baby, the itty-bitty laptop that travels with us. While clearing it I tried playing MP3 tunes on it, and since that went so well I stored my tunes on Baby to take with and then put my MP3 player, its speakers, our portable back-up disk, and the car's GPS in our old garage-sale safe. But it wasn't all work: we had some fun printing twenty of the business cards, which turned out to look rather nice, and playing Welltris for relaxation until it was time for bed. The advantage of keeping so busy was that I didn't have any time to mull over the various ways our travel plans for Wanderung 19 could go wrong, and since we had patched together a bus trip sandwiched between two cruises, there were plenty of ways for our plans to unravel!