“The core of man’s spirit comes from new experiences” – Jon Krakauer (Into the wild)

It is the day before we fly out to America. It has been such a long time coming. We can remember counting down from over 200 days and now there is only one sleep left! Blogging while on the go may be difficult, but we are determined to keep up with it. We think that the best memories deserve to be remembered and if it means taking half an hour to an hour out of our day to write them up, we will do that.

It has been three years since our last overseas trip to Vietnam. We have both completed university degrees and started full time jobs within this time. Overseas travel is expensive, but worth every cent.

In preparation of this trip, we decided to start losing weight. At the start of this year, we were both the heaviest we have both ever been. We were both pretty ashamed of the way we let ourselves get and we knew that we needed to change. Ronnie weighed in on January 1st at a whopping 124.5kg and Aimee weighed in at 80.5kg. We decided to use America as a motivator for our weight loss journey….and it worked!

The theory behind our decision to use America as a motivator was that we know that we are going to indulge when we are there and we don’t want to come back to Australia to the point where we are too heavy to function. We spent 19 weeks tracking our weight. It was hard, as fast food was our vice and we had vowed to have not a single fast food item until we get to America.

It is now the 20th of May and Ronnie weighed in this morning at 106.4kg and Aimee weighed in at 68.3kg. That is an 18.1kg weight loss for Ronnie and a 12.3kg weight loss for Aimee. Daily walks which started with us walking around the block (sore back, sore legs, completely fatigued) to walking 8-9 brisk kilometres around Windradyne toward the end without breaking a sweat was massive. Couple this with being extremely careful with what we eat and it was a recipe for success. Every time we were faced with cravings and the opportunity to eat fast food, we had to remind ourselves of the reasons why we are doing this.

We are just putting the finishing touches on the packing for the trip now. Neither of us have ever been away from home for this long. Ronnie is an anxious flyer but has found another way that has made him calm for the flight. The mindset has been that if the plane crashes and we die on our way to America, it would have been the same outcome in the end as we believe that living without travelling is no way to live and if we did not at least give it a shot, we may as well be dead. However morbid that might sound, it has actually made him feel better.

Tonight we are heading to Sydney with Aimee’s family to stay at the hotel at the airport for the flight in the morning. We fly out at 12:00pm from SYD and we should arrive at 12:40pm at LAX with a stop over in AKL for 3 hours. We are just grabbing dinner tonight in Sydney and resting at the hotel which should be nice.

Our next post will be tomorrow morning prior to our flight and then we are not sure when the next one after that will be. We haven’t quite worked out the timezone stuff yet, but it will be sometime within the next 48 hours.

Thanks again for reading and we look forward to checking back in tomorrow morning prior to our departure.

Much love

Ronnie & Aimee