In the last few months we have been going through a true transformation. One person ends his job and turns down incoming inquiries with surprising ease. The other is retiring and doesn't miss the work she always enjoyed doing at all. We wonder about ourselves.

The car has been bought, a camping cabin has been ordered, but there are still all sorts of details to be clarified. When planning the trip, questions arise that we had no idea about. And: We have to rearrange ourselves and our home in order to keep everything organized with less effort for the next few months and perhaps years.

So in the meantime we work through a long list and notice that for every point we delete, two new ones are added. We enlarge our wildflower meadow in the hope that nature will take care of the rest and give up the vegetable patch. We clean the pond and are once again surprised that we have to saw through 10 cm thick roots. Two outside stairs are being re-grouted and the last two rooms are being repainted after 16 years – everything else has already been renovated by Wolle in recent years. We're cleaning out the basement and sorting out a lot of other things – including books, sigh, there are just too many. In short, we do all the things that you always say you want to do at some point.

We simplify our account structure, cancel subscriptions, spend a Sunday searching and finding cancellation options and IBAN changes. We take care of our health prophylaxis and are vaccinated against yellow fever, rabies, typhoid, meningococci and whatever else makes sense. We are researching long-term health insurance and are grateful to Stiftung Warentest for their good preparatory work. Car insurance is then the next challenge – for tax purposes it is a truck and according to the road traffic regulations it is a car. Our vehicle is now a motorhome and also insured for Africa.

It's a lot of work, but we also enjoy the benefits of being retired, such as sleeping in, having breakfast without hurry, and reading the newspaper. And it often happens to us that we drift away from our work and do something completely different – which doesn't really matter, the main thing is that something gets done.

And then we finally get our car and try it out, we go on wonderful trips to Rømø, West Frisia and Lake Selent. Overall we're getting along well and we're sleeping well on the mattress, which is really important! We struggle with using the power station and decide to buy a solar panel. We test the water filling and the air compressor, think about how to pack and create new lists with all the things that still need to be done in detail. What are the regulations – do we need one or two fire extinguishers? Where does the heavy duty jack fit without being annoying? How do you avoid rattling here and slipping there? How do you actually lift the cabin off the tray? And oh yes: does the self-timer for the camera still work?

There are days when we receive three shipments of things we ordered online. We never wanted to promote online trading, but we are wondering how this could be done without. Here you need a specific format for a cargo box, there you need a special attachment for the sandboards on the roof. The table must be foldable to fit in the storage box, the perfect backseat wall organizer comes from Australia and is out of stock. And where can we get a malaria test kit? Then there is a phase of daily visits to the hardware store for screws, eyelets, straps and tools. We try to keep track of all the topics and lists and start discussing in half sentences and jumping between topics. There are moments when we reach our limits and have to be patient with each other. And there are moments when we laugh because we are being stupid or because we have forgotten from one moment to the next what we were actually discussing.

And then comes the phase where things sort themselves out, we can complete a number of topics, the lists become significantly shorter and we get the feeling – yes, it can work. Excitement, anticipation, disbelief.

Before we go on the road we have one more trip. We booked an off-road training with a trainer and our vehicle. We are still getting the additive long-distance travel software for fuel and altitude installed by O-M Services and have to complete the final technical details on the Hilux itself.

Then it’s time to pack!