Prologue

When embarking on a one-year travel adventure, you will soon discover that the least complicated point in the journey is the morning you nudge your still sleeping husband and announce: "I have a great idea, let's move to Romania for a year."  While your motives may be pure (who could deny the appeal of 365 consecutive days off work?) and magnanimous (a free-lodging holiday has been offered to our friends with great liberality) neither of these laudable reasons will serve to accomplish anything in the way of the first and foremost vital task, namely, moving all of your crap 6,500 miles away (that's 10,500 km for you metric minded folk).
You may spend a great many pleasant and leisurely evenings sipping wine with friends while discussing the upcoming relocation and the esprit de courage it requires to launch such an undertaking but morning after morning you will begin to experience the realization that, other than frequent headaches and liver damage, nothing much is being accomplished.
Your summer clothes, instead of being tossed about in the middle of the Atlantic in some obscure cargo hold of a Polish shipping vessel, are still in the drawers of your dresser.  The novels and medical magazines, rather than mildewing away in a random storage unit in Scotts Valley, remain dusty and upright on the bookshelves throughout your house.
Now you come to understand a small but unmistakable truth: inanimate items do not move themselves no matter how detailed you describe the process in conversation, no matter how many glasses of wine you drink with friends, family and envious co-workers.  The plain fact is that at some point you must silently beg Carlos Puyol not to score with a wild-haired header while you step away from the latest FC Barcelona game in order to put your things in boxes, put the boxes in your car and take said boxes to some destination point other than your house.
Yes, the reality is that long before questions such as "Where shall we go first, Cairo or Paris?" can legitimately be decided upon, you must first assess all of the junk in your house and determine what will precede you, what will accompany you and what will stay behind.  In other words, while looking about your home you must ask yourself the following about each and every item:
1) can I live without it for a year?
2) am I willing to pay to have it stored?
3) am I willing to pay to have it shipped and possibly pilfered by modern day pirates with possible connections to terrorist and/or human trafficking organizations who will sell my CD collection of 80's Goth bands in order to fund said organizations?
The probable end result of this severe and pitiless culling is that the local homeless and women's shelters will be ripe with new donations and you will have a very respectable tax write off.
Thus begins Challenge Number 1 of the Great Pan-Romanian Adventure.
Like most things in life, it turns out to be far less glamorous than one imagined and hoped for, far more filled with banal details such as how to ensure everyone will have enough clean underwear and decent toothpaste for 12 months.
I will provide updates regarding the progress of Challenge Number 1 and inform you of Challenge Number 2: getting the kids out of school and wrapping up our jobs and other bureaucratic-type business.  But first things first: tonight its the second leg of the Copa del Rey and Puyol cannot be asked to hesitate before scoring....