I left Australia on July 14 at 10:15am. Yet I started stressing about leaving Australia on, oh, May 14 or so.

Any removed third party could easily say, well hey – you had like, months of not working to pull yourself and get organised and move overseas; why was there any stress at all? And to that invisible removed third party, I would say: fuck you, guy. Because they totally called me on it. But while reading this, please keep in mind I was suffering from a touch of post-traumatic stress disorder from ‘the accident’ – so multiply everything by, oh I don’t know, a million, and you’ll get an idea of why it was so stressful.

The first major stress was the luggage weigh allowance. Because we were flying into North America, for some arbitrary reason they allow two suitcases with up to 23 kilos luggage in each; in contrast to the UK’s one suitcase with 20 kilos. What I’m trying to say is: that’s an insane amount of luggage. Ridiculous, even. But as it turns out, when you’re packing up your packable life to move overseas for a couple of years, it can be tight.

I thought that would be plenty, so I merrily packed away; continually checking the weight of each bag with a set of scales I borrowed from my brother. I even ensured I was packed a full week before I left, so I could make sure I had packed everything I would need in an average week. Go me. This was all fine and dandy, until the night before I left when I returned the scales to my brother and was informed two things that fucked my head: firstly, you can’t accurately weigh on carpet (as I was); and secondly, the scales I borrowed were fucked at the best of times. I weight again. The first bag was 28 kilos. The second was 25. My head was 0 kilos, because it exploded there and then and left a small pile of ash on my shoulders.

I was staying the night at my brother’s house, which is around 30 minutes drive from where I was living, so I’d already locked up home – plus it was getting late, so I wasn’t going to go back to repack. There were no other scales at home anyway; and who’s to say that the fucked weights were that far off? That’s what I was trying to tell myself as I sketchily tried to get some semblance of sleep while tossing over the multitude over possibilities of the dramas at check in the next morning.

I couldn’t afford to pay any excess luggage fees (true to their name, the fee is excessive), so I thought about the things I could ditch. Honestly, because the weight allowance seemed so generous considering what my stuff was weighing (thanks, carpet!), I stuffed so much crap in, there was little rhyme or reason. I couldn’t, say, ditch all my running gear; or ditch all my work stuff; or whatever – it was one big amalgamated mess of clothes. Any item considerable heavy – y’know, laptop, set of iPhone speakers – was already in my carry on luggage. So it was just clothes, and clothes can’t weigh that much singularly… can they?

Result? I didn’t get a wink of sleep. But there’s a happy ending, as I was fine the next morning: I only just barely scraped in weightwise. However the check in chick may have been a bit more accommodating because I think my sister had done the honours and told her I was stressing my little head off about moving overseas.

This was meant to be my cue to chill the fuck out, because I basically lied and told everyone that I’d be looking forward to the trip once I sorted out the luggage – and for the 15 hours to LA then the 5 hours to New York, it was. But I knew stress number two was waiting in New York.

Y’see, my travel buddy Bree managed to fly for free on Qantas frequent flyer points. So we could arrive together, I took the same flights. Qantas had booked Bree onto a flight that landed in New York’s JFK airport, and then the connecting flight to Toronto that left from La Guardia airport a mere two hours after we arrived. We had worried about this timeframe before departure, which prompted Bree to call Qantas and ask how they expected this feat to be pulled off. They told her it was illegal to sell tickets to a flight we weren’t able to connect with. This calmed us, until I called my travel agent to book the same flights at the same airports, and she said, “Oh boy, you will not make that flight…”

The reason being that we landed at 5:30pm: peak hour. And although it can be a mild journey between airports, at peak hour who knows what the traffic conditions would be like. Bree told me to book a different flight, but I booked the same and told her that even if we did happen to miss the connecting flight, the adventure would start early. So we started calling that leg of our journey the Amazing Race portion and dreamt of pushing people out of the way to reach a taxi rank.

Luckily, we had enough aforethought to hunt around for a car service that would pick us up at a designated time and drive us to the other airport. We had another stress that’s not even worth reporting on at La Guardia (the luggage collection there is fucked, we waited like half an hour), but in the end: we made the connecting flight. With enough time for me to get a meal at Wendy’s.

Thanks to a prolonged unemployment spout when she moved to London, Bree was stressed about finding work in Canada. Aforethought wins again, as she engaged a Canadian recruitment agency while we were still in Australia, and they found her a job. A good job, at that. We landed on Tuesday, and she started on the Friday.

This is quite a long entry, but what I’m trying to parlay is: it was fucking stressful. But we really didn’t need to be stressed in the end. Is there a moral to this story? I feel like I should be giving some kind of sweet conclusion, like some Asian masseuse. Y’know, something warm and fluffy that’ll help you sleep at night like, ‘you don’t need to stress about even half the things you do’. But honestly, beyond telling you to weigh your bags properly and book connecting flights that allow greater transfer time, I got nothing. In fact, if I had to do it again tomorrow, I’m pretty sure would do the same because it made getting here – on time, in one piece, with all of the luggage we wanted to bring – that much sweeter.