The Morning We Leave

Today is moving day. We’re in a hotel room in the UK, our bags are packed, and later today Gelli and I are catching a one-way flight to Vietnam. It feels exciting, sad, stressful, weird, and slightly surreal all at the same time.

Waking Up on Moving Day

I always thought that when a big life change finally arrived, it would feel more obvious. I thought there would be this clear moment where everything suddenly felt different.

Instead, I woke up in a hotel room, looked at the bags on the floor, and immediately started wondering if we had forgotten anything.

Today, Gelli and I are leaving the UK and flying to Vietnam. We’re moving. We’ve got our bags, our documents, our cameras, far too many last-minute thoughts, and a one-way ticket to a country that has lived in our heads for months but is now suddenly very real.

When the Idea Becomes Real

It’s a strange feeling because part of me wants to feel excited, obviously. This is what we wanted, planned for, and kept talking about for months. But now that the day is actually here, it doesn’t feel as simple as excitement.

Over the past few months, this move has mostly existed as admin. Visa forms, flights, accommodation, insurance, bank cards, phone numbers, storage, packing, selling things, cancelling things, and trying to remember every tiny detail that could become a problem later. When you’re in that stage, you don’t really have time to feel the size of what you’re doing because you’re too busy dealing with the next thing on the list.

Then eventually the list gets smaller, the bags get packed, and you’re left with the reality of it. We are actually leaving.

Leaving Familiar Behind

Leaving the UK isn’t just leaving a place. It’s leaving familiarity, the area you know, the shops you understand, the routines you don’t have to think about, the people you can see without booking flights, and the life that, even when it didn’t feel right anymore, at least made sense.

That’s probably the bit I’ll miss more than I expected. Not necessarily the weather, because let’s be honest, I’m not going to pretend I’ll be standing in Vietnam crying over grey skies and drizzle. But I will miss the feeling of knowing how everything works. I know what to do, where to go, who to call, what things cost, how people behave, and how to move through a day without constantly having to figure everything out.

In Vietnam, at least for a while, we’ll be beginners again.

We’ll have to learn how to get around, how to cross the road without looking like absolute idiots, how to order food properly, how not to overpay for things, how to find a routine, how to make somewhere feel normal when everything around us is new. That part is exciting, but it’s also uncomfortable. I think that’s the honest version of travel that often gets missed online. Everyone shows the beautiful side, and of course that side is real, but so is the awkward side. The sweaty, confused, “why is my bank card not working?” side. The side where you’re standing somewhere with all your bags, trying to look calm while secretly wondering what on earth you’re doing.

I’m fully expecting plenty of those moments.

The Hardest Part Is People

The hardest part, though, is the people.

You can plan the practical side of leaving. You can pack a bag, book a flight, sort documents, and make sure your passport is definitely in the pocket you checked five times already. What you can’t really sort out neatly is the emotional side of leaving people behind.

That has been the part I’ve found hardest.

There are people here we love. Family, friends, and people who became family in ways we didn’t expect. Some goodbyes happened properly. Some felt too quick. Some didn’t really happen at all because life gets busy, people are scattered, everyone has their own things going on, and suddenly the date you kept saying was “ages away” is today.

That part hurts a bit.

It’s easy to talk about moving abroad as though it’s all brave and exciting, but there’s guilt in it too. At least there is for me. You wonder if you’re being selfish. You wonder whether you should stay closer to the people who matter. You think about birthdays, illness, bad news, random cups of tea, and all the ordinary little moments that don’t feel important until you realise you won’t be nearby for them anymore.

But then I also know that staying would have come with its own sadness. That’s the bit I keep coming back to. We weren’t choosing between a hard option and an easy option. We were choosing between two different kinds of hard.

Staying in the UK would have been familiar, but it would also have meant continuing a version of life that didn’t feel like it fit us anymore. The cost of living, the pressure, the grey routine of things, the feeling that we were always trying to keep up with a life that wasn’t really giving much back. I don’t want to be unfair to the UK, because it has given us a lot, but somewhere along the way it stopped feeling like the place where our next chapter made sense.

So we chose the other hard thing.

We chose to leave.

Doing This Together

Gelli has handled all of this in a way I really admire. I tend to overthink everything, then overthink the overthinking, and then mentally prepare for about seventeen different outcomes that may never happen. Gelli feels things deeply, but she also has this ability to just keep moving.

I wish I had more of that.

She trusts that we’ll figure it out. We’ll land, get through the airport, find our way to where we’re staying, eat something, sleep badly because of jet lag, and then slowly begin making sense of things. I know she’s nervous too, but she has this quiet confidence in us that helps balance out the part of me that wants a spreadsheet for every possible scenario.

To be fair, I still believe in spreadsheets. I’m not pretending I’ve become some carefree traveller who just floats through life with one pair of sandals and no concerns. That is absolutely not what has happened. I have checked our documents more times than is probably healthy, and I will almost definitely check them again before we leave this room.

But maybe that’s the point. You don’t have to become a completely different person to change your life. You can still be anxious, still overthink, still worry about the practical details, and still go anyway.

Waiting to Feel Ready

That feels important to say because I think people often wait to feel ready before they do something big. I definitely have. I’ve spent years thinking I needed to become more confident, more prepared, more financially secure, more certain, more whatever, before I could make a move like this. But today has taught me that readiness is probably not what I thought it was.

Ready just means you’ve reached the point where staying the same feels harder than taking the risk.

That’s where I think we are.

What We Carry

Packing for this move has been weirdly emotional too, which I didn’t expect. At first it was just annoying. What do we take? What do we leave? What do we sell? What do we store? Why do we own so many random things? Why does every drawer contain at least three cables that apparently belong to nothing?

Then, after a while, it became something else. When you reduce your life down to what fits in a few bags, you start to realise how much you’ve been carrying that you don’t actually need. Not just physically, but mentally as well. There’s something about letting go of stuff that makes the whole move feel more real.

Of course, I don’t want to romanticise it too much. Minimalism sounds lovely until you’re trying to work out whether your bag is overweight and whether you really need that extra pair of shoes. But there is something freeing about knowing that, for now, our life is simple. Not easy, but simple.

We have what we need to start.

That’s enough.

We’ll Figure It Out

I don’t know what happens next, and I’m trying not to pretend that I do. We have a rough plan, but not a perfect one. We know where we’re landing, where we’re staying at first, and the general direction we want our life to move in. Beyond that, we’ll figure it out as we go.

Maybe Vietnam becomes home for a while. Maybe it becomes the first step into a wider life in Southeast Asia. Maybe everything feels amazing at first and then reality hits. Maybe we struggle with the heat, the noise, the language, the food, the admin, or just the emotional comedown after months of build-up. Maybe Chartless grows into something real. Maybe it takes longer than I hope. Maybe I’ll look back at this article in a year and laugh at how little I understood about what was coming.

That’s fine.

That’s actually the whole point of Chartless for me.

The Whole Point of Chartless

It was never meant to be about pretending we have everything worked out. It’s not about polished travel advice from people who glide effortlessly through the world with perfect itineraries and matching linen outfits. It’s about what happens when you step into the unknown without being entirely sure what you’re doing, but with enough honesty to admit that.

Because that’s where we are.

We’re not leaving the UK because we have life mastered. We’re leaving because we want to try something different. We want to see what happens when we stop waiting for the perfect moment and start building a life that feels more aligned with who we are now, not who we used to be.

I think a lot of people understand that feeling, even if they’re not moving country. That sense that the life you’re in is technically working, but something inside you keeps whispering that it isn’t quite yours anymore. That doesn’t always mean you need to quit your job, sell your things, and move to the other side of the world. Sometimes it means making a smaller change. Sometimes it means being honest with yourself for the first time in ages.

For us, it means Vietnam.

Next Stop, Vietnam

So today, we’ll check the room one last time, probably more than once. I’ll ask Gelli if she has the passports even though I already know where they are. She’ll tell me yes, and I’ll still feel the need to physically see them because apparently that is who I am as a person.

Then we’ll leave the hotel, go to the airport, and begin the strange in-between part where you’re no longer fully in your old life but not quite in your new one yet.

I don’t know how I’ll feel when the plane takes off. Maybe emotional, relieved, or too tired to process anything properly. Maybe all of it at once.

But I do know this.

Today marks the end of one chapter and the beginning of another. Today we leave the UK.

Next stop, Vietnam.

Go Chartless.

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