Two weeks from now — you should know — I won’t be anywhere near here. By that, I mean my home state of Utah, the United States, or even the western hemisphere. Rather, I will be en route to a far away, transpacific land with a fearsomely weighty backpack on my person and very little understanding of what the hell I am getting into.

But first, a confession. I have recently been made aware that up until four weeks ago, I had not had a shot in the arm (nor the tuckus) since the first term of the Clinton administration. I doubt this is in compliance with immunization guidelines, laws or general societal responsibility — my deepest apologies to anyone who shared my airspace during K-12 who I may have put at risk of contracting the measles, polio, the Black Death or what-have-you. But, now, I am happy to inform you that my tender left bicep has been a veritable dartboard in recent weeks for immunizations for Hep A and B, Meningitis, Typhoid, Japanese Encephalitis, Tetanus, MMRs, etc. Consider me wholly in line, and then some, with the whole Pasteurian rigamarole.

Getting back to the important stuff, my itinerary goes something like this. My girlfriend, Kellie, and I will be leaving SLC International on Feb. 10, 2016, at 6:05 a.m. Mountain Standard Time, when we will then soar over the vast Pacific, in a race with the sun, before landing briefly in some Chinese city to sample foreign airport delicacies and unreadable reading material. Shortly thereafter we fly south to our real destination, Ho Chi Minh City, formerly known as Saigon, in the southern region of Vietnam.

This is where the trip gets a little murky. Kellie, a seasoned traveler, the global yin to my isolationist yang, has spent the past few months creating accounts on a number of classified-sy websites made for travelers hoping to gain room and board in exchange for five or six hours of work a day. Things like farming, teaching English or hosing down elephants. Our plan — if you can call it that — is to leapfrog from place to place in an arc from Vietnam to Cambodia, then Thailand and Myanmar (Burma for those who really ought to update their Google Maps), then this little outstretched toe of China, and then Bangladesh, Nepal and finally eastern India.Then, I suppose, we will get around to finding a city with an airport with airplanes that can fly us home.

I will say upfront I have no idea how long this will take, nor how much of this journey will actually be possible — but the unknown factors were kind of the point when we decided to take this trip. Essentially, we are just going to wing it.

So, what will follow in the coming weeks and months here at Odyssey is a travelogue-type-deal of our successes, failures, epiphanies, strange fruits and vegetables, spicy foods and the requisite stomach ailments, mountains, cities, rice fields, temples, and more stomach problems, markets, hostel beds that look like the drawers of morgues, water in every flavor and shade of blue, and people, we are sure to encounter people.

I hope for this to be a living document of what can only be the greatest adventure of my as yet pretty isolated life. Through these words, and from the comfort of your home Wi-Fi connection, I invite you to come along.

I promise it will really be something.