The beautiful fall weather has left and, here on the suddenly misnamed Sunshine Coast, we have the rains.

The monsoons are steady and dark. It is an endless dripping, interspersed with torrents and gusts and sprinkles and sploshes and mists and well, mostly it is now the season of the sodden.

Clearly there is only one logical thing to do, and so, early on Thursday morning, we will fly to Peru.

It has been said that if you gain a reputation for getting up early, you can sleep ’til noon every day.

In my particular version of this, I have somehow garnered a reputation of being a bit of a traveler. People say stuff to me like, “Well, you know what to do about (fill in the blank here) because you’ve traveled to so many places.”

Ha.

This amuses me because I’m probably the least-prepared traveler you could ever meet.

It is true that I have been to many places – but a lot of them have been on press trips. On these junkets,  I simply show up at the airport and, when I land, I’m met with my name on a little sign. I’m shuffled into a mini-van to fulfill some PR person’s itinerary of what to see and where to go.

Exactly how travel-savvy does one need to be to do that?

Which is why, when we are setting out to do a month-long trip on our own, I like the idea of starting with a guided tour. It gives me a level of comfort to know I’m starting with people who know how things work – wherever I’m landing.

No matter how often we go somewhere new, every trip feels like I’m once again finding a travel version of sea legs. A guided tour at the beginning provides me the time to acclimatize and makes life feel a whole lot easier when someone else has covered the logistics.

And yes, admittedly, there is something quite comforting in seeing my name on a sign. It’s a much more pleasant start to a trip than trying to deduce which cabbie is legit…

By the time we’ve finished what promises to be an amazing 12-day tour of Machu Picchu and the Amazon, we will have adjusted to our new world and I can once again pretend to be the in-the-know traveler as we continue on our own to Argentina and then Chile.

I plan on posting photos to Instagram and Facebook and doing the usual Twitter stuff. I hope you follow along to share in my discoveries. As usual we’ll only be traveling with carry-on luggage, but because I plan on traveling even lighter than usual, I will not be bringing my laptop.

Which means, just like I did in July when we traveled to Atlantic Canada, there will be no blog posts until our return at the end of November.

Until then, this is a fond goodbye from the Traveling Light woman you know so well; that woman who always wakes up early and is the savviest traveler you’ll ever meet.