Six Months in
With the new year fireworks still ringing in our ears, its hard to believe that we are six months into our world tour. Both the fact that we’ve already been doing this for six months, and that we’re half done with this monumental adventure, — after which we are supposed to get back to real life — is unsettling.
Even harder to believe — we only decided on the trip a year ago!
Sure, there have been hard moments along the way. Sleep has been tough in many places — whether it’s noises, lack of proper bedding, out of control jetlag, or just plain uncomfortable beds, it really affects you throughout the day. That’s to be expected. And we’ve quickly gotten used to living without garbage disposals, dishwashers, driers, microwaves (actually, while these didn’t exist in Europe, they are ubiquitous in Asia!). But you get unexpectedly nostalgic for the random things — our big couch, big pans, brewing coffee at home, sour cream & farmers cheese.
But one of the biggest surprises has been how difficult it is to get stuff done on the road. Even when we are not actively touristing, our rosy plans of simultaneously learning new skills, researching new jobs, planning rest of the trip, and monetizing our blog have somehow not materialized.
When traveling so much, so many diff places, its easy to lose track of what you’re trying to achieve, how you are supposed to think about all the diff places.
Over the months we’ve learned that nomadic living in itself doesn’t really change you. If you hoped that leaving most your possessions behind and hopping country to country will reveal the inner you, or give you a different perspective on yourself or the world (guilty) — well, not so much. You can’t leave yourself behind, especially travelling with family.
But the lifestyle can engender or bring to surface all kinds of latent family dynamics. In some families we’ve met on the road parental roles have dramatically shifted on the road. Whereas the dad may have been primarily a breadwinner back home, not very involved with schooling, life on the road introduced different schedule and working from home. So now, the father spending a lot more time with the kids highlights the very different parenting styles of the couple, generating friction.
We certainly were not used to spending so much time together. As a family of introverts it’s been critical to carve out independent time for each of us. And also to recognize the importance of physical space — even in a single hotel room, an extra hundred square feet can make a big difference!
What will the next six months bring? In some ways, we are just hitting our stride. We do have more tempered expectations now. But already, we will need to start thinking about what happens when we come back…
