450 Days on the Road

My mind has been over saturated since the moment we left home.

For the past year I have been constantly absorbing new information, connecting with and without words, enjoying and struggling, listening and processing. The three weeks in Bulgaria were the only sensory break in the span of our trip. Being in my homeland felt like being snuggled in a cozy old sweater, lose and soft, familiar. But then I was ready to discard its comfort in a month’s time. Give me more adventures, my heart whispered. I was sad to leave family and friends behind, but it felt exciting to plunge back into the unknown and start the cycle of exploration all over again.

As a whole, our time on the road has felt somewhat surreal, half rooted in reality and half imaginary. Sometimes, quite often actually, I wonder if I have been daydreaming it all. It is strange to ask myself this as we are still traveling and experiencing new cultures, right? But I do, especially when flipping through our countless photos. How is it possible to cram so many colorful moments in a year and a few months? We all know a year is pretty short, isn’t it? Before the trip, mine barely contained enough time for a handful of short trips, a few memorable parties and a mountain of countless ordinary moments of work, mundane tasks, beauty, confusion, happiness, peace and work again.

Well, on the road we haven’t been on a diet of positive emotions only. We have had our moments of frustration, exhaustion and moodiness, but work? I forgot how it feels to work all the time. Instead, our days has been filled with play. At the beginning they tasted a little bit like a forbidden pleasure, almost like eating ice cream for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It is not forever, I kept repeating to myself. Enjoy it while it lasts, but as it usually goes with overdosing on treats, I woke up one day sick from too much sweetness on my tongue.

It was in Argentina that I collapsed from the excitement of it all.

Sorry Argentina, and please don’t take this personally. It might have been the sudden separation from Africa, our last love, or maybe not, because at this point we handle goodbyes pretty well. Maybe it was our lack of Spanish? Probably not, as I enjoy and relish challenges. Was it because Argentina was very expensive for us? It was exhausting to plan and think and figure out how to travel this enormous country without breaking the bank. Distances were huge, bus tickets were equal in cost to plane tickets and plane tickets were out of reach. Here we found ourselves bound to our tent again, without a car this time, having to carry our backpacks in the heat. Suddenly it was all too much for me. One day after a torrential rain I had one look at our muddy mess of a ‘home’ and suddenly I felt ready to call it quits.

Kuba took to my mood with sudden perkiness. His secret fear that I would never want to stop moving got appeased and he patiently started calming down all the questions that were bubbling up from my confused mind.

Is this trip worth it? Well of course! It is the best thing we have done for our family.

Are we wasting our time? No!!! No! Heck NO! It has been a-m-a-z-i-n-g. Amazing. Life is all about our personal perception anyways, so what is important to us is all that matters.

Should we be working instead and building our ‘career’ or whatever this thing that adults in their early 40s are usually doing is called? Who cares what we should be doing? And who decides that for us anyways? Btw there is time for everything. 

Our family life is a dance, just like that. One day I lead and the next Kuba takes over. At 450 days though we are both reaching the dangerous point at which this lifestyle of ours is becoming the only one we remember. Holding a 9 to 5 job and sitting on a chair for 8 hours a day has become a faint memory. Feeding kids among the constant blur of business, running errands and driving from one activity to another seems to be receding to the gray background where I stash the non-important.

But here come those pesky questions again. Would we be able to go back to a mundane existence governed by routine? If not, would we be traveling forever?

What do we actually want?

I have no idea what we want. In Bulgaria I had a brief epiphany but it had evaporated already. These days I think that I want a cute little house on a piece of sunny land with a small garden, a few animals and a community of like minded souls around. This one scares Kuba. He sees it as endless work and he is probably right.

You have never had any animals! Well, true. You have never farmed. It is hard work! True. I am a city girl, who has only grown lettice and butternut squash, which in reality grew by themselves. All I had to do was harvest them. Building a house from scratch again?! So much work! He is right about this one, isn’t he? 

Anyways, forget about the future. The present is all that matters and at the moment we call the beautiful city of Sucre home for a month. Even though we are stationary, we keep on learning new things daily and this colors our days with the usual excitement of being on the road minus the stress of moving all the time with our backpacks on.

We started going to salsa. Kuba surprised me by enjoying himself, maybe because salsa appeared to be so much easier than the Bollywood dancing I tortured him with in India. Then, there is the challenge of learning Spanish. I am discouraged by how difficult it has been for me to start speaking this new language. It is our second week of everyday classes and I am still mixing all the verb forms and I still shift in frustration while trying to communicate. Today was the first day I had a long, somewhat decent conversation with a lady I trusted to cut my hair. We chatted about the weather, about her family, about mine… but the real miracle was that she did exactly what I asked her to do in this Spanish of mine! She didn’t end up cutting all my hair and dying it reddish pink as it happened in Kampot, Cambodia with the cute hairdresser who seemed to understand English, but probably didn’t have a clue as to what I was saying.

But wait, this was all in the past. Back to the present – we decided to make a change in the way we travel. From now on we will move much slower through our remaining time and most importantly we want to connect deeper with the places we like by volunteering and doing good.

Thank you Neil and Helen for inspiring us to travel this way.

I think that this will give much needed purpose to our days and I am sure it will cure me from my temporary homesickness or whatever I was yearning back there in Argentina.

And please friends, tell me that we are not missing out on anything back home, just a multitude of snow-less snow days, right?

~M