What’s the longest you’ve been on the road?
As I think back, I can identify periods of life where I’ve been away from “home” for many months; but mostly staying in some kind of temporary “home” while I was away. A college dorm room. The guest room at a host family’s house while studying abroad. A shared apartment during university. And otherwise…hmmmm. The two weeks of backpacking around Europe? 3-4 weeks on mountaineering expeditions? The 2 weeks of solo travel around Borneo after I quit my job? That’s really it, and all of those things are very different to what we’re embarking on now. 5 months of being on the move – traveling through 17 countries (give or take, depending how things go). Around a 150 days of travel and being away from home.
Now I know, for some of the world travelers out there, this sounds like no big deal; and I get that. If you’ve been on the road for 7 years, this sounds like perhaps just a long vacation. For the rest of us, it feels very life changing. One major a-ha moment was saying goodbye to my son. Going on 24, he’s been an adult already for years but never physically missing from my life for more than a couple of months. As I saw him off at the airport, sending him back to his home before climbing into the Giraffe and heading east, all my vows of leaving on a high note took flight. It was full-blown ugly cry and desperate last, clinging hugs before crawling into a dark corner of the airport lounge alone with my sobs. It is very, very hard for me to say goodbye.
And then another a-ha moment came a few days later, having a glass of wine with the very friendly Slovenian couple who allowed us to park on their vineyard property. We had been all packed up and were getting ready to head off, when our host drove down to our parking place on a little scooter and invited us up to their house for a coffee or a glass of wine.
We were a bit anxious to hit the road, but I shrugged at Achim and said, “this is part of it. Meeting people along the way is part of the adventure, we have to go.” So we did. And this lovely, elderly gentleman, over a glass of his crisp, pleasant Sauvignon Blanc told us, ‘You have a very nice home.’ I kind of started, almost made a comment about how my home is a Finca in Mallorca, and then stopped. Because he’s right, and I’ve been looking at things all wrong. We are traveling with our home – the Giraffe is not just a form of transportation, it’s a temporary home. And the more I start to settle into that, the easier being away – from my son, from the Finca, from our friends and our cats and our wine and the swimming pool and all the known and loved aspects of the life we’ve built over the past two decades – the less stressful that will be.
So: we are on our way. To discover the unknown. To plunge ourselves into the unfamiliar. To take on a massive adventure in foreign lands, braving the challenging roads and paths ahead. And doing it all, in this very nice, Giraffe-decorated temporary home.
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