It’s been awhile since we’ve posted about the less glorious side of travel. As of today, we’ve been on the road for 151 days.
Every new location comes with a bit of anxiety as we adjust to a new “home”. Each new place requires research and exploration to understand what sites we want to see, how to use the public transportation system, and how to find a place to eat. Serendipity is not very reliable when it comes to travel planning.
Day 2 is always way better than Day 1, and by Day 3, we feel pretty confident. Day 4 is often the day we leave and restart the whole Day 1 process over again in a new place.
We felt like we unlocked some sort of secret code when we started taking taxis to and from the train stations whenever we first arrive and leave a city. It makes it so much easier to not have to worry about getting pickpocketed while you’re loaded up with luggage.
Doing laundry on the road probably deserves its own post. Because we are only traveling with carry ons, we have to do laundry at least every 6 days or so. We have managed to negotiate laundromats in 9 different countries and 5 different languages. Every machine is different and using Google Translate to interpret signs while others wait can be stressful.
When the travel-weariness is heaviest when the work to get to, get into, see the site, get back home and somehow eat something in there somewhere feels less worth it than just staying in our house and streaming movies all day. Some days that is what we do, but mostly we shrug off the temptation and get out there anyway. Sometimes Marla just has to have a good cry, which makes both of us slow down for a minute. After the tears dry we acknowledge our weariness that lives side by side with our gratitude for this time, share a kiss and a hug and plunge once more into the breach.
Just talking about this and putting out there makes us feel like ungrateful brats! Who gets this sort of opportunity? How can we be unhappy sitting in this enormously privileged position? When did we become so tethered to the familiar that we can’t go four months without it?
According to some things we’ve read online, travel weariness is a real thing and tends to strike long-term travelers around month four. So…..as we started to see ads in hotels to “schedule your holiday parties now” accompanied by Christmas decorations right around the four month mark, we realized we didn’t WANT to spend Christmas away from the U.S. This led to the decision to come home for the holidays. We’ll be back to Erin’s parents for Christmas, then Kansas for a wedding and in Denver for a couple of weeks in early January. We’ll recharge our U.S. batteries and then pick up our travel plan with the SouthEast Asia tour.
Coming home both feels like a failure and the best decision we could make. Circumnavigating the globe is out, seeing friends and family is in. This recharge time will help us get ready to leave the cold and look forward to the beaches of SouthEast Asia instead of dreading them as “one more thing”.
Still grateful for the ability to do this, and we don’t post our struggles for sympathy. We post to acknowledge that there are challenges to having only each other for company, to not being able to speak the language, to not understanding body cues and the unspoken cultural rules of a place, to being overwhelmed sometimes with planning. When you acknowledge things they are easier to deal with and you can move into the “fix it/accept it” phase rather than the “boo hoo/struggle bus” phase.
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