Wow! A year has passed in the blink of an eye and today was our final full day of our trip. Tomorrow we spend on a plane riding time zones and losing all that artificial time we gained heading Westward over the last year.
I can’t honestly say we approach returning home with mixed feelings: Our feelings are actually unequivocal. We’re looking forward to seeing friends and family, but none of us are happy to be stopping traveling. For the boys in particular they’ve now spent a significant proportion of their cognisant lives on the road – it is ‘normal’. For Jennifer and me, we’re only to aware that going home means returning to normality. We’ve been making resolutions about living with fewer things and going on lots of holidays – only time will tell if we manage to keep them in focus amidst the quotidian whirl.
Already we’ve started dealing with the reality of finding a place to live, resurrecting credit cards and phone accounts and all the other minutiae of the place you permanently live. The whole travelling thing which means that nothing matters too much because you’re always moving on, comes to a crashing halt as we contemplate moving home. We’re not renting for a week, we’re renting for six months or a year; a bit too far out on public transport will mean a lot of days of early starts and late finishes; and all that stuff we have sitting in storage takes up more room than the four backpacks we’ve lived out of for a year.
So we’ve all been a little on edge today. We decided on a calming approach to the day and returned to the Children’s Creativity Museum. We all had an absolutely brilliant time, which was honestly made even cooler because the staff had seen our posts on our earlier visit and knew who we were. That made the visit lovely, but also made our final day even more poignant as we realised we were about to leave the coolness of being world-travellers behind us.
We had a great time anyway. Declan made a great Angry Birds stop-motion video and Callum made a movie based on Plants vs Zombies.
Tomorrow we fly.
Tags: Childrens Creativity Museum, Round the world last days, San Francisco
Thank all for a very consistent, entertaining and informative blog over the last year. What a great adventure you have had. All the best for settling back in.
Wow. A year already! I’ll miss you guys and my daily serve of vicarious travel adventures. Safe trip home . . .
Gosh. I feel very odd on your behalf. xx
Wow. I knew this was coming but it’s still caught me off guard. We had re-entry troubles and are feeling some sadness as we come up on the one-year mark of our departure, and we were only gone for 6 months, AND we didn’t do anything like a round-the-world adventure. I just can’t imagine the transition now….
Coming home is a whole new adventure
welcome back
So you’re probably back now to this rotten and strange ‘summer’ coldness. But I hope it doesn’t feel too bad.