Marking a year traveling the world

We recently marked the one-year anniversary of taking off to travel the world. The date had almost passed unnoticed. Dates take on a different perspective when traveling. Anyone who has ever been on vacation and remarked, “I don’t even know what day of the week it is” can understand what we mean. The calendar is just a means to schedule our travel; we are more focused on looking forward, rather than looking back.

Despite the occasional curve ball that’s been thrown at us, it’s been smooth sailing so far. We’ve had a few lodging snafus, but we’ve learned to either grin and bear it for a night, or retrench quickly. Only one flight has been cancelled and we haven’t had to visit the lost luggage counter. We’ve had no health issues—even our emergency roll of toilet paper remains unfurled. (Nothing like saying that to jinx it!)

Quite frankly we thought that a life constantly on the move would have burned us out by the fifth or sixth month.  We often don’t know where we’ll be going until a few days ahead. But instead of being nerve-wracking it’s been invigorating.  Maybe that was one of the goals for this trip.

One of the questions we often get is “What’s it like to be with the same person for a year? Day in and day out, hour by hour, minute by. . .” well, you get the idea. That part has been surprisingly easy. After 25 years together we are attuned to each other’s rhythms and make it work. While we do spend most of our time together, we’ve learned to branch out separately from time to time. This lets us pursue our own interests which are then fun to share later, (kind of a nomad’s version of “how was your day, Dear?”)

We did not undertake this journey lightly. We had endured a family situation that was no longer tolerable. A life of stasis was not an option. It was time to look forward and break away from an enabling situation that we could not change, or allow it to keep dragging us under. We chose to keep going. We needed to.

We took this trip to shake up our lives a bit and have they been shaken. It’s been refreshing, a little intimidating, enlightening, but never boring. We highly recommend it to others. You don’t even need to have a strong yearning for adventure. Perhaps you just want to break out of a rut, to realize that you don’t have to follow the same path for the next 20, 30 or 40 years.

After a year on the road we still have a plenty of the world we want to see, and we can definitely say that we would do it all over again. Well, maybe not right away, we do have to stop at some point to earn a living. But we doubt we will follow the traditional route with our lives that we had been on before.

Some humans nest while others are nomadic. Over the past year we’ve met many who fit into the latter group. Like them we now find the world a delightful place to roam. If that’s something you’re interested in, we encourage you to forge your own path.

Little Rocky dons the kilt in Scotland.

Tagged as: Personal stories