I just booked our plane tickets back to the United States. Yikes.
We fly from Amsterdam to Chicago on August 19th. After a few days visiting my mom in Chicago, we’re going to drive, bus, or fly to Ohio.
And then, we plan to stay mostly in place for a while in Ohio – for at least a year, but almost certainly longer – so that Theo can go to school, make long-term friends, and develop a deeper relationship with his grandparents than facilitated by our weekly Skype sessions.
I admit that I feel melancholy. But I also feel silly about the melancholy, both because the end of the trip isn’t particularly close and because, even if it were, I can look forward to a very good life even when remaining relatively stationary.
So, tonight I’ll just let myself feel a little melancholy. Tomorrow I’ll remind myself of all the goods things to come.
***
Since we’re pretty much booked through the end of the trip now, I’ve updated the map of where we’ve been and we’re going. On the map below, the places where we’ve lived for about a month are marked in blue and our upcoming, planned homes-for-a-month are marked in orange. We are currently in Taipei, Taiwan.
(Clicking on the map will open it in Google maps, where you can scroll, zoom, and see places we visited for a shorter time.)
Places we’ve lived thus far:
- Skibbereen, Ireland
- Lyon, France
- L’isle-sur-la-Sorgue, France
- Zagreb, Croatia
- Istanbul, Turkey
- Pissouri, Cyprus
- Stockholm, Sweden
- Reykjavik, Iceland
- Esterellos Oeste, Costa Rica
- Buenos Aires, Argentina
- Auckland, New Zealand
- Sanur, Indonesia
- New Delhi, India
- Chiang Mai, Thailand
- Hanoi, Vietnam
- Taipei, Taiwan
Upcoming homes-for-a-month:
- Otsu, Japan
- Rabat, Morocco
- Barcelona, Spain
- Berlin, Germany