Decision Time
Only months after Mongolia, the death drop is Zac’s second near-death experience within a year.
I am crystal-clear when I wake up in the morning – yes, even before coffee! – that Ethiopia and Sudan are now firmly off the cards. We have used up our luck for the year, and there’s none left for another higher-risk adventure. To overrule my son’s concerns about sickness and stomach bugs after the Blue Hole would be, frankly, tempting fate.
I have gone with the flow, and the flow – or the Universe, if you’re more of a hippie than I’ll ever be – has confirmed that it is time to stop travelling.
There’s no question this is the right decision for Zac.
Will it be right for me? Fuck it. I’m adaptable. I can hang with hunter-gathering nomads and fashion queens. I can sleep on rocky river beds or drink Negronis in high-end bars.
I can handle being a grown-up again. Can’t I?
I guess I’m going to have to. Ulp.
“Yes,” my spawn says. “I think I’m ready for a school environment again. I’m quite looking forward to, you know, being told what to learn and learning it.”
“After Australia,” I say, faux-casually, over breakfast – for we’ve been planning on Christmas in Australia for a while, although the intention was to head from there to Argentina – “After Australia, do you want to revert to the original plan? Settle down in Bali, find a school and all that?”
“Yes,” my spawn says. “I think I’m ready for a school environment again. I’m quite looking forward to, you know, being told what to learn and learning it. And… I don’t really want to travel any more.”
“OK,” I say. “Let’s just stay in Dahab and head to Oz from here. And, for the meantime, shall we just laugh off school, apart from Chinese?”
We agree that, since we are about to stop travelling and reenter reality, Zac will ditch all pretenses of a proper education bar his weekly Skype Chinese class, and go full feral for a couple of months, in one last fling of freedom.
Dahab, for the record, is a splendid place for any child to go feral. Further, as The Whore can confirm, it’s not a bad place for a parent to go feral either.
I need to work out a whole bunch of stuff, not least what exactly we do next, how much money I’ll need to earn to do it, how I’m going to earn said money, and how I (and we) continue to have adventures. Cos I know that without having adventures I will go absolutely spare.
And during this period, when people ask me what I do, I say something like this, “We’ve been travelling for four years, but we’re about to stop. So I’m kind of in transition. And I write stuff.”
Image credit: STOP by Steve Snodgrass.
Wow. Huge. Sounds like it was the hardest/easiest decision to make.
I’ve enjoyed following along on your adventures (about to start my own!) and wish you much luck and contentedness in this new chapter of your life.
Thanks, Tarnya. Well, it was always going to happen — and we’re still having adventures, which is kinda cool….
I just stumbled onto your blog, as I found it on gotripyourself. I wish you Godspeed on the next part of your journey. What a great way for this kid to grow up!
Thank you, Susan!
Having just return to the U.S. after 13 months of traveling around the world, I sympathize with the challenges of stopping. I did find a way to deal with the return to the reality of rent, job, commute, etc.: think of myself as a permanent traveler. I may be parked in my adopted home town (Portland, Oregon) but I am still in travel mode. Meaning, I explore my city and will blog about the adventure as if it were just another stop on the big trip. I can’t imagine you can stop traveling after four years. It might just be another place on your journey, whether you stay there a year or four. I look forward to continuing to follow along!
Thank you, Peter. That’s very much how it feels, like a pause, rather than a permanent stop. I think it’s also helpful that we’re settling down somewhere that we didn’t live before, rather than returning home.
I envy you for all your travelling and wish, someday , we can have a go at it too! Meanwhile following some of your posts for our small trips – next one to Italy (yey)!
As a long-time reader I just wanted to say that I really love your blog and that it was a huge inspiration for me, back when I was stuck in the UK longing to hit the road. (We’ve been travelling for nearly a year now, right now having an awesome time in rural Hungary!)
Anyway so yeah, thanks for that! Are you going to keep blogging here when you guys are settled?
That’s great to know! I’m definitely going to keep blogging here – I’m some way behind on my life at the moment, but anticipate catching up. We’re also continuing to travel and I think it’s interesting to people to see what happens after nomadism, as well as what happens during it….
Your travelling life totally isn’t over – it isn’t even on hold. I know it’s not the same, but I work full time, and I still manage to travel plenty. Ok, so not quite as much as I’d like, but it’s totally possible. And if you can’t go away long-distance, there’s always so much exploring to be done at home. It’s amazing the places you can stumble upon in your own back yard!
Thanks, Katie – I’ve come to realise that too…. Particularly if you have an interesting back yard. We used to travel a lot before we travelled longterm, and I/we can go back to that….
I guess it was not an easy decision for you and hope it will bring only the best for you both.
Being a nomad myself and having a small child, I am intimidated by the thought that he may want to settle down and live “normally” forcing us to stop moving around the world. Just as you said, you can cope with anything, and I guess, so can we. It’s just a bit unpleasant to think about right now.
And it will be definitely interesting to me to read about your post-nomad life.
Good luck!
Ah, you have plenty of time for all that – parenthood’s a journey. There are pleasures in building a life somewhere else as well, so I think the moral is to embrace what happens. How long have you been nomadic, by the way? Lots and lots of people seem to stop after four years: it’s quite rare to keep going significantly longer than that….
I entirely sympathise. We’re not nomads, but are serial expats. With kids of 14 and 10, we’re now at the stage where we have to stop, pick a country and associated education system (the kids have done 3 so far), pick an education language (two to date), and stick with it long enough for them to get a secondary education and an entrance ticket to go to college.
It’s the right thing to do for them, so they can have fairly normal teenagehoods, with a fixed school, friends, perhaps their first puppy love crushes, but oh! I’m so chaffing against it personally. It’ll be eight looooooong years.
Yep, it’s hugely annoying. But – I’m sure they’ll thank us for it in about 15 years, right?! Where did you decide on?
We’re in the US now, in the South West (we’re originally from the UK too). The kids spent some years in French-speaking primary schools, but it was going to be better for my not-very-foreign-language-inclined oldest to do his secondary education in English. So the kids will go through US high school – dunno what they’ll decide for university. The US is expat-lite, but at least it’s mildly more interesting than the UK for us!
Well, it’s a lot bigger, for starters! I’m increasingly interested in the US as a place to travel to, actually. I’ve only been to New York and Vegas, which is pretty shocking, all in all – would love to see some of the big ticket stuff, like Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon. Zac would also love to see some of the US (he’s flown through Miami, but that’s it). Ooh, and the Canadian Rockies. Skiing the Canadian Rockies would be just bloody wonderful. So – you do have a lot of potential while you’re “stuck”…
Yes, it’s admittedly a gilded prison. We’ve taken some great camping road trips through Arizona, Colorado and California; last year I went to a wedding at Yosemite; later this year when the kids have October break we’ll do city trips: one or more of Washington, New York, San Francisco. Could be worse.
I do miss belonging to an expat or travelling community though. Absolutely everyone here is living a ‘normal’ life: staying in the same place they were born or have lived for decades, having their family around and getting together for BBQs and Christmas, etc. I’m very much an outlier here, so although I deeply enjoy my unique ‘that English lady’ status/ self-definition, and the kids are rocking their English accents and being school celebrities, I find I’m a strange emotional blend of not wanting to be like the locals, but envying them their comfortable social groups. I need to find a new identity for the next 8 years, methinks.