Tag: Globetrotting

23Aug

Unknown v. 2.0

August 3rd slipped by this year without a hint of fanfare (unless you count a dirty house as a celebratory tradition); it was a normal Wednesday in a normal workweek in a normal summer, and it completely slipped my mind that this normal was once the sheer unknown gaping underneath.

Four years ago, we packed our lives into a motley assortment of boxes and tracked a thing with feathers across the Atlantic. Through miracle and determination, Dan had found a job here that fit his abilities perfectly, and the opportunity to finally, finally take on our dream was marvel and terror at once. Some nights, we danced in a buzz of ideas, lit from the inside out with the champagne-glow of adventure. Other nights, we lay creased in thought, my hand resting on the precious variable in my womb as the whens and hows circled like vultures overhead.

There was no gingerly edging off the beaten path, no feeling out each new step from the safety of solid ground, no road signs assuring prosperity in 4,500 miles. All we had was the blank expanse of possibility and the faith to leap, spurred on by knowing our options boiled down to courage or regret. We took the leap, and on August 3rd, 2007, we landed on Italian soil to begin forging our new normal. In the four years since, we’ve settled into the comfort of friendships and routine, language becoming ever less of a barrier and the Italian culture sinking ever deeper into our bones. It’s more than we could have hoped for when we boarded the jet back in Philadelphia…

…which makes this new drop-off all the more dizzying.

Dan has turned in his job resignation. It was necessary for a variety of reasons, and it was time, but oh. We’re here again with the buzzing ideas and circling questions, minus one occupied womb and plus one meticulously written business plan, and while there are possibilities that make our heads spin with goodness, they’re still only possibilities. Our now-normal has a windblown pang to it. I keep taking mental inventory against my better judgment and trying to work out which facets of our life—home? church? friends? money?—will still be in place come Christmas. My heart balks as the calendar pulls us forward.

Never mind that we wouldn’t be here in the first place without that leap off the edge of reason; I don’t want to do it again. I don’t want that momentary weightlessness above the dark pit of my imaginings. I don’t want to have to rely so completely on a divine intention I still have difficulty trusting (and sometimes believing at all). I just want someone who can peek into the future and put a stamp of guarantee on our steps before we plunge into them. I would like the risk eliminated altogether, thankyouverymuch.

But if I’m honest with myself, it’s only the narrowest bit of my mind that’s clinging to the notion of safety. The broader scope of who I am recognizes that ours, like any good story in the making, runs on the cogs of adventure. These tenuous days swinging between doubt and hope are paragraph spaces in an unfolding work of art that teaches us to live as protagonists rather than as background filler, and the process is nothing short of exhilarating.

It seems clear that August 3rd has served its time as a memorial to our story and is now ready to pass on the honor to a new date, a new landing—whenever and however it may be.

15Aug

I Want S’more

It’s a good thing today is a holiday because we’re all still in a sun-stupor. Breakfast was so late that we decided to count it as lunch. Naptime was non-negotiable—for any of us—and a homemade chocolate frappuccino courtesy of my ever-thoughtful Dan was the only thing that pulled me upright afterward. We’ve skipped almost all socially recommended forms of getting ready for the day (read: clothes) and gotten straight to work lounging away the afternoon. Time consuming, that one is.

While I wish I had something more profound or provocative to write today, truth is that my mind is still back at the campground doing cannonballs into the pond and swinging two-by-two in hammocks and cheating at Crazy Uno to help the little ones win. My thoughts are still soaking up purple mountains at sunset and the happy-making mess of s’mores, s’mores everywhere. I’m still cocooned in a sleeping bag nest with my husband and exclaiming over fish (as only true city dwellers do) with the girls and piling around a picnic table with friends. And I’m going to go ahead and say that’s okay.

The splash formerly known as Bethany

What were your favorite moments from the weekend?

19Jul

A Clumsy Apology

Hello there, neglected little blog.
Hello there, neglected friends.
Hello there, neglected pages, fingertips, heart.

We’re home from a rather dizzying eight countries in three weeks, and I’m still stumbling around on disoriented feet, tripping over an unpacked suitcase here or there. Not having written in even longer, my sense of direction is totally shot. Everything feels unfamiliar… fingers on the keys, the transference of inklings into ink, even (wince of pain) Facebook.

I’ve had to do more on-the-fly prioritizing the last few months than ever before in my life, and of all the mosaic tiles that make up my days, writing feels the most expendable. Make an appearance in the blogosphere or accept the translation project? Work on my half-finished book or run the weekly errand gamut? Journal or attend the girls’ school dinner? Respond to emails or clean up our natural disaster of a kitchen? Even during our vacation, I made a daily decision against snuggling up with my laptop and instead ventured out to experience new places with my family. I wouldn’t have chosen any other way.

But damned if I don’t miss this.

(This being my neglected little blog, my neglected friendships, the neglected passageways from my heart-tips to my fingertips, and the simple pleasure of snuggling up with my laptop despite the kitchen’s resemblance to Mount St. Helens.)

Please to forgive? And to stick around until I regain my footing again?

P.S. – No time or energy for a birthday list this year… but if I can show up around here a little more often [than my current trend of never], I’ll consider every moment of it a gift. Ribbons optional.

 

15Jun

Present Perfect

My head is full up to here. Lesson plans, present perfect study guides, proper British spellings, and would they translate it as cinema or theatre in the UK? Dust clusters, cheese baked onto forks, a weekend filling up fast. Blank pages staying blank, clock face a blur, heart applying whiteout with a heavy hand. Lists like a rolling sea and the tide coming in.

We leave to camp our way across Europe in just over a week, but the days are still picking up speed, and I’m bracing myself for the almighty impact of vacation… or rather, the night before vacation when we’re playing Trunk Tetris with the car and my eyes are only half open and I still have half the kitchen to pack. Being a detail person generally works well for me, but I do have a habit of drowning in my own practicality—especially, say, when we’re T-9 days from an epic camping trip with pretty close to nothing planned. We haven’t even figured out which country we’re going to spend the last week of it in. That would be more than enough to overwhelm my head if there were any space whatsoever left in it right now.

But seeing as there’s not, I can’t manage to work up a good panic, and truth be told, involuntary oblivion is kind of nice. I guess all that really matters is that four of us leave home together and come home together, even if I forget to pack the kitchen sink and/or we accidentally detour through remote Slovenia. (Come to think of it, that could be fun…)

I’m grateful for these spastic little glimpses into the brain clutter reminding me that yep, it’s pretty full in there, no room to worry about the future, and hey what do you know, we’re all surviving. What’s more, we’re all happy to be here right now, and I suspect that two weeks from now when the unknown is our new right now, we’ll still be glad to be living it. However, if there were room in my head for the kitchen sink, I wouldn’t complain. Just saying.

2May

Sanity at its Handiest

Here is my mantra for the day: “I am going to blog today, dangit, I AM GOING TO BLOG.”

Principalities and powers and double-part-time* working hours have conspired to keep me away from the blank page lately, and they probably would have continued unabated had my husband not looked straight into my crazed eyes over the weekend and reminded me that some cultures value sanity. The man makes a convincing argument, and not just  because he accompanies it with freshly-brewed espresso.  I mean, I’ve gone so long now without catching you up on our Easter camping trip that both it and Princess Beatrice’s hat are old news. (But will that keep me from doing so anyway?)**

* Doesn’t count as full-time because I’m a freelancer and also like deluding myself.
** No.

Two Easters ago, we went on an impromptu camping trip that was so magical and life-infusing that we dubbed it a new family tradition and went back the next year. This Easter, we decided to expand our horizons a bit and head north to Lake Como from whence not even a rainy forecast could deter us. What did deter us, however, was our car, which fainted rather suddenly in the middle of a roundabout mere hours before our scheduled departure. It was Friday evening; the holiday weekend had already begun. No mechanic shop would be open until Tuesday, and even that was doubtful as traditional Italian Easter feasts require several days of recovery. Como would have to wait.

Just in case you ever find yourself in this situation, I’ve put together a handy guide gleaned from our experience –  What to do when your car breaks down in Italy negating your anticipated Easter camping trip:

Set up the tent on your balcony, avoiding eye contact with the neighbors. Stock it with My Little Ponies. When your preschoolers ask if they can sleep out there by themselves in the rain, shrug and answer, “Eh, why not?”

Balcony camping

Ride the bus downtown to chase pigeons. Purchase giant parmesan pretzels from an Austrian entrepreneur. Chase pigeons with giant parmesan pretzels. Sample every single shade flavor of lip gloss at The Body Shop. Invent the extremely safe and socially acceptable sport of escalator racing.

After a lipgloss sampling at the Body Shop

Have a pizza picnic on the floor. Have a strawberry picnic on the floor. Have a banana split picnic, not on the floor. Discover that your children do not like banana splits (“My ice cream and bananas are touching!”) and ease their distress by eating the rest for them.

Pizza picnic!

Hurl football-sized chocolate eggs at your unsuspecting spouse and complete a nutritious breakfast with the fragments. Host an Easter egg hunt in the backyard so as to have enough candy on hand for a nutritious supper as well. If running out of chocolate, dine on green eggs and ham—just so long as eggs are somewhere on the menu.

I do not like them, Sam I Am

Sleep in until noon, build nerdy Lego contraptions, watch music videos and talent shows and hilariously awful infomercials, impersonate cows, play a very pink version of kickball, and if you hit a lull, go with the failproof Granny Pants Dance.

Granny pants - 1

There you go. Sanity has been restored, my blog is marginally more  up to date, and a new wisdom-packed vacation guide is out in the world. And who knows? One of us might even get a new Easter tradition out of it.

23Mar

Harebrained

Admittedly, our weekend in Rome wasn’t the most harebrained idea I’ve ever jumped on, but it clearly was not the work of a sound mind. One daughter was vomiting, you see. The other was dealing with a bout of “poop juice” (what her term lacks in delicacy it more than makes up for in originality), and I was feverish from a mild case of food poisoning. However, one’s husband only runs his first marathon once, and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to cheer him on. Besides, it was Rome. Cobblestone streets, gold-plated basilicas, Colosseums, Rome. We were all going.

As close as we got to the starting line  2

The decision was at least 30% mistake. The family and friends of 14,000 racers seeped along the streets carrying curious tourists along, and a sickly mama with a preschooler attached to each arm was no match for the full-bodied tide. We never made it within 300 meters of the starting line, and we were somehow less successful at finding the finish.  As for my vision of popping up around the city like moles with Metro passes, arriving at famous monuments with impeccable timing to whistle and snap artsy photos as Dan ran past… well, we were actually more like earthworms, inching from the underground stops in pale discombobulation and completely missing our first pre-planned photo opportunity because we were lying belly-up in the sun.

Basking in the sun

However, for all its faults, the experience was one I’m glad I took life up on. Had the girls and I stayed curled under familiar blankets, we wouldn’t have gotten to watch spring wake fresh-faced from her beauty sleep and beam into the niches of the Eternal City. It was a rare kind of pleasure to sit on a marble bench in the Piazza del Popolo with the sun freckling my nose and the girls napping on my lap while we waited for Dan to sweep by on the stream of marathon runners. For that hour, we had no obligation to tour or snap photos or do anything; it was a golden opportunity to just be, and the unplanned respite could not have been more perfect. While tourists milled around surreptitiously snapping photos of us (“I’ve never seen such a sight in all of Rome,” grinned the man who offered to take a shot on my camera), I soaked up spring and the precious nearness of my still-little girls.

We were a tourist attraction 2

And then my husband ran past—kilometer 37 of 42.2—and it was incredible to see his hard work and dedication in every footstep planted on centuries’-old pavement.   We smiled at each other like married people do, one in sickness, one in health, both calculating the experiences of our life together and coming up rich. Then he turned the corner, the girls and I collected our jackets and sickness bags, and all four of us headed on jellied legs toward the finish.

Daniel at kilometer 37 - Cropped

That was about the time the girls and I got lost and Dan ended up dehydrated and we realized it was three in the afternoon and some of us hadn’t eaten in 24 hours and our parking meter ran out and the glamor of our adventure was trampled under tired feet and I decided that next year I’m limiting my spring-welcoming activities to opening windows and potting flowers. Still, even our least sane ideas lead to experiences that we cherish as our family’s most valuable keepsakes, and there’s no doubt in my feverish, harebrained mind that we left Rome richer than we came.

4Feb

Highland Fling – Part 13 (and the last)

February has been a perfectly charming house guest so far. Blossoms are exploding on the mimosa trees, sunshine is beaming the chill into compliance, and our thoughts have turned to summer vacation. There is talk of Belgium, but I’m hoping the other possibility of Portugal wins out. I would love to camp our way through French countrysides and Spanish vineyards, maybe take a ferry to the Azores… or not. Now that I’m looking at the map, I see that the Azores are practically halfway across the Atlantic. It was a nice daydream though. At any rate, this line of thinking keeps snagging on something at the back of my brain… something about our epic camping habit… something I’ve forgotten to finish…

Oh. Oh dear. Seven whole months have passed since our trip to Scotland, and I have somehow neglected to post the last installment of my related letter to the girls. Seven months are an embarrassing amount of time to wrap up a vacation, no matter how many adventures it entailed, and I am appropriately sheepish. I hope you can find it in your hearts to forgive me… and possibly even to keep reading. (Even though I’ve done my very best to ensure that none of you will remember what happened up to this point. Egad.)

~~~

(Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, & 12)

Early the next afternoon, we rolled into Munich and the waiting hospitality of our dear friends the G’s. Your dad, the car, and I exhaled a collective sigh of gratefulness that we didn’t need to unload the camping gear; for our last night of the trip, we could luxuriate in home-cooked meals and mattresses, not to mention wonderful company. Don’t be fooled though into thinking this meant we spent the afternoon sinking our toes in the carpet and marveling at our proximity to indoor plumbing. That’s just not our style. Instead, we outsmarted both the heat and Germany’s lack of beaches by spending the afternoon at a local creek sinking our toes in the sand and marveling at how far our water cannons could shoot. You, Sophie, weren’t as keen as the rest of us about the creek… and once I slipped into its knee-deep silt, I could certainly sympathize. (Shudder259103738992.) However, you happily used the hours to collaborate on sand soup recipes with your friend Noah, and I’d venture to guess we all got our fill of pure, slimy fun.

Natalie fires backThe inconvenient thing about shooting water straight up in the air is that it insists on coming straight back down. Of course, that might have been the whole point…

With an indefinable mix of reluctance and glee, we set out the next morning for the last leg of our trip home. To say the drive was noisy would be putting things mildly. You two put on spectacular performances of ‘80s hits (“I’m walking on sunshine, WHOOOOOO-OOOOOOOOAAAAAHHHHHH!”) using your German sausages as microphones and your vocal cords as battering rams. Your dad and I were three-quarters deaf by the time we made it through the Dolomites, but eardrums are overrated anyway… especially when it come to surviving a 51-hour road trip.

Opera singers in the back seat“…don’t it feel GOOOOD!!!!!!!!!”

And survive we most definitely did. I suspect it’s something of a miracle that we all still liked each other at the end of so much concentrated togetherness, but I guess that’s what fighting off hostile farm animals does to a family. (That and blueberry muffins.)  I can’t emphasize enough what rock stars you girls were about our whole crazy undertaking. It would be asking a lot from mature adults (which your parents are not) to expect them to speed-camp across Europe with a fraction of your cheerful adaptability.  You girls weren’t just tagalongs on the trip; you were participants, and you colored each new experience with a shade of delight uniquely your own. True, some of that delight seemed a little like being skinned alive with a pair of rusty nail clippers (*cough*climbingHolyroodHill*cough*), but I will forever be grateful that I got to share these adventures with you… theatrics and all.

Extracting giggles from a tired Sophie
Love,
Mom

~~~

~~~

Fin.

© Copyright 2019, all rights reserved.
Site powered by Training Lot.