Another year behind and past makes a person reflective about what they’ve done. In my case, think most about where I’ve been (physically and mentally), what I’ve eaten and what I’ve had the pleasure to drink.
On January 1, a year ago, I got on a ship that I would call home for four months. It took about 700 of us around the world, to 11 different countries, covering approximately 22,806 nautical miles in a little over 100 days. We saw so many sunrises and sunsets, and more stars than I had ever seen before. With not quite a week each, we trekked Hawai’ian waterfalls, bullet trained from Kobe to Tokyo, walked so. many. miles. across Shanghai to fly to Hong Kong. We navigated the Mekong Delta to reach Ho Chi Minh City and sleeper-bussed the way to the almost-north of Vietnam to Cat Tien National Park. We were shuttled for hours from port to Yangon, then spent a night floating the rivers of Aleppey in Kerala. We visited temples in Mauritius, drove on the left-side of the road from Capetown to the southernmost tip in Cape Agulhas, and were moved in the slave castles of Cape Coast and Elmina. Tired feet led us through the sweet and savory streets of Fez before bobbing outside the coast of Lisbon, unexpectedly thanks to storms in the English Channel. We flew to Hamburg for a hamburger to train to Berlin to walk the Wall before busing to Krakow and following the devastating journey of tens of thousands at Auschwitz. We craned our necks to see the peaks of St. Vitus in Prague, then made a welcome but bittersweet return to Ohio to reunite with our families (a new niece!) and then-solo pup, Obie.
Weary travelers, we are.
Summer took us home to Colorado and into the mountains, down a raging river of Class IV rapids, and an even wilder new pup, Lu. to our only camping trip and extended time off of work which was also when we moved from our teeny basement apartment above ground to rent a whole house for ourselves and our books. We librarian-ed and taught our way through the fall semester and saw friends marry in Ohio before spending our first Christmas solo in Colorado, where we found snow up in the mountains.
It was a comparatively relaxed summer and fall, given the beginning of our year.
I asked Boyfriend to play the rose and thorn game, a best and worse kind of thought game, and there were so many roses. So, so many. But there were a lot of thorns too, which is fair. It’s always hard to adjust to the end of an adventure, and the reverse culture shock was so real again. How do you cut that kind of adrenaline rush cold turkey? What do you do when, after waking up in a new location every day for months, you wake up in the same place for months on end? How do you recalibrate? For me, I didn’t for a while, which was a major thorn, complicated by the fact that I wasn’t immediately hired back to teach at my university, and then was, throwing me into a professional tailspin on top of the personal one I was already experiencing.
I spent the first half of the year full of hope and wonder, and the latter with self-doubt and indecision. Both were full of beer and good food, but that’s a reflective story for next time.
I don’t know what 2019 has in store for us, but I’m sure looking forward to it all, since we don’t ever really appreciate the highs without the lows to give us that perspective. Happy New Year, folks.
Away we go,
Kiley
CURATED SYMPOSIUM 