The Thursday Ramble: Thoughts on Long Adventures

This is the first new blog post I have written in a month, and I am writing it as we approach the end of a trip that is over 10,000 miles of travel, over 4 weeks and 3 days.  A long trip 

I am glad we did this. We are able, I think both of us feel stronger than we did when we started. I will add up the total cost sometime soon, or maybe I will just pay the bills and leave it at that, paid for. A reward for decades of work, saving and being careful with money.  

Being away for a month is a long time. Long enough to break habits, or form new ones. Long enough to forget, while packing in new memories. 

For the last half of it, I had internet access, and some connection to my network, but only virtual.  And I needed to remember if I sent a text message at 8:00 AM, it was received on the east coast of the United States at 2 or 3 AM, for my friends farther west very much in the wee hours of the morning. Not exactly a good morning text, if it wakes someone in the middle of their night. The flip of that is messages sent to me at 5 PM, came in at 11 PM my time. 

I missed my social network. English is less common in Vienna than other places I have traveled, and I don't speak German. At times I longed for a stranger to have a conversation longer than an elevator ride with. 

Not knowing the language is a special challenge. Even street signs are long strings of letters spelling something, that I can vaguely make out. I struggled with spelling as a child, and learned to attach meaning to a string of letters, even if I couldn't make out what the letters spelled, that is how I navigated Vienna, if part of the pattern of letters matched, that was good enough. 

All in all, I am glad we took the trip, that we had time to stop and smell the roses. That I had time to get lost. And I did, in Barcelona I wandered off in the Gothic Quarter, ended up a couple of miles from where I thought I was, headed in the wrong direction. Google maps on my phone to the rescue. 

Will we do this again? When? Will I do anything this complicated again? We will figure that out over the next few weeks. There are always points in a trip like this when we think, never again, then we start thinking, that was fun, I'd like to spend more time there, maybe next time.