Getting here

Or, the journey before the journey.

So taking nearly a year off to go travel is truly a rare and special privilege…and one that is only possible due to my amazing wife. It is her constant hard work and highly paid job that has allowed us to do this. Not that she has stopped working; neither she nor her firm could stomach that. So she continues to work most evenings while we’re here, when it’s morning in California, clacking away at the laptop, joining conference calls, and managing a team of junior lawyers and consultants. I’m not sure how she does it. One advantage: as a natural night owl, she’s quite a bit more awake and alert for those conference calls, than when she was home and sometimes starting early calls while still in bed. 😉

Me? My job was never so lucrative as hers, so we agreed that I would quit (more or less) a year ago so that I could focus on some house projects and getting us ready to go. We had ideas to build a new garage and to do a kitchen remodel, and it seemed like a good idea (at the time) to knock these out before we left. The garage would give us a good place to store our stuff while we were gone, and both projects would make our home more attractive to prospective tenants as we rented our house during our time abroad.

I started these projects in February 2021, and thought it would take six months to do both. A year later, I still wasn’t done (no surprise to anyone that knows me!), but we booked airline tickets anyway and set ourselves a deadline of March 28. The past three months have easily been the most stressful of my entire life as I worked night and day to wrap everything up, while we also packaged up all of our worldly belongings and tried to pack a couple of suitcases for a very long trip. We pushed our flights to the 30th, and even then, when our ride showed up to take us to LAX, I was still working out in the garage, not even yet showered! Meanwhile, our house looked like we’d be robbed. Sigh.

But here we are. And luckily for us, my amazing mother has saved the day, spending countless hours cleaning up our house and finishing up all of our loose ends for us while we’ve been gallivanting across the Spanish countryside. We couldn’t be here without her! Thank you, mom…I owe you one. (Hopefully she’ll be done soon so she can come join us!)

After all that, it’s been quite a transition to having nothing to do each day but figure out what we want to go see and where we want to eat lunch. Especially for me, when so much of my identity is wrapped up in the things I create. Most anybody else would be exhilarated by the prospect of vacationing for a year. But me? I’ve actually been a little…depressed. Anxious even. Sorry, Amy and Griffin, if I’ve been impatient or moody. Surprise, surprise: I may actually be constitutionally incapable of relaxing and doing nothing! (Amy and Griffin on the other hand are content to wander and explore new places, and in fact seem to thrive without a routine.)

First world problems, to be sure. But perhaps this trip is therapy for me, teaching me how to live a different way and build a new identity for myself. I think I sort of knew that all along, even said it aloud, but I didn’t think it would be so…hard. Spain especially has been educational. The Spaniards are experts on how to relax and enjoy themselves, probably more than most Europeans, with centuries of experience. I keep wondering aloud when these people work! But maybe I need to learn from them how to just be.