And so it begins…
For the next year we are leaving the United States and traveling.
At this point, we think it will be throughout Europe (UK, Norway, Iceland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Rep, Hungary, Croatia, Italy, Albania, Bosnia, Greece, Turkey, and who knows where else. Heck we could end up in Moscow for a year!)
It isn’t where we’re going that is the emphasis for us. Every City has a Bridge. That is to say from a geographical point of view, all great cities and towns have bridges and parks and museums, great restaurants, bikes to rent, bodies of water at which to stare and so on. While we very much look forward to seeing and experiencing all of that, (likely beyond our wildest dreams), the focus of our trip is quite clear:
We want to connect with people.
We want to use local knowledge of where to go and what to see and what to eat and what to drink, as our guide book for the next 12 months.
We want to open up our hearts and minds and be curious little children in grown-up bodies exploring this glorious world of ours. As such, to make any plans could interfere with making connections. We’re not sure. We just don’t know. We are open to having this be a life-changing experience as well as having it be a year of simply drinking great wine, eating great chocolate and just having fun. We just don’t know.
Sharing our experiences will be in and of itself an interesting crucible for learning. How much time do we want to take to talk about what we just did or what we just saw or what we just felt as opposed to hungrily reaching out for the next experience or feeling?
We see the benefit of keeping a cyber journal and sharing it and we also see a benefit in completely staying away from electronic devices. We just don’t know. We are taking a drone to capture video and photographs from the sky. (We hope that all works out). We just don’t know. We’re somewhat confident in our flying and video/photograph capturing. We have no idea yet how to edit, add music, upload. We have a year to learn and grow into that form of documentation. We’re just thinking this is going to be a riot!
We hope to come back. But as Sandy says, if our time is up as we’re overlooking the sea on the Amalfi Coast, what a wonderful way to check out. We hope to stay healthy and safe. We just don’t know. We are going to accept life on life’s terms and get into the flow and see what happens. We could just as easily end up sobbing uncontrollably in a hotel room in Prague, longing to come home and hear MTT conducting Mahler with the San Francisco Symphony and having fried chicken at Blue Plate, as we could choose to take up permanent residency in a little town in the rolling hills outside of Tuscany. Or start a tour business in Athens, or continue our exploration of voluntourism, or… We just don’t know.
We welcome your thoughts and feelings and blessings. We particularly are interested in places you’ve been and things you’ve done in Europe. Moreover if there are key people with whom you think we should connect, we’d love to know their name and contact details.
As our dear friend, Thayer, says, “This is so much more than a year of travel, you two are embarking on an Odyssey.” We take with us a line from Naomi and Rob, of Moody Little Sister, “Here we go, here we go, here we go, go, go.” Our car and driver arrive in 26 hours. We haven’t packed yet. Nor have we found people to lease our home. In the words of Bob Marley, “Every little ting gunna be alright”.