Home is what you take with you, not what you leave behind. — N.K. Jemisin

That’s certainly how we felt about this adventure. And most of our lives. And it’s absolutely true in the broadest sense. But in the approach we’ve taken in executing this particular escapade, I think we’ve come up short.

Despite the obviously meticulous planning that made what we’re doing even possible, our entire process has been to play it by ear. Where are we going next? We’ll decide when we need to. How will we get along with limited native language skills? We’ll find out. How will we feel? TBD.

What we did know is that we’d each be giving up a lot to do this. What we didn’t know, and couldn’t, is what those losses would feel like and where the dial would land between gain and loss. We’ve both tended to be loosely tethered to place, happy to pack up and move if it seemed convenient or interesting, so we weren’t expecting the absence of home to carry so much weight. In hindsight, there’s a glaring difference between not being attached to a particular home, and not needing a home at all.

Something’s Lost But Something’s Gained…

There’s been an underlying asymmetry to this plan from the very beginning, in the sense that Dorothy and I valued very differently the things we’ve had to give up. We both gave up friends, which I think landed about evenly, probably a little harder on Dorothy, who’s less noticeably sociopathic than I am. Zoom mitigates that a little, but not entirely. Lockdown taught us that Zoom could suffice when there were no other options. And there are definitely no other options while we travel. Three months is a long time to stay somewhere as a tourist, but it’s hardly long enough to make friends.

The real downside here is less about access to our friends than that we are 100% our only companions. We’re experiencing everything together, and it’s a little claustrophobic. One of our ironclad relationship rules is that each of us should have a hobby that doesn’t involve the other. I had board game nights with my friends that Dorothy didn’t join. Dorothy had nights out with her friends that I didn’t attend. But we’re this hermetically sealed unit on our travels, and that’s not healthy. I’ve taken to going on walks by myself one day a week, but all that does for Dorothy is absent me; it doesn’t offer her anything positive in return. Not that the value of my absence should be underestimated.

We both gave up work, which hit with completely disparate impacts. Dorothy gave up satisfying other people’s demands for money, which she’d have to be a psycho to crave. But she misses work in the sense that her entire adult life has been devoted to making things with her hands, and that is largely absent. We travel with a sewing kit, and she has hemmed the curtains in our Airbnb and bought clothes for the fabric and completely recut them and reassembled them by hand. It’s what there is for her to do, and it scratches the itch at least a little. Personally, I find the faint whiff of desperation intoxicating.

I, on the other hand, haven’t enjoyed my work for the past twenty years or so, ever since I started being paid like an adult and stopped being creative. We wouldn’t have the flexibility and freedom to do what we’re doing without the financial base those twenty years built, but I can appreciate the benefits without having to gaslight myself about how much fun it was.

So I’ve happily given up a work life I’d only ever tolerated, while Dorothy is sporting a severe phantom limb where making things is concerned.

And we both gave up Home. More on that in a minute.

What have we each gained to offset our losses? Most obviously, adventure. We’re going places and doing things that are absolutely amazing. However, there’s even a little asymmetry here, as my risk calculations tend to be looser than Dorothy’s. I’m happy to just set off (my motto: What could possibly go wrong?), while Dorothy requires a little gritting of teeth (her motto: It will be fine…). I know not to push too hard and Dorothy knows to let things happen, so while this isn’t a major problem it’s definitely a source of underlying tension.

Dorothy has gained the challenge of settling us in a new place every three months. She has to figure out how to close any gaps in what the Airbnb offers, suss out the local produce and figure out how to feed us, and make sure that our home is as gracious as we can pull off under the circumstances.

The other thing we’ve probably gained is staving off dementia. One of the reasons we chose to gallivant off in the first place was because we knew it would be hard in ways that promote neuroplasticity. We can practically feel that on a daily basis. Our retirement fears were all about becoming smaller and having our lives close in on us. Disaster averted! For now.

The primary thing I’ve gained is this blog. I’ve always written a lot for work, but I’ve seldom been able to write as a pure expression of myself. I not only take pleasure in the act of writing, but the writing forces me to be thoughtful about the places we visit and the things we do, even the pictures I take. I am definitely a more engaged consumer of our experiences because of it. Of course, I could just write a pure travelogue: “We went here and saw this and then we went there and saw that.” But how profoundly uninteresting, for both me and you.

Instead, I want to write about what the places we’ve been and the things we’ve seen mean. I want to understand their context, to write about things that aren’t just on the surface. That requires that I’m thinking both while we’re adventuring and while I’m writing. I’m not crafting learned dissertations, but I feel a responsibility to accurately represent what we’re seeing. That’s what made Cuba so painful. The truth underneath the surface was fucked up.

So, on balance. I gave up work I didn’t like in exchange for adventure and the blog. Dorothy gave up friends and making things and home for… adventure and housekeeping?

When we set out, the commitment we made to one another is that we’d stop when it was no longer fun. What we didn’t understand is that, at a practical level, that meant that we’d go until one of us broke. Neither of us want to pull the lever if the other is still having fun, so that means we’d each hold on until the last possible moment before cracking.

That’s an unhealthy dynamic.

We needed to figure out a safety valve, so we could reduce the pressure when necessary without having to completely throw the towel in.

Homeward Bound

As it happens, my sister, Nef, owns two apartments in her Hyde Park Chicago building. Don’t ask. There is no straightforward narrative that ends in “spare apartment.”

We’d already made arrangements to purchase the apartment from her. The idea was that we’d pick up our Final Resting Place for when we were done traveling, lock it in at today’s prices, and rent it out for a little extra income until we careened to a stop.

Since this adventure is all about being responsive and adaptive to whatever’s going on around us, we’re executing a pivot. We’re returning to the US after Tunisia, but we’re returning to truly move into the apartment. We’ll get our things out of storage, do a little renovation, and have a real home.

Our assumption had been that we couldn’t afford to maintain a home and travel, but that’s what spreadsheets are for. We’re paying for our travels out of our Social Security income, and we actually run a surplus every month, even with all of the rugs, pottery, and clothing. You can see our budget here.

We paid cash for the Chicago apartment from the proceeds of selling our St. Louis building, so it only has insurance, taxes, and HOA fees while unoccupied. That load isn’t 100% covered by our travel surplus, but it’s defrayed to the extent that the additional expense isn’t an existential threat. And once set up and furnished, we could rent it out on one of the sabbatical services and bank some profit if we wanted.

What this means is that when we’re having the conversation about where to go next, “home” is now an option. We could travel for six months of the year, nine months, or a full year at a time, as we see fit, knowing that we can tap out and recharge at any time. That will substantially extend how long we can do this. Left as we currently operate, I think we’d have an increasingly shrill year of this left, maximum. With a safety valve installed, we can do this until we’re physically unable, which had been the original plan. It never occurred to me that we’d crack mentally before we broke down physically.

Our son, Sam, is graduating with his MBA in December of this year, so we’re going to stick around for the ceremony before hitting the road again. That gives us more than six months in Chicago to settle in, learn the city, and make a home. A home we’ll be happy to come back to whenever we feel the need.

I’ll write about the move-in and renovation, and I’ll write about Chicago. But then we’ll be back in the saddle and on to more exotic destinations and more interesting blog posts.

Let your home be your mast and not your anchor. — Kahlil Gibran