Vacation Recap(s): First the Feels, Then the Funny

We’re back from our travels. I’m sitting in bed, the kids are rotting in front of the TV, Robb is working at his home office set-up in the garage. We’re moving pretty slowly these first few days back from traveling for almost a month straight- first driving the eleven hours to and fro Oregon, then taking seven planes and staying in six different places in Michigan and Ohio.

It’s not just the jet lag, it’s also the emotional weight that’s flattened us. When we left our home of sixteen years on New Year’s Day, 2021…and the midwest where we’d lived almost our entire lives and our kids had lived exclusively…it was in the middle of COVID. We hadn’t seen friends and family for almost a year. So this trip ‘home’ was the goodbye tour we never got. It was hard, as it’s meant to be. Plus, it’s still terrifying, as only half of us are old enough to be vaccinated, and every bit of travel feels like potential exposure.

It’s a weird feeling, facing the fact that we chose isolation, that we deliberately left the nest where we know people, where we have a network, to seek something new and different. We feel certain, exquisitely certain, that we’ve found the right place and are doing the right thing for our family and ourselves, but also it’s lonely. I don’t mind being alone. I like it, but it feels exposed to not have anyone close physically backing us up. Signing my kids up for camp, I realized that outside of Robb and me, unless our ONE FRIEND happens to be in town, our closest emergency contact is 3,000 miles…