I have 13 days worth of material to write from our trip. The drinks tried (so many good drinks), the food (haggis=ok, black pudding=meh), the people (the accents!), and more.

But today, today is about home.

We arrived back in Minneapolis on the 4th of July at about 5:15, a little late. We stood in line for a long time in customs, grabbed our bags, and missed the shuttle back to our car by 5 minutes, so we got to sit for an hour.

#damnit

Tell me about it. I was stoked to get off the 8 1/2 hour plane right (fun fact, Delta flies from Atlanta to Johannesburg, a 21-hour flight!). Honestly, getting there and back was pretty uneventful. On the way out, I got the middle seat, which was not a good flight. The guy beside me was sprawled out and my wife is a cuddler (never a bad thing), so I was squished. The remaining flights were all on planes where we were only two across and she sat me on the window, giving me a little more room (but also more room for her to snuggle up! 🙂

Anyway, we sat for an hour, then headed the three hours back home, returning about 11:00 PM Thursday night. By this point, we’d been awake a LONG time (I’m not doing the math across 7 time zones), so we brought our stuff inside, pet our kitties (they missed us), and crashed hard!

The next day, we woke up and went grocery shopping because the pantry was empty!

#hungry

We ended up at our local town celebration and many people told us, “Welcome back” or “What are you doing here??”. One of the reasons, we visited a pub in Dublin (about a 20 minute bus ride from our group) by recommendation of a friend. He did request a t-shirt if we went there, so got on the bus and made it happen! It was an amazing place and I’ll write about it later.

What I’ve thought about a lot since returning: Now what?

We’ve got our “f*ck it” plan kind of worked out if teaching just dissolves into a nightmareish hellscape. But if that doesn’t happen, we have at least 5 more summers before we retire. What do we want to do? As parents, we’ve saved a lot of money for our daughters to be able to go to college. We’ve saved money for our own retirements. We’ve saved for taxes, insurance, weddings, cars, but have we saved for us? This trip was really the first vacation that we’ve saved for us.

I want more. There’s a whole big world out there that needs to be explored. We’ve both said some kind of Spanish immersion would be good for us, based on where we work. We both want to see Italy and Greece. We both want to see the Redwoods, Savannah, go back to New Orleans, or go on the Amtrak and visit Seattle.

We were asked if we wanted to come back, and we almost said in unison, “No!”.

We were NOT ready to return. Two weeks without American politics was heaven. Two weeks of good food, good drinks, and amazing view, we were ready to keep going.

It also makes us wonder about where we are living. If we are going to travel more, do we need three acres? Do we really need two lawnmowers? Do we need barns full of stuff? I loved that part of my life, but is it time to start thinking about the next stages? I don’t know, but it’s fun to start looking at life and seeing, how do we change it?

So, we are home, the jungle of a lawn is mowed (it’s ready for another cutting), the weeds have been beaten back (kind of), and all the bills have been paid.

Now what?

When we figure it out, we’ll let you know! 🙂