The road home

As we’re nearing our end of the trip I have trouble comprehending how it has almost been two years that we’ve called Liberty the Great our home. We have been ‘on the road’ for two friggin’ years – but what does that actually mean?

Our lives just continue, and we lead a pretty ordinary existence; we explore, we care for our children, we work. But it’s been somewhat isolating not to be able to connect properly to people, places, routines. And we also don’t just ‘travel’. In that respect we are different from pretty much all the people we’ve met on the way.

While our mobile lifestyle is not completely normal, we pretty much accepted it a long time ago as normality for ourselves. Which makes me wonder what it must feel like to our boys, who have lived this way most of their young lives. For us adults it’s been an conscious lifestyle choice to live in motion, in dramatically reduced space, with less stuff. Our kids didn’t have a say in this.

In visiting places we usually go through a succession of scoping them out, making them our temporary home, finding our adventures, and saying glad or sad goodbyes upon leaving. Usually, there’s a new place just around the corner. But not this time. I wonder about how the boys will cope with the change of having a permanent home, about not living in the bus, not moving on. I assume memories of our traveling lifestyle will be imprinted in some deep chambers of their minds. It’ll be up to them what to make of it in the future.