Going old?
“Forty eight. I have 48 pairs of shoes.”
On a spring day in 2017, I stood in my closet and counted my shoes. When did I accumulate so many shoes? I was getting ready for work and it was way past time to go. My mind was elsewhere. I’d just read an email that a website where we’d parked our travel diaries for 10+ years was closing shop. It was going to be a lot of work—in not-a-lot of time—to move the entries before the site closed. I had thumbed through our posts, like pages of a magazine. There we were in Iceland, in Portugal, Jerusalem, Cuba, Antarctica, in Easter Island ten years ago. There I was in front of the moai—camera in hand, hair blowing, eyes closed, and a beaming smile. Where had the time gone?
A lot had changed in 10 years, yet the days and weeks never really varied. Work, eat, clean, TV, sleep, and talk-talk-talk about traveling the world. I had sat there staring, turning off the computer in a numb daze. Now I stood staring at shoes. Would we ever go on the trip we’d saved for, dreamed of, talked about?
Portents
Not long after, I had a vivid nightmare. In it, I couldn’t move. My legs wouldn’t listen to my head. I was trapped listening to some banal TV show and was too far from the room’s small window to even look outside. My time for walking in the big, wide, wild world had passed. I was bored. Claustrophobic. Angry. I awoke—scared and sad and anxious.
One morning a month later, I was sitting in my kitchen drinking a cup of coffee when we learned yet another in our circle had died. He was only a few years older than us. And on this summer morning, he had dropped dead in his kitchen while drinking a cup of coffee.
Chilling. My stomach soured and my nerves tightened. Gripping fear. We had to go. GO NOW. ASAP. We’d talked about going for years, saved for it, dreamed of it. Why were we waiting? What were we waiting for? We’re healthy. Our families are healthy and independent. How much longer would we have the time and the vigor to go?
And that was that.
We made the decision that morning to go, to quit our jobs, to take a break. Pent-up dreams of places far away starting spilling out. We jotted down cities, countries, rough plans to hit the road for an extended period of time. Travel light. Sleep cheap.
My mother was supportive. She told me that she and and my step-father had always wanted to travel around the USA, yet never made the move to go. He passed away two years ago. “You should go while you can,” she said. Light bulb. It took a month or two, but we convinced her to go with me on a long road trip before Bryan and I left for the around-the-world trip.
People said, “How brave!” when we told them about our plans. “You’re quitting your jobs?” “What about health insurance?” “What will you do when you get back?” We tripped through the answers. We secretly grilled ourselves on these same dead-weight questions and still had no real answers. It felt beyond irresponsible. In the weeks leading up to the gap, we bounced between thrilled, terrified, tingling, sleepless, and frantic—but always with giddy smiles, pounding hearts, and no regrets.
My last day of work was on Friday the 13th of October. A few days later, I got on a plane to go get my mother for a road trip around the USA. We pulled out of her driveway two days after that. Seven weeks, twenty-seven states, and 11,511 miles passed. We got home in time for Christmas. And then, in early January, my husband and I left for an 11-week, 28,000+ miles, around-the-world trip. Thousands of photos and stories later, here we are—back home.
We’ve been on the move—living in the moment. Now, I’ll share some of the memories. Also, please note, that I’ve backdated the blog posts for when they were happening and drafted).
And then?
Well, we’re still figuring that out.
We are going old. But life is too short not to GO. One day, when we become lost in our heads and/or trapped in our bodies, we’ll have our memories to go on—even if they play as random as a box of VCR tapes with the labels worn off.
So here’s to going—and going until we run out of road!
