The holiday whirlwind and nomadic musings.

I’m writing on Christmas Eve day, looking back on six weeks of time in the US so far. Chicago, Colorado, California, and now Washington. Thanksgiving and Christmas this year are times to get together with friends and family, to try to renew the bonds which constant travel can fray, and catch up on small and large life events which feel like the very important glue holding relationships together.

To dip in and out of folks’ lives like we do can be challenging. To us the traveling, the changing locations and adapting to a new place is just life, it’s what we’ve been doing for almost two and a half years. But what’s it like for our friends and family to have us plop down in their houses and let out a big sigh and say repeatedly how lovely it is to be somewhere familiar?

How tired are they of our travel tales? Are we getting insufferable? When, we hear from some friends, are we going to settle down? Get jobs again? Do some volunteer work? Something other than this constant travel and adventure and fun.

Short answer- not right now. Two plus years in and we’re still very content with our lives. We visit our storage unit when we’re back in SF (it’s actually in Walnut Creek), roll up the door and say “So much stuff!”. It’s not really that much stuff, the unit is only 10×15 feet, and we carefully considered what was worth storing and liberated the rest. We swap out some clothing and shoes, exclaim over the things we can see, oh look at that chair, my favorite. And then we roll the door back down, lock it, and leave.

We do miss nesting, especially around the holidays. Having a place set up to your own specifications, the things you want close to hand, comfortable furniture to enjoy. This is where house sitting, through Trusted Housesitters, becomes such a joy. With careful planning we can find sits in places we want to be for the holidays, Christmas in Seattle this year, near good friends with whom we will stay before and between two house sits. Right now, for Christmas, we have a lovely kitty to cuddle, and a comfortable house to enjoy and look after for the homeowners.

And what’s next? As we were boarding a flight from Denver to Burbank a few weeks ago Rich was trying to book flights for us from Singapore to Geneva in March. The website was not cooperating and he was frantically trying to get the payment through before we got to the gate agent. His boarding pass is on the phone. The tickets to Geneva are almost on his phone. I teased him, you know you have a travel problem when you’re booking tickets for a flight while boarding a flight. It’s not a problem, he corrected me. I did it.

Rich is working on our onward travels. SF to Taiwan. Borneo, Malaysia. Somewhere somewhere, and Singapore to Geneva via Istanbul in March. To be reunited with our touring bicycles. We look forward to bike touring so much.

Our end of year list of countries as traveled: USA, Taiwan, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, Japan, South Korea, USA, Switzerland, France, Germany, Chezia, Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, UK, France, Albania, North Macedonia, USA. Happy Holidays wherever you may be.