backpack living

I may be back in the States, but my lifestyle has hardly changed from
the globe-trottin' days. We're still looking for jobs, still don't
have any clear place to settle, still staying with friends and family.
So we're also still effectively living out of backpacks (although
more than one, since we have a car to carry our stuff around with
us). Time still seems to fly by and it seems like I'm too busy to get
anything done, even though I'm not really doing anything. Such are
the problems of constant traveling. And even though now we're staying
in some spots much longer than we ever did since leaving New Zealand
(three nights in one spot was a looong stop) we're still living the
nomadic lifestyle.
The main difference is when we were cruising around the world, we
generally had some idea of where our next stop would be, even if we
didn't know what we'd do when we got there. Right now, we're not even
sure of the next destination.

Hold it up
Originally uploaded by slack13.

Central Montana has been cold lately - a few days of 1° highs and around -15° lows. Looking through the travel pictures reminds me what it's like to be warm - like in Bangkok. It was about 80° most days, had to be about 90° the day we arrived, and humid. Also, while we were in Southeast Asia, it rained nearly every day. Luckily, it almost always rained early in the evening, when we were somewhere eating dinner. Maybe a couple of times were we caught in the rain - only one I remember was in Cambodia, while we were touring one of the Angkor temples.

This photos was taken at a Bangkok temple, or wat. It was the wat on the grounds of the Grand Palace.

elastic time

Despite my best intentions, a broadband connection and plenty of free time, I (obviously) haven't updated this page in some time. Ideally, that will change. I'm aiming for at least two updates a week, and hopefully more, as I try to put some of my traveling experiences into written form.


Time plays tricks. The tricks are different when you're constantly traveling, trying to see the highlights in a location then moving onto another, overloading the brain with stimuli.
Tricks especially when a day is split by time on a plane, train or auto into two parts in separate locations. Each city or stop has a place in your brain, rather than each day. Things that happened yesterday morning Germany seem like a long time ago the next day when you're in Scotland.
But as experiences quickly recede into the "past" section of your brain, they also get lumped together. Everything that came before this place happened more or less together, is the impression.
At one point in the midst of the world tour, I stopped, thought, and told someone it seemed like we'd been at our current stop both for a very short time and a long time. Whoever I directed the comment to, someone who was in a stable location in space and time, didn't understand. To them, I was swooping into their life for a few short days before leaving again just like that. To me, the stop had a different quality, as one of many brief stops but also a unique, one-of-a-kind experience (just like all the others).

Now, the whole trip is lumped together in the back of my brain. We're back in the States, unlikely to leave anytime soon, with no exotic destination to look forward to (with no destination of any kind, yet). But I can separate any stop out from the jumble when I think about a specific place, specific people.

The surprising thing to me, now that I'm back, is how easy the return was. I loved the travel. I even loved the moving around every few days, although it was occasionally wearing. I thought I'd have a tough time when it ended.
But more than anything, it seems like my year and a half away from the States was just a pause in my personal flow of time here. Of course, since everyone else's flow of time has continued, I'm resuming my States time a little behind.

a funny thing happened on the way to berlin...

In 2004, I traveled to Germany as the third stop on a European tour and found the language impenetrable and the country extremely foreign.
In 2006, I traveled to Geramany after spending six weeks in Asia and was amazed at how much meaning I could parse from the written language and how un-exotic the culture seemed.