Kyle and I—we are still the people who met in Kosovo, and we are the couple who later moved with their toddler to Turkey and lived there for three years. I am the one who gave birth to our second child in a Turkish hospital, where I barely spoke the language and almost left the building with a needle still stuck in my spine.
It’s now ten years after we met in Kosovo and two years after we moved back to the States from Turkey, and something is missing. Our inner adventurers hug the walls as shadows, eclipsed by parental and culturally expected responsibility. I still think of myself as a vagabond, and yet these days I only travel for work. I am a writer and Kyle works from home for a small company, but we feel the heaviness of our ordinary life. It is a reasonable weight; we aren’t overcommitted, and I am mightily grateful for the years of exploration behind us. But our existence is still heavy with midlife expectations—mortgage payments, schlepping the kids to karate and gymnastics, cleaning the gutters.
Tonight, the air is thick with the conviction that there is no reason for unhappiness. We are in our thirties, doing work we enjoy after having spent most of our twenties traveling, and we are finally settling down to become the Normal People most of our friends became ten years earlier. Over kitchen cleanup and toy redistribution, I admit what I know is true: “I miss the Adventurers. And I think it’s time for them to come out again.”
Kyle knows what I mean. Now is as good a time as it will ever be to move beyond dreaming and playing with the idea we’ve quietly cultivated for several years. The kids are all potty-trained, they’re astute travelers for their age, and yet they are still young enough to be unrooted.
“Let’s do it,” Kyle says. I dry my hands with the kitchen towel and find the calendar.
This is our grand idea: we’ll circumnavigate the earth in one direction, kids in tow, for an entire school year. We’ll show them what it means to get lost in the world. It’s a dream we’ve put on hold, one Kyle concocted a few years ago. I was nursing our youngest, and he bounded down the stairs, plopped down on the couch next to me, and said matter-of-factly, “I have an idea.” It was crazy and irresponsible and no right-thinking parent would toy with such an idea. But also, it was fantastically brilliant and I said, “Thank you for bringing it up first.”
Two years later, in our kitchen in the Pacific Northwest, we circle a square on the calendar. I like having plane tickets in my name on the horizon, and this is close enough: we are going to stop brainstorming the idea; we’re going to do it.
We’ve been earmarking money for several years for our travel fund, and though we haven’t yet reached our financial goal, we do the math and calculate how much we’d need to earn working from the road. It’s doable. I research flight patterns and travel gear and create a burgeoning to-do list. We’ll continue homeschooling our kids, but they’ll carry the heft of their spelling lists in backpacks and times tables on portable tablets.
I reject any speaking opportunities for the next twelve months, jokingly adding, “Unless your event is located on an island in the Indian Ocean or on an Icelandic volcano.” Kyle meets with his coworkers the next day, asks if they’re on board with his working remotely for the foreseeable future. We make a checklist of things to do in central Oregon before leaving for a year.
We prepare ourselves in the ways we know how. We will never be fully ready, of course, because how do you prepare to circumnavigate the globe with three kids in tow?
Two opposing things can be equally true. Counting the days till Christmas doesn’t mean we hate Halloween. I go to church on Sundays and still hold the same faith at the pub on Saturday night. I shamelessly play a steady stream of eighties pop music and likewise have an undying devotion to Chopin. And perhaps most significantly, I love to travel and I love my home.
This is my one rub with the trip idea. All these years, I’d been plagued with longing for a return to my global explorative roots, but I also want nothing more than to curl up in my armchair with a good book. I dream about places unknown, but I also buy throw pillows for the couch and mull over the just-right master bathroom paint color. I want the perfect shade of sea-glass green both in tile above my sink and in water below my boat.
Every memoir I leaf through in the travel section at the bookstore tells stories from people in search of themselves on the open road. Usually they are young and single. The occasional volume carries the story of someone older, often in search of healing after unfathomable grief. Their stories are a pre-travel life that is rough at best, soul-sucking at worst. Nobody seems to embark on a massive journey because their lives are already full of meaning.
I look out beyond the precipice into a year of global nomadism and a pang of guilt gut-punches me: I wonder if it’s selfish to uproot us in the name of itchy feet.
There is, of course, the immeasurable good fortune that Kyle is also plagued with wanderlust. This is no small thing. I know lopsided couples, one dying to hop on a plane and the other wanting nothing to do with the idea. The travel itch spills into our children as well, besotted with our DNA. Finn, our preschooler, doesn’t know the difference between a county and a continent and is along for whatever ride the rest of us venture. But Reed has an unrelenting interest in Turkey, his birthplace that holds little memory, and Tate misses her life as the token blonde kid in a sea of dark heads, with more stamps in her passport than counties in Oregon. Our entire little collective misses the world, and this counts for something.
This is key, I think, to my acceptance of the For Sale sign in the front yard. If we store our earthly possessions for a year in a storage unit, it will benefit all five of us.
We pencil in a hard date.
The house sells ridiculously fast.
Selling the house is just one piece of the puzzle; we must also decide what to keep, where to keep it, what belongings we need for the year, and what travel plans to reserve in advance. Trekking around the world will be more enjoyable, we deduce, if we don’t schlep much around, and so we narrow down our list of possessions to only what will fit in packs on our backs. We also need to buy said packs, along with the smallest version of gadgets we can afford—only the ones that will make our travels better.
In all this bustle, the questions churn. Do we bring all the toothpaste we’d need for a whole year? What about an extra power cord for my laptop, in case mine bites the dust in the middle of nowhere? Will the kids have regular chores? Will they still earn allowance? The answer to all is wait and see.