This week we reached a pretty exciting milestone – over 200 blogs posted in nine months. What’s even better is that they’re actually being read! We’ve been averaging around 54 subscriptions a day for the last few weeks, which is fabulous. With that many new subscribers coming on board, it seemed like a good time to recap how we got to this point. Those who’ve been following us for a while will know many of the ins and outs of where we’ve been and how we got started. While the physical journey gets pretty good coverage, I also wanted to cover the personal journey.
Over the next few days/blogs I’ll be drawing from a presentation I did for last week’s exhibition looking at how we got this far, and what we’ve learned along the way.
By Way of Introduction...
When we tell the story of this adventure we usually start in November last year. But the first rumblings were heard months before.
In the twelve months leading up to last November, we witnessed two births and two deaths. I had a huge falling out with my family and neither Nyani or I were in jobs we loved. Desperate for a change, we explored options to renovate our house, or move, or renovate, or move, or renovate…
In June last year, a trip to Canada and the US gave us the taste for something completely different. We’d planned to travel for six weeks – one week in New York visiting friends, a month in Montreal with family and then we had a spare week at the end. We opened a map of the United States and asked, ‘where could we go?’ It was an exciting feeling – if you could go anywhere, where would you choose?’ We settled on the Grand Canyon, and on a whim, Sedona, Arizona. We loved both.
Before we left on that trip, many people said to us, ‘won’t you get bored travelling for six weeks?’ Clearly we didn’t.
Fast forward to November. After a heady time watching the US elections, and wearing my ‘women for Obama’ t-shirt non-stop, Nyani and I had a conversation in the car after dropping Teya off at school. It ran something like this:
“You know, we should just pack up and go travelling for a year.”
“That would be awesome. We could write and take photos.”
“Where would we go?”
“North America?”
“We’d need something to hang it on though.”
“What about the first year of the Obama presidency? Witness history in the making.”
“Brilliant.”
And that, quite literally, was the extent of it. That afternoon we listed our house with a rather bemused real estate agent. Four weeks later, the day before Christmas, we received an offer on the house. Three weeks after that we were on a plane bound for Hawaii. We arrived on the day before Inauguration, exactly seven weeks after that first conversation.
With the Obama presidency as our theme we wanted to be in North America from day one. We considered going to Washington, but figured that Hawaii was a much warmer option! From there we flew to California – where we met up with the fourth member of the family (see above photo!) - bought a car and drove through Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick and now Nova Scotia – over 23,000 kms to date. Geographically, we’re probably as far away from where we started as we could possibly be. It’s not surprising that people in Cape Breton look oddly at our California number plates.
When we left, many people told us we were brave (we suspect they meant "mad"). Looking back, the physical journey - miles covered, beds slept in, tourist attractions seen, articles written, photos taken - seems easy, the harder part was the distance we each had to cover in our heads.
In the twelve months leading up to last November, we witnessed two births and two deaths. I had a huge falling out with my family and neither Nyani or I were in jobs we loved. Desperate for a change, we explored options to renovate our house, or move, or renovate, or move, or renovate…
In June last year, a trip to Canada and the US gave us the taste for something completely different. We’d planned to travel for six weeks – one week in New York visiting friends, a month in Montreal with family and then we had a spare week at the end. We opened a map of the United States and asked, ‘where could we go?’ It was an exciting feeling – if you could go anywhere, where would you choose?’ We settled on the Grand Canyon, and on a whim, Sedona, Arizona. We loved both.
Before we left on that trip, many people said to us, ‘won’t you get bored travelling for six weeks?’ Clearly we didn’t.
Fast forward to November. After a heady time watching the US elections, and wearing my ‘women for Obama’ t-shirt non-stop, Nyani and I had a conversation in the car after dropping Teya off at school. It ran something like this:
“You know, we should just pack up and go travelling for a year.”
“That would be awesome. We could write and take photos.”
“Where would we go?”
“North America?”
“We’d need something to hang it on though.”
“What about the first year of the Obama presidency? Witness history in the making.”
“Brilliant.”
And that, quite literally, was the extent of it. That afternoon we listed our house with a rather bemused real estate agent. Four weeks later, the day before Christmas, we received an offer on the house. Three weeks after that we were on a plane bound for Hawaii. We arrived on the day before Inauguration, exactly seven weeks after that first conversation.
With the Obama presidency as our theme we wanted to be in North America from day one. We considered going to Washington, but figured that Hawaii was a much warmer option! From there we flew to California – where we met up with the fourth member of the family (see above photo!) - bought a car and drove through Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick and now Nova Scotia – over 23,000 kms to date. Geographically, we’re probably as far away from where we started as we could possibly be. It’s not surprising that people in Cape Breton look oddly at our California number plates.
When we left, many people told us we were brave (we suspect they meant "mad"). Looking back, the physical journey - miles covered, beds slept in, tourist attractions seen, articles written, photos taken - seems easy, the harder part was the distance we each had to cover in our heads.
Read the rest of the series:
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