Good-Bye

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Setting up the tent for our very first night outdoors in Cape Reinga, New Zealand

I've been home for a month today. It's been a slow adjustment - from living in visions of the past to now looking toward an uncertain future. I don't have the self-awareness or the poetic voice to explain what this all has meant to me. I observe that the world feels both larger and more accessible than ever. That I am far better suited to a life outdoors than I'd imagined. That I'm happiest in the mountains, and that Christina is happiest swimming 30m underwater (future irreconcilable differences?). But I don't know what to express beyond profound gratitude. Maybe that's enough.

Thanks for following along and sharing this experience with me. This blog has been an important way for me to feel like I could share the beauty of these places with the people that I so wished could be there by my side. And in this way you inspired me to explore and to continue searching for my own happiness. Thank you and good-bye!

Home

beach

Pro Kadima

The baby demanded Sea Bass. She caught three

In a word: Robusto

Cape Cod was not part of this trip, but I wanted a "home with my family" entry. Happily, Christina joined us in Truro for a few days on her way back from India (her yoga course was a smashing success, but you would have to ask her for more details about that). This has been a joyful reunion, stretched across weeks. And I again thank my family and friends for their support of this trip and of Christina's and my shared dreams.

London

pub

Oxford

Borough Market

The quiet desperation in Peter's face: "No more raclette."

Churchill War Rooms

Christ Church Cathedral

Hospitality is a warm hug at the door and a cup of hot chocolate with boozy whip cream. One of my dearest childhood friends, Peter Mayers has lived abroad in Geneva, in Bangladesh, and in London since graduating from Boston University in 2008. An opportunity to visit him, then, is a major life event. And how better to adjust from India to the United States? England is itself still a developing state, Peter remarked, and it would ease me in my transition back to the first world across the Atlantic.

I loved London. To be sure, some of its joys were a feature of my re-entering the west. I wasn't aware of how on guard I was in India - from thieves, from noise, from traffic, from heat, from pollution, from foodborne illness - until I caught myself battling non-existent enemies in London. And so I spent much of my free time walking the London streets enjoying the air quality and the shocking quiet. What a pleasure just to walk and breathe freely! I was in one of the great cities of the world, but I could as well have been strolling the English countryside.

The cathedrals, the Thames, the hearth-warmed pubs, the museums, the Victorian architecture, meanwhile, all totally charmed me. London is a city best savored on foot, and I loved walking and admiring the brick buildings and old monuments to the empire. I left the city on my own for a day, taking an afternoon trip to Oxford. There I drank with the ghosts of the Inklings (J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were the most famous members of the literary discussion group) in the Eagle and Child Pub, but only after a visit to the thousand year old Christ Church College. I fantasized about how it would feel to study at Oxford, where the school's rich and ancient history is embedded in each assignment (so I imagined).

At night and on the weekend Peter and I played. He basically took me to all his favorite date spots in the city. The boy has it down and you can't argue with success. We ate the Borough Market, took a water-taxi on the Thames, climbed Greenwich Hill, took in a comedy show, visited St. Paul's Cathedral, failed to see an organ performance at Westminster Abbey (too late only because Peter stopped to help a homeless man on our way to the tube), feared for our purity on the late-night drunk bus, indulged in chocolate souffles, admired the water foul at St. James's Park, and talked it all over some delicious local ales in some of the darkest pubs on earth. I have photos of most of the locations, but it's harder to preserve memories of heartfelt and stimulating conversation, of Peter's endless generosity, of Peter's kind roommate René, and of the best shower pressure I've ever bathed in. So I note it here.