all good things must come to an end.

or so we’re being forced to accept.

how is it june? june! weren’t we just packing for this adventure?

and now we’re back. not quite home, but back in the USofA.

want the honest truth? i’ve been having an incredibly hard time accepting the close of this chapter. the minute we landed at LAX we were back in the throes of road rage, trips to costco, schedules and pressures. i wanted to run and hide.

in fact, i kind of have been hiding.

i haven’t mustered up the energy to return phone calls, text messages or emails (please don’t take it personally). i am excited to catch up, but want to chat with you after i get a grip.

elements of home have been great, but i’m not ready to admit this adventure is over.

since the final leg of our flight home, i’ve been a lethargic, emotional mess. if i hear a song from our trip – i cry. if i look at photos from our trip – i well up. if i see another traveler post on instagram – you get it.

the rational side of me knows it’s ridiculous. we have a fantastic life to come home to. a life we were never running away from to begin with. but the way of life we morphed into living abroad was really awesome. and like all things in life, i don’t think the full amazingness of it all really sunk in until we were back.

isn’t that life’s cruelest joke? we always want what we can’t have. while in asia, we’d talk about all the things we craved and missed at home. and now that we’re back, we haven’t really indulged in any of them. now all we want is street vendor grilled chicken, we’re totally content in our worn out travel t-shirts and aren’t using the cell phones that now have service. everything feels incredibly overwhelming.

towards the end, we said we were ready for home. but days after touchdown, ready to turn back.

to console me, danny tries to reiterate that obviously this isn’t the last adventure we’ll go on. it wasn’t our first, and it won’t be the last. but i’m quick to retort that it’ll never be the same again unless we leave now. dramatic much? perhaps. but i believe there’s a kernel of truth to that.

i’ve always had a bad case of wanderlust and you’d think five months on the road would have quenched my insatiable thirst for travel — but it did quite the opposite, it made it worse. my list of “must sees” has grown longer. the stresses of travel have dissipated. the world seems so easy to navigate and obtainable now. all we need is a backpack and some cash – so, let’s go!

some of you know that i originally wanted to do a one-year around-the-world trip, but i compromised with my rational other half and we landed on a six-month sabbatical. it was my six-months to plan. danny really didn’t care about the destination or have expectations. for him, it truly was about the journey. a half-year to push pause (or play, depending on how you look at it). to look up from the computer, breathe fresh air, live stress free and decide for himself how to spend every minute of his days. the whereabouts was up to me. and with my little brother’s wedding date as a firm deadline, we had five months to travel and the remaining few weeks to adjust, catch up with loved ones and ease back into reality before going back to work.

throughout our journey, we were repeatedly asked: “so you obviously don’t have jobs, right?” and our response with a smile, “no, actually we do have jobs to go home to,” which was inevitably followed by a “wow, you guys are really lucky.”

and we are lucky. we seriously hit the jackpot when both our companies agreed to support our adventure. we’re damn lucky that we actually got to do this trip. that we didn’t have to risk our careers. that we got the perfect snowbird renter in our home. that friends opened their arms to our sweet huntie. it all seemed too easy.

and the logical side of me knows that a year would have been an entirely different scenario regarding all of the above and more. but even today, i hold on to the hope that we’re going to wake up and jet off to another continent. since the second week into our trip, i’ve been pushing… what’s another few months, i kept saying. all the hard work is done. life at home will still be there. we’re able-bodied, 30-somethings and kidless. this is our chance to see it all! and seriously, who in their right mind would move back to phoenix just in time for summer? am i greedy or thinking clearly?

maybe that’s my biggest blessing and curse. i always push for more.

i push myself. i push danny. i push my friends, family & coworkers. i push our social calendar. our annual travel budget. no list is too big to accomplish in a day. more is always possible, right? maybe. but for my emotional well-being and husband’s sanity, i need to work on learning to breathe and be content with our (awesome) reality.

reality. yup, that’s what we’re working on over here. danny’s slowly shifting from laid back to productive. and that’s him. throughout our time in asia, he’d fill his free time with architectural sketches, financial spreadsheets and talk about how he missed the feeling of a productive day at work. he’s incredibly driven and i love him for that. but this week when he started talking to me about our deferred taxes and getting me a new car, i kinda shut-down and told him to keep those things to himself. i’m still in denial.

so that’s where we’re at. mentally we are lingering somewhere between asia and arizona. so for the time being, we’re going to soak up the last bit of our deferred reality and i’ll continue to blog about that one amazing time when we jetted off to asia with a one-way ticket.

  xx