Seattle! ...And a few reflections from the road

We made it!! After two days of driving from Banff, we landed in Seattle. By now, most of our readers know that we've been settling in for a few weeks, and so far we are enjoying our new home and getting to know our new neighborhood.

Downtown Seattle from Kerry Park

Even though the trip has been over for a few weeks, we still feel as though we are mentally unpacking all of the perspectives and lessons learned from our time on the road. Below are just a few thoughts that have surfaced so far.

The end of our road trip was bittersweet. To be on the road for as long as we were is certainly not without its sacrifices. At times, I missed having things like a reliable internet connection and a freely-available hot shower. I also missed many of the familiar daily routines that are easy to take for granted like cooking my favorite meals or relaxing on the couch with Matt and Henry. I was surprised by how much of my life before the trip was tied to these routines and small comforts. Giving them up was a useful exercise in what it means to have structure and predictability on a daily basis.

But, in exchange for these sacrifices, we got a few gifts.  One was a shift in perspective on time and nature. Walking through so many vastly different ecosystems in a relatively short timeframe gave us a new appreciation for the tremendous forces of nature that shaped them. Particularly in the southwest, our attention was drawn again and again to the millennia that have come before us on this planet. The earth is old, and we don't typically see evidence of its age in our day-to-day lives. Standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon or under the Landscape Arch is a pretty good way to remind yourself of how old the earth really is and how long it has existed without humans. We felt very small for much of our time out there in the wilderness, which is how it should be.

Obviously another gift was the freedom to abandon everyday responsibilities like paying rent and going to work, and being able to go wherever we felt like being on any particular day. This new freedom was at first exhilarating, but we got used to it after about a month or so. At the end of the trip, we both felt that on some level we could just keep living a nomadic life indefinitely, as if this was our new normal routine instead of going to work every day. More than once we were tempted to extend the trip, or at the very least, to plan another one. We kept a list of places to return to sometime in the future, so we may have to do it all over again sometime.