six weeks

Six weeks ago we rolled out of bed in our Dublin hotel, popped a protesting kitty back into his despised Sherpa carrier, and caught a taxi to the airport. As we sat in the airport, as our departure time neared, the thought of leaving Ireland, and Europe in general, weighed upon me more and more heavily. I felt like I couldn't breathe. We boarded the plane, it trundled down the runway, and tears gathered in my eyes and spilled down my face.

Now, there are some wonderful things about being back in the US for us, don't get me wrong. The weather in Athens is lovely and sunny and warm right now (except for that little matter of seven inches of snow last weekend, but we'll just pass right on by that anomaly). The cost of living is considerably cheaper when you're living off US dollars and salaries (although of course the dollar is now worth more against the euro than it was the entire year we were over there--grrr!). I love love love the old house we found and that we both have quiet private spaces to work and our big backyard and being reunited with our books again (although as one might expect, we're finding that we did make a few mistakes in The Great Book Purge of 2008). I'm really excited about seeing old friends again and doing a lot of travelling here in the Southeast and along the East Coast. And did I mention the Mexican food?

Having said all that, now that the chaos of the last few weeks has begun to slowly recede into something resembling normalcy (I said resembling--there is, for example, a stack of unpacked boxes next to me as I write this and nowhere to put their contents, because furniture is scarce at the moment)--I am missing our friends in Ballinamore and I am missing something indefinable about the way people treat one another in Ireland. And I'm missing Spain and walking on the beach in Barcelona, which we were doing this time a year ago, and--I'm just missing it, being over there instead of here.

And yet I sound mournful but I'm not. I know mournful--I know all too well that feeling when the wanderlust lodges itself somewhere under my ribcage and just hurts, when I have to make myself stop reading or even thinking about other places because I know I'm not going travelling anytime soon and it's sort of like a phantom limb, the pain of absence and loss, of something that should be there and isn't and aches so unbearably. I don't feel like that. What I feel is a happy anticipation of what's ahead, of travels to come and going to places old and new.

I've got wandering on the brain, though, and to that end I've added a new link on the sidebar, travel and expat journals I like a lot. Some of them, like the two Spain journals, I've only discovered in the past year; others, I've been reading for a while and Wired 2 the World the longest of all, for a good 10 years, since the couple took their round-the-world journey. The travellers and expats that write them are singles and couples and families; they are different ages and write from a number of different perspectives, but they're all lively and interesting and engaged in the world around them. Check them out. Plan your own journey. See the world. Be alive.