Almost Ready for Home

We never did make it to Naples. Our last full day in Sorrento we were both still lazy and I was in a very average mood. Boys, skip to the next paragraph if you are so inclined. As we talked about many months ago, I had a contraceptive implant called Jadelle put in my arm in January. The side effects vary greatly but for me they mean that in the time since I had the implant put in, I’ve gone from very frequent 7-day periods to having had three 2-day periods in 9 months. Only one of those has been during the course of the trip, and that was in Sorrento. Rather than being nasty with PMS, I just got very tired and in an over-tired mood. I couldn’t be bothered doing anything but at the same time I was getting frustrated with the lethargy of the last couple of weeks.

The bike needed an oil change and so Courts went off and did that while I wrote and surfed the net at camp. When he got back, it was too late to justify a trip into Naples and I couldn’t be bothered anyway. We decided to go to Amalfi but we never made it there either. Instead, we had a huge lunch at a cheap little eatery in Sorrento village and then rode down the slippery cobbled hairpin road to the port, where I lay on the beach in the shade and Courts explored underwater with his trusty snorkel.

And that was about it really. I people watched from the beach and tried to play games on the phone but with an emotional, hormonal PMS cloud hanging over my head I ended up engulfed in homesickness. I wanted to see my Mum and my sister and my friends. Most of all at that particular time, I wanted to see my dog. Courtney’s family had said that if anything bad happened to anyone while we were away, they wouldn’t tell us until we got back – no point spoiling the trip. I knew that my dog Toby and his sleepover buddy Jimmy had escaped out the back fence a few weeks ago and I started worrying that he hadn’t made it back and people just weren’t telling me.

While Courts watched fish and found dead crabs to pull the legs off for me (my favourite kind of gift – not!) and I watched obese children splash in the water, all I wanted was my dog. Like an overtired child with a pout and folded arms, I just wanted my dog and I wanted to be home and I didn’t want to wait 3 more weeks for it to happen.

The homesickness was entirely PMS related I’m sure but I do think if I went home now I’d be OK with it. At the tail end of Courtney’s Netherlands-Germany-Czech leg of the trip, I was starting to think I was ready to go home then, but the Dolomites and Venice completely renewed my travel lust. Italy was the country I was most looking forward to and I’m loving every second of it, but I’m thinking about finding a house and work and seeing everyone and a lot of my travel energy has already been used up by the previous 10 countries we’ve been to.

Funnily though, the same thing happened around the same time of my much-shorter American travels when I was younger. When I was about 80% of the way through the trip, like we are now, I was suddenly ready to be at home. That was only a 1 month trip though, and I did the second half of it on my own so it was a different dynamic to this one. Our next stops are Rome and Tuscany and I can’t wait for either of them. I’m very conscious of the fact that a month after we get home I will wish I could go back and relive these last few weeks if I don’t make the most of them now. I’ve told Courts that when we get to Rome, we are getting up and moving at normal times and exploring the city like we would have done London.

Next stop, Colosseum.

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Italian Butterflies Don't Know They Are Italian

A few weeks ago, we were riding through Italy in the early hours of the morning, as movement in the cities slowly roused the sun from sleep. We were on our way to the ferry at Ancona, ready for the overnight trip to Greece. There is little to do on the bike except think. I often think about my business at home doing acrylic nails and training new technicians to do the same. I come up with ideas for marketing or expansion and I often write them down on the phone when I have a moment free from GPS.

Other times, I do a lot of reflecting – on mistakes I’ve made, ways I have changed, people I’ve hurt, other people I have just lost touch with. It is easy to get swept up in those thoughts, running through what-if scenarios and wondering what the people I have lost touch with are doing now and what I would say to them if I had the chance. Of course those people are far from the majority and I spend a good deal of time thinking about the people I am close to as well, the people I miss at home.

At this particular point I was thinking about my Mum and sister and how far away from each other we are at the moment. It is a romantic notion in many movies and books to think of seeing the same stars as each other but I realized at that point, that we don’t. When I lived in Australia, it was easy to look up at the same constellations as them and know we weren’t that far apart if we could see the same things. From the northern hemisphere though, those southern constellations are nowhere to be seen. It made me feel even further apart from them and, sat on the back of the bike with the sun starting to rise behind me, I sent quiet messages to the moon for them.

It’s funny the things you see and think of when your mind is on a journey of its own, having wandered with little to do for several hours. In Italy again, but weeks later and on the opposite side, a tiny white butterfly landed amongst the overgrowth as we rode past. An Italian butterfly, exactly the same as the butterflies that nibble on vege gardens at home. He has no idea he is Italian, or that other butterflies that look just like him are living differently on the other side of the world. Maybe they’re not. Maybe when you’re that small and that close to the flowers, overgrowth is all the same.

He has no idea that his life could be different. Neither do the dogs that lie in the shade of the Acropolis. They don’t know that they are sleeping on marble that has been there over 2,000 years, that has had emperors and pilgrims and warriors and mothers walk on it, that has seen death and blood and storms and destruction, war and peace, love and spite. Imagine the things the Acropolis has seen. 2,000 years of change. Imagine the time lapse video you would see if the Acropolis had been filming all that time, the rise and fall of times and eras, the expansion of Athens, the arrival of tourists.

Imagine for a second, that the Parthenon has a stream of consciousness. It was used to store gun powder during the war with Turkey, and a carefully aimed cannonball blew it half to smithereens with no respect for the age and beauty of the structure. The building, had it limbs, would have lost them. All this time later, people care enough to put it slowly back together. Imagine the bloody sacrifices it saw when it was young, and what it must think of the tour groups that trample it every day now. After 2,000 years of such vastly contrasting activities, how could it not look so strong, proud and imposing?

The dog sleeping in the shade knows nothing of this, or why the tourists flock with cameras. He only knows the marble is cold and the tourists are friendly, and that it’s a long walk down should he choose to leave. Maybe he had a home once, as many Athenian strays did, but he knows nothing of the activities of a dog on a farm in New Zealand. He might be curious as to what the dinnertime smells are, coming from the homes of Plaka, below his marble bed, but he has no inclination to travel to lands unknown. It is really only humans that travel and migrate for pleasure rather than necessity.

The kitten born at a campsite in Santorini knows the human inclination to travel, very well. He will probably never figure out though, why the humans that feed and play with him, all speak different words to him. He won’t learn a name, like the dogs up the path won’t learn to sit or stay or shake. There is no consistency in the words spoken to them, no chance to learn. They remain deaf to any understanding, trapped in their species more than any domestic dog at home.

My dog, Toby can pick up words in amongst sentences of human conversation. He will question them, wonder if they apply to him, ask for clarification. No, we will tell him, we were talking about walking to the shop, not the park. He will pick up the general idea of what we are saying, recognizing some words and the tones of voice they carry. Similar to us in France. We picked up words, we could communicate, we heard vocal tone with more clarity than ever before, by necessity. The Santorini strays will never have the awakening of that same understanding.

It is only the human level of communication and understanding that allows us to learn and question the big bad world, grow curiosities like they were daisies and pick away at them one by one. And yet, riding on the back of a motorbike at 5am, we might still send messages to the moon, and while knowing they won’t, secretly hope they make it back down again, and land in our loved ones arms.

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The Comforts of Home

We’re only just over 2 weeks into the trip but there are a couple of things we wish we had with us. You already know how much I miss my furbabies, if I could travel with them I would. We also really miss having our own couch and TV to come home to after a day out.

There are no particular shows we want to watch, but we’ve been leaving the hostel around 10am and getting home after 10pm. If we go to our hostel room we have to go to sleep, because there’s no light and everyone else is in bed, but we just want half an hour between getting home and going to bed where we can sit and wind down. We’re both really looking forward to getting our tent set up in France just so we have our own home base with no one elses dirty laundry on the floor.

It’s not much to miss, and I haven’t been homesick at all. I miss my furs, and I miss my friends. And most of all, on my Mum’s birthday, I miss my Mum and my sister. On a day to day basis, there are no triggers to make me miss them. If I see something they would like, I take a photo or it passes by. Mum’s birthday came and went while we were sleeping and with no internet at the hostel I couldn’t wish her a Happy Birthday. When we got to a café with free Wi-Fi, there were Facebook updates from Mum, my sister and Mum’s best friend mentioning the birthday celebrations and that’s when it’s hard to be the one that’s not there.

We sent a parcel home (Oh my goodness never plan on sending things home from England it’s crazy expensive) and contacted her before her birthday but it’s just not the same. As we head onto the next leg of our journey, including getting the bike, the trip gets more and more exciting for us and time passes quickly. We think often of home but don’t often wish we were there instead. Occasionally though, there’s that little pang and something makes you think of what you’re missing.

I think that’s the beauty of travelling like this. We experience new things every day, some good, some bad. Some show us how far behind our little country is but many remind us what amazing things (and people and furs) we have waiting at home for us in September. Whereas I left being glad to stir the pot a bit, get out of my job of 4 years and out of an adventure-rut and into the big bad world, and while I’m definitely not sick of travelling or anything like that, I can’t wait to get home.

What travel-triggers make you miss home?

Oh, and HAPPY BITHDAY MUM!!!! Love you and miss you heaps xxxxxx

www.flickr.com Penelope_nz's London photoset

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