Don't Pull the Magic Thread

When we decided to start traveling, we intentionally left for 8 months with minimal plans. We had a few countries we wanted to see, and a couple dates in mind, and left the rest up to what we would find along the way. While this has allowed us the flexibility of staying in places as long or as short as we want, it hasn’t been without its share of difficulties. 

We try to battle the guilt of being locked up in cafes when the sun is shining and the beach is calling and we need to do more travel research on visas, transportation, and money exchanges. Then there’s tracking flight prices, air bnb’s, booking questions, transfers, language misunderstandings, and time differences. 

I was once told a french tale called Pulling the Magic Thread, which I read in times of restlessness. It reminds me that the beauty and the rest, and the stress and hardships, are what make life, and will make our travels worth it. We will remember the days sipping coconuts on the beach, reading in the hammock, and waking up to warm rain, just as we will shaking our shoes for spiders, searching town for the nearest store with toilet paper, and googling countries we don’t even know how to spell. 

It’s a new style of work for us that doesn’t require a set number of hours, but happens in the snippets of the day when we can connect to wifi and plan out our next piece of traveling. We are settling into the fact that for now, this is our work. Our research for living, our miles walked around town to find the simplest things, our getting lost and finding our way home, and trying to keep our small wardrobes clean are all part of the journey now. We join digital nomads at the hip coffee shops in many cities so far just to simply plan our next couple weeks and, for that, we are grateful. 👣