A Pause for Reflection

 

Sometimes you just need to stop and smell the flowers!!

Here I am curled up in bed, with some Strawberry Macadamia Chia Pudding (mmm) and my laptop ready to madly finish off my posts about our fabulous weeks in Northumberland and the Netherlands. We have only been back in the UK for a week so I am not so dreadfully behind but like to keep up to date.

 

So what is stopping me?

 

I believe it is time to stop and take a moment to reflect on our experience so far. This experience, so long in the planning, is racing by at a speed that is making my head spin.  I cannot believe that in six weeks time we face our last night in the UK before we head off for our European Adventure.

We began our adventure with an attitude of "so much to see, so much to do" and we certainly have seen and done an extraordinary amount. But now we have reached a happy place where all we really want to do is to just "be" here. This weekend, the May Bank Holiday weekend, we enjoyed being part of our school community. Rob and I made around 20kg of frozen fruit into sorbet which was great fun and a huge hit, and I'm so glad I brought my Thermomix half way around with world with us. The last two days we have stayed home and taken nature walks, read books, cooked great food, played in the garden and a fair bit of blogging.

Now this feels like a holiday. So now my one and only regret about the whole experience has raised it's head. I wish we just had more time to say here and do nothing. And yet everything is planned, booked and mostly paid and of course we are only allowed in the UK for six months and this deadline is drawing ever nearer.

When I look into the future we have what appears on paper to be an amazing itinerary, nine weeks on the road (or actually the train) with seventeen different home bases. While this should be a source of excitement instead it sounds truly exhausting. But it should be a huge source of joy, inspiration and incredible excitement. So I am going to learn from our experience in England, and perhaps having reached the point of realising that "being" somewhere special is far more important than seeing everything possible in that place I will take that realisation forward with us.

In fact I'm am feeling more excited already. What a lovely relief to think that seventeen places are well and truly enough to see and we can forgo the enormous list of daytrips.

Ahhh that feels so much better having gotten that of my chest, and down in writing to remind myself (or have you kindly remind me) when I am back running around like a proverbial chicken with its head off in a few weeks time. Of course it's bound to happen, but that's life.

 

And now I have picked out a good book to read ("The Road from the Past",  Ina Caro) when normally I would be blogging so you shall just have to be patient.

 

Thanks for joining me on this journey so far.