I can only speak for myself, but I know when I travel for long periods of time I go thru a cycle. I am so excited when I arrive, and that lasts for at least two to three weeks, and then I start getting a little tired somewhere near the 3 week mark. I start missing home, my routine, my “normal”. It always happens, even when I’m having fun, even when I wouldn’t go home if I could. It’s like the body wants to go back to the muscle memory of pattern/normal life and you have to push past it and make your new reality your new habit…and your new “comfortable.” After you push past it you get the benefits of being where ever you are on a different level...less like a fly by tourist, and more immersed and exposed to the details of the culture.
We are just at that point now, and you couple that with John’s broken foot, and the fact the internet is spotty and there aren’t enough dish towels in the kitchen. Well, you’ve got a stressful day in there…maybe two. Part of it is helped by the fact I know this pattern in myself, I know I will have a lull in my travel energy and so I can anticipate it and brace for it and keep it under wraps (at least sort of). It was harder his time because of my immobile partner though, so basically I have 5 kids right now. "Honey, can you get me another bottle of water?" Why does that make me want to kill him?? There is no good reason and it says nothing good about me that's for sure...still, I did want to kill him just a little.
We spent a day in full lounge mode, poolside, and doing not a lot more than eating, and cooking, and letting John hobble around as little as possible. The kids were excited, they went back and forth from the pool, to primping and getting dressed, to the pool again, back to primping. The older girls were totally in their zone, and other than going to gelato twice with them, I didn’t hear a peep out of them.
I took John into town along with the little kids, and we went to the pharmacy for his meds (he gets the pleasure of taking a shot each morning in his stomach of some anti-coagulant drug that I’m pretty sure would be a pill if we were in the US.) We bought blow up toys for the pool, mosquito combat material (Italy and mosquitos are one with each other). We stopped in the tiny butcher and bought steaks for dinner, in the fruit/veggie little store for potatoes, zucchini, figs, basil and purple eggplant, and lastly the bakery/bread shop where we bought focaccia drenched in olive oil, these sugar rolled red balls that you see everywhere and I was dying to try, and a big loaf of bread (salted). FYI, the red balls tasted like dark chocolate, with vanilla cake around it, then red velvet cake around that, and then rolled in chunky sugar. Not bad. There’s some line of divide in Italy (not quite sure where), and apparently on one side they bake the bread with salt, and the other not. Apparently we still get a choice either way here in Umbria.
At some point during the day I started to feel completely overwhelmed with the reality of John’s leg, the heat, the crush of things being different and it all feeling more tiring than normal or than it should be. I think that really was the crux of it, fatigue, and not just in the sense of not sleeping enough the night before, but in the sense of the fatigue of trying hard to do normal things day in and day out when “normal” isn’t normal—it’s all new. I've bought no less than 5 "cream" looking milk products for my coffee only to find they were NOT in fact cream. Stuff like that.
My episode of freak out I think I kept very low key and generally to myself and I didn't even cry even though I sort of felt like it. I did express some of it to John who said “I thought you said everything would be fine?” Uh, yeah, I DID say that, and it will, but I still need a moment to panic, be overwhelmed, and want home. This is the thing, I wanted to freak out longer, but I don't get that luxury or indulgence because the kids just want to have fun and only look to us for direction in attitude. I think John wanted to freak out a little too about his leg, but he sucked it up for the same reason. Now the freak out is over.
The next day was adventure day, and I felt better equipped for it. We are a party of 10 now, with the addition of our friends and two kids, so any adventure involving 10 people, is bound to be….well, a little bit of everything and mostly loads of fun. We hit Lake Bolzano, which was great, involved a surprisingly warm lake, swimming, some yummy beach spritzer drink....lots of kid fun.
Romeo found “Mischief”, this guilty looking dog that was our dog of the day. If you look that guilty, you probably just did something fun (like eat six red balls and a cappuccino, uhh...not like I would know anything about that type of behavior).
Signed, ME {lv}