Tattooed Travel

As a harried little foreign exchange student over ten years ago, the two week mark hit me like a freight train. I pack for a year? GIANT SUITCASE?! I leave for a year? BYE HIGH SCHOOL. I say goodbye to cat for a year? CRY HARD.

Turns out not much has changed. I traded a giant suitcase for a backpack and small roller bag. High school has long since passed, but the dreams of grad school and doctorate programs linger on the horizon. I still cry over cat.

Two weeks from today we will be on a plane to Rhinelander, Wisconsin to visit Colton’s hometown for a few days and then trundle around Michigan. Before long we hit New York, and then finally on August 13th we leave the United States for an unknown period of time.

There might have been some alternate universe where I would feel prepared to leave, unfortunately that doesn’t appear to be the one that I’m living in. The house? A mess. Our health? Tragic. Colton has tendonosis and tendonitis in his hamstrings and I have an entirely blown out herniated disk in my lumbar spine. We’ve hemmed and hawed over whether or not to even continue with the trip…but as many with chronic illness know, there is no promise of getting better. There is, if anything, only the promise of getting worse.

Despite the pain and despite the profound anxiety of not knowing if we’ll even be able to do half the things we want to do, we carry on. Travel should not only be for the able bodied. That won’t make it any less painful or uncomfortable and at times downright horrifying, but we will feel pain regardless. Might as well be in pain halfway around the world.

We have two weeks to mentally prepare, to pack, to put everything we need to exist for an unknown period of time into two bags and leave our lives behind. It still doesn’t feel remotely real. Because of the multitude of health conditions we’ve managed to accumulate my brain seems stuck in the rut of “Okay, this is planned but you’re not actually going….right?”

Turns out when you do something you’ve dreamed about for 15 years it’s a little hard to wrap your head around. It likely won’t be real until we step foot in Dubai and my little peanut brain realizes “gee Dorothy, we aren’t in Kansas anymore”.

Which is good. Nothing against Kansas.