Day 1096
It's somehow been 3 years – 1096 days – since we queued up at the check-in desk at Heathrow with a couple of bags and one way tickets to Hong Kong. We'd spent the weeks before selling everything in our flat, saying goodbye to everyone we love. Not sure if it would turn out to be a mistake or the best decision we'd ever made (in case this is your first time here, it was the latter).
This last year has been the slowest yet of our travels and sometimes the excitement of those first few months feels distant, just like our old lives in London. We spent most of it in Europe, staying for a month or two in different cities, getting to know places a little better, focusing on work a little more.
We've still had our adventures though. This time last year we were in San Pancho, a little Mexican beach town that we still think about all the time. We went on a road trip from Southampton to Nice. And then went on another one through the mountains in Slovenia. We spent the autumn going the long way home, getting the train through the Balkans and then Budapest and Vienna and Nuremberg. And after Christmas at home we wandered the snowy streets of Prague for 2 months and ate lots of pierogi in Warsaw.
At the start of this fourth year on the road we're in Orkney, a group of islands off the north of Scotland. It's beautiful and remote and our morning runs take us past little lambs and white sand beaches.
We've spent our morning getting angry at the Sunday politics programs and reading the paper. This afternoon we're going for a long walk along the cliffs at Hoxa Head and then we'll come home and cook a shepherd's pie. I don't think we've ever had such a classic British day. But that's one of the lovely things about travelling that I never expected, it's made me appreciate home.
This next year is going to be our last one travelling and we have so much planned – going to some of the smaller islands in Orkney, a road trip around the north coast of Scotland, a month in London, a few days in Brooklyn and then flying to Colombia and making our way south. So we're not done just yet.
A little side note: I know blog posts have been few and far between lately, but there's plenty on the way. For a more up-to-date look at what we're up to, see my Instagram.
—Yasmine