Checklisting Europe | Settling Down

Checklisting Europe | Settling Down

Seriously? A sound recommendation on how best to run away from home is to find another home and settle down?

When I was a child and then teenager, I fixated on idle boat ride on shallow water and bumpy ship journey across open sea. As I got older, overnight train, long-distance bus and road-trip got added to the mix. In this millennium, online shoutout and social hash tags boat voyage and land transport are shortened to #rtw, glorying round-the-world trip spanning major continents and world cities.

So I didn’t get to driff off indefinitely and tag my vagabonding as #rtw, but I stumbled into another kind of traveling, less roaming and less world-bound. I moved to one region, stayed put and became region-bound. I became Eurocentric.

For starter, this kind of traveling is much easier than the traditional #rtw where you will likely need to sell  everything or put everything away, quit everything and do nothing but rounding up the world.

Sometimes we are not able to give up yet everything and go everywhere. Perhaps we just pick one place and call it our temporary home.

Home does not have to be where you spend your childhood, peaceful or turbulent. Home can happen in far away where you feel a sense of belonging.

We travel to find something different, but sometimes we look for a place that we call home.

Find a home before setting out to be “homeless” was one paradox in life I found comforting and exhilarating.

For the time being, the home is in Europe, where the checklisting began.

[photo taken by Moyan Brenn]