We’re Going Home!

Yes, the day has come. You may not realise it from reading the blog, since we are so far behind, but we are in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, our final stop, and tomorrow we fly back to England.

16 hours later we will be home, for the first time in 16 months.

After 488 days, our travels are over. It’s not a rash decision, we’ve had the flight booked for months and always planned to be home around this time,

The obvious question is are we sad? Well yes, in a way but in all honesty we’ve been ready for this for a while. We have loved (almost) every minute of our travels but for the last few months we’ve started to have enough of the whole lifestyle.

We’re sick of packing and unpacking, sick of sitting on buses, sick of always having to go out to eat, and sick of struggling with Spanish every day (even though we’ve got infinitely better at it).

I don’t want this to sound like we haven’t been appreciating it – if anything the last month has been full of some of the most awesome experiences of the whole trip – a great few weeks volunteering, Machu Picchu, a trip in the Amazon and most recently the incredible Uyuni Salt Flats.

There are also lots of things we’ll undoubtably miss – the freedom to decide where we’re going and the immense freedom that comes with travelling. But overall we’re happy to be coming home, even if it is back to a world of responsibility and reality.

Because that world also includes the same bed to sleep in every night, a kitchen to cook your own food, family and friends to see, cosy pubs to drink in and many home comforts (hello PS3!)

We’ve had an incredible 16 months though, and while it has been hard at times, overall the experience has been amazing. Perhaps life changing, but we’ll have to wait and see how we feel at home before we can say that.

Honestly, if we suddenly had time and money for another 6 months or a  year, we’d happily carry on with this lifestyle…as long as we could see the family and friends we miss.

Anyway, what now? Well this blog won’t be going quiet, thats for sure. If anything, being at home and not feeling like we’re wasting ‘travel time’ by writing, the remaining posts about our travels should be of much higher quality than some recent posts.

I’ll be the first to admit this blog has become a bit of a chore of late, with the lack of time available, so we’re looking forward to spending some time improving it so it is a worthwhile memory of our trip and hopefully a helpful resource for others.

And over time, we’ll obviously be travelling again, even if it will be weekend breaks rather than 16 month epic trips!

The featured image in this post uses a modified version of 367bw – Air Europa Boeing 737-800; EC-IXE@PMI;08.08.2005 by Aero Icarus licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0