Two Months on the Road

I’ve shied away from writing about personal or relationship topics on our blog, preferring instead to focus on our travel experiences, but with today marking two months that we’ve been on the road, it feels like the right time to share what John and I have been thinking and talking a lot about over the past few weeks.

At one month into our travels, we remained energized, with high enthusiasm for everything that we were seeing and doing. And then not long after, about five or six weeks in, we tanked. We were exhausted. We’d been moving at a fast pace, not sleeping very well, and then John caught some kind of stomach bug. He blames the dumpling place we went to in Beijing. We searched long and hard to find it, following a recommendation from the NY Times, but if we had seen the bathrooms there before we ate, I’m pretty sure we would have headed elsewhere for lunch. At first he just felt fatigued, with a dull ache in his gut, but after a couple of weeks he got feverish and listless and had some pretty unpleasant bathroom experiences. Fortunately by that time we were staying with our lovely friends Trish and Mike in their beautiful apartment in Kobe, Japan. (More on that to come! We know that we’re woefully behind on our blog posts, and we’re working to catch up.) In Kobe, John had the chance to rest, start a course of Cipro, and come back to life.

I’m not sure he would completely agree with me, but in the end I think it was a good thing that John got sick. It forced us to reevaluate our travel priorities. By the time we reached Kobe, we were at each other’s throats. Looking back, I know the real reason was the travel pace we had adopted, but in the moment I think we could have each put together a long list of grievances. John being sick forced us to slow down and figure out what we needed to change in our schedule so that we could really enjoy this time we have together.

Moving at a manageable pace now, we’re both really enjoying ourselves again and looking forward to the adventures down the road. And over the past few weeks, as we’ve discussed our plans and vented our frustrations, we both feel like our relationship has gotten stronger. Friends and family have been asking, “How are you and John doing spending all day every day together?” And it feels great to be able to answer that we’re really doing well. For sure we’ve argued and gotten irritated with each other, but having all of this time together has helped us to better understand what really makes each of us tick and what drives each of us crazy. Before leaving on this trip, I felt like we already spent nearly all of our time together, but now we really do, and we’ve learned so much more about each other than I realized that we still had to learn. And understanding each other better has made it easier to communicate, too. (Though I will say that John has taken to repeating, when he wants me to communicate better, a phrase that we’ve often heard our parent friends say to their toddlers, “Use your words, Shelley.”)

We’ve spent a great deal of time talking about what we hope to take away from this travel experience–seeing amazing sights, learning about different cultures, a better understanding of world history, awareness of global events–but over the last couple of weeks I think we’ve gotten that the most important part of this trip is all of the time that we have together and what we’re learning about each other and how much closer we’re growing as a result, and for that we both feel very fortunate.