Little Pieces of Home

 

It's no secret that Ryan and I have a lot of dreams for our someday-travel. Fleshing out those dreams on paper or computer screen happens to be one of my favorites ways to pass the time. 

My friend Julie loaned me a book called At Home in the World, written by Tsh Oxenreider, and I've been reading a chapter from it each day. Her family traveled around the world for a year, and the book shares the stories of what it's like to live a nomadic lifestyle. Though our dreams don't involve traveling the whole world, I'm learning from Tsh what it's like to live without a home base, and it fascinates me. 

The whole reason Julie loaned me the book was because I told her about an Instagram account I'm following (Under the Sycamore) of a family doing the same thing. I've been taking mental notes of some of their strategies over the last few weeks, and just this weekend, I picked up on a new one that I absolutely loved. It works even if you're not traveling internationally, by the way.

She said, "We have a family agreement if we find a place we all love, we go back as often as we can before we head to the next town. We know we could never visit every spot in a city, so this is our way of kind of making home everywhere we go. Instead of saying, 'Remember that shawarma place in Himare?' we say stuff like, 'Hey do you remember the shawarma place that was next to OUR bakery in Himare?' There are little bakeries dotting the world that are ours now."

Immediately I thought back to a working vacation Ryan and I took back in 2016. We had just moved to Kokomo, literally days before this trip. I had been invited to speak at a women's conference at our friends' church in a little town called Chilton, Wisconsin. We also stayed at our friends' house while we were in town, and they showed us all their favorite places. 

One of the first places they took us was a little ice cream shop called Scoops. I love ice cream and have eaten a lot of ice cream in a lot of places. This ice cream was extraordinary. So much so, that a couple of days later, when our friends went to small group, we decided to go back and have more ice cream - just the two of us. And a few months after that, my friend shipped a whole pint of the salted caramel ice cream I loved so much - as a birthday gift!

Scoops is my ice cream shop. 

Though Ryan and I are very different from the Under the Sycamore Instagram account in that we are unlikely to travel the whole world, we are similar to them in that we don't usually stay in one place too long, and we don't normally go back to visit the same city again and again. So while we're there, we do try to make the most of the places we love.

There was the little food cart at our wedding resort. I think we ate there three times in one week. (It was the first thing we asked about when we went back for our fifth anniversary, and we learned the gentleman had closed up shop. We were so sad.)

There was the seafood restaurant down the road from our wedding resort; we ate there the night before our wedding and our first night back in town on our return trip.

There was the coffee shop downstairs from our Airbnb in Richmond for our 8th wedding anniversary trip. We ate there every morning because it was included in our Airbnb package, but it was so good that I think we would have eaten there more than once anyway.

These are our places that make us feel at home in our travels. I hope that as we continue to make our way across this big, beautiful country, we find more and more little pieces of home. And now I am going to be sure to claim them as ours. It's a grand plan.