Just a note...

In Feb of 2008, I surprised Joris with a belated birthday present. I had borrowed the keys to Hulu Beach and packed everything I could think of to have a 5 star experience on a deserted beach: tent, lounge chairs, table, a 3 course bbq meal and a big jug full of snacks and bubbly drinks.

I woke him up at 6 in the morning and as we drove to Bandabou in the dark with some good music on the radio, a even-bigger-eyed-than-usual Joris kept asking: where are we going? Hm? Hm?


As reading material I brought the only thing I could find at the moment, which was a stack of ancient National Geographic Magazines. As we were lying and reading, we kept sighing and saying things like: I wanna go there. All of a sudden we both turned to each other and said: So why don't we? Let's do it!

We had found our travel buddy for this lingering dream we both had. And for the rest of our lives.

In the course of getting to this goal we had several of these moments. Moments in which we would we thinking of something, each on his or her own, and the one just had to start the sentence and the other would laugh and say: I was just thinking that. Usually this entailed big decisions, like moving in together, marriage, going back to school and moving to Holland after travelling. It became the standard to which we would hold our decisions, to see if it was a good one. Joris started writing things down and hiding them, so he could show me the moment when he started thinking something.

Another one of those moments came along. Please read this sitting down.

Monday morning, Aug 9th, I woke up really early, with a strange uneasy feeling. Thoughts were going through my head at 200 mph and my stomach was hurting, so I got out of bed and went downstairs, to clear my head. As I was sitting there, there was this one thought that kept pushing through, and after a few hours I woke Joris up to talk about it.

When we started thinking about travelling, we had the plan to travel for at least a year, maybe more if possible. Volunteering and working with large animals was high on our list and we had certain places we really wanted to visit for a longer period of time. As we started doing research it was moved back to 8 months, later 6 and now at the end it became 4 months. There are so many things we want to do and see, here in Holland. Joris jobhunting is going exceptionally well, he could start working tomorrow if he so chooses to and it is a big joy to see Kwek starting up here. We have been living on a budget for 3 years now, saving up for the wedding and for the trip. Our savings are there, but it feels like nothing else is in place. Sounds spacey, but it just did not feel right.

We saw our beautiful plan melt into a reduction of a reduction of a pale comparison to the original idea.

When I started rambling on that Monday morning, Joris jumped up and ran to the wastebin and started digging through the trash. He found this note he wrote:

Laten we de wereldreis minstens 1 jaar of misschien tot na je bachelor opschuiven...dated July 30th at 14:40.
We both felt it inside, but could not bring ourselves to say it out loud, but we could not ignore it any longer. We are postponing our dream trip, in order to give it the room it needs to grow back into what we intended in the first place. In 3 years we will be better prepared, financially and in any other way, Joris will have made his mark in the Dutch work environment, I will have my studies (almost) done and in the meantime we could really relax and enjoy the live we are living right now a little bit more.
We are still crying silently about it when nobody is looking, but Joris is looking forward to start working (hopefully in October) and my school starts Aug 23rd. Never a dull moment here....