Back to Reality

I'm sitting in an empty house desperately waiting - in fact, counting the minutes, until I can head down to the train station to meet my good friend Ryan (one of my bridesmaids).  I have the Workman family house to myself this weekend.  The parents are on a weekend away together and Simon is down in London for his bachelor/stag party.  This will be the first (face-to-face) contact I will have had with a female friend in months!  And an even longer time since I had 'girl time!'  We are planning to do nothing more than cook at home, watch a girly movie and drink wine.  I personally cannot think of a better date!

These last couple weeks, since arriving in England, have felt like a heck of a lot longer than the 2 weeks they've been!  We are struggling a bit.  We're coming down off of an extremely intense high of traveling for 10 months (!) and are now living stagnant, unimpressive days on end.   Of course it's hard - impossible really - to beat waking in a new town or even country every morning and looking forward to adrenaline that comes with exploring a new world.  SE Asia was incredible.  All of our travels were.  I feel like I just graduated from an intense graduate school program.  The knowledge, the compassion and understanding for different cultures, and the appreciation of other ways of living that I gained during my travels is priceless.

We sit and wait now, for our next adventure.  We have a one-month gym membership at the local fitness center which is helping get us out of the house and stay a bit active, but aside from that, we have little to do.  I have contacted numerous volunteer organizations but none have shown any interest in our help.

Luckily, our next adventure is not far off.  We are getting married in just 3 months, which is so exciting!  And we start graduate study at the University of York (in England) in October.  We will both be working towards our masters - mine in Social Policy, Simon's in Public Policy.  Our plan is to complete these 12-month programs in October 2012 and then move back to the States to look for jobs.

Since we have so many fun things coming up, we have decided to keep the blog going so that we can continue to share our lives with you.  For the next couple months you'll probably be hearing about nothing but the wedding, so prepare yourselves!  We're both having a great time planning for it, and we will most certainly want to share both the excitement and the struggles of the planning process!

Journeys end: Heading to the airport in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam