Back from 5 weeks vacation, camping in National Parks, caravan parks and friend’s backyards, and visiting friends and family. We all had an amazing time that I’ll write about over the coming weeks.
Returning home was surprising – our home of nine years looked eerily unfamiliar even though nothing had changed. I think that there’s a length of time, perhaps about two or three weeks, that is the length of your ‘now’. ‘Recent memory’, if you like. Most vacations aren’t long enough to reach that point, so you don’t get such a disruptive experience when you return to normal life. But I definitely went beyond that point with this holiday.
We drove back into Melbourne late on a Tuesday afternoon, and I was taken aback by the sheer number of people, their pace, and what seemed to me to be the tunnels of vision that they were racing down. The pace out in the countryside is definitely slower and people seem to look around them as they go about their day. Maybe it’s just me and the fact that I’ve been spending weeks marvelling over the size of the country and the sky – we really don’t have much sky in the city – but it was something I noticed immediately.
But it is good to be back in our comfortable beds, good to be able to go to the market and get a proper range of fruit and veg (and at reasonable prices!), and just enjoy all the things that were familiar before we left and are becoming familiar again.
And I’ve got a lot of gardening to do…