80 Beds, An Anniversary, and Moving Forward

     Rainforest, New Zealand 2014. I look really small.

    The bed count within the gap-year reached.....80. I'd like to say the 80th bed was located in an exotic, breathtakingly beautiful locale, a place full of adventure and dazzling sights but.....in reality the 80th bed resided in a Hampton Inn directly off I-5 in Elk Grove/Laguna, Northern California where we stopped for the night on our way too long drive from Palm Springs to Oregon. Clearly, not all bed experiences are created equal. But I'm so getting ahead of myself. WE HAD AN ANNIVERSARY!

     Thursday was an anniversary of sorts. A year ago that day, movers swept our boxes and furnishings off to storage in Indiana and we piled ourselves into our overstuffed SUV to begin our journey west and into a new phase of life.

     Those who know me know my love for travel and ongoing itchiness to see and experience the world. Where did my gap-year adventures take us? Because I love data and counting stuff, I've made a few lists.

State side (and in no particular order)  National Parks  -- Mesa Verde, CO, Saguaro East, AZ, Crater Lake, OR, Olympic, WA, Grand Canyon, AZ, Haleakala, HI, Hawaii Volcanoes, HI. I like this list.
Other locales -- NYC and the 9/11 Memorial, a visit with dear friends, and tour of Harlem, cycling on the San Juan Islands, WA, visits to Vancouver, WA, Portland, OR, Palm Desert, 
Palm Springs, Tucson and more.

Cruises -- four -- Transatlantic from Florida to Amsterdam, Norwegian with stops in Iceland, Faroe Islands, and Shetland Island, Vancouver, BC to the Hawaiian Islands, Hawaiian Islands through French Polynesia to North Island of New Zealand to Sydney.
Bike trips -- two -- Ireland's Connemara Coast and New Zealand's South Island.

Places visited -- Lisbon, Portugal, La Harve, (Normandy) France (Omaha Beach, WWII museum), Dover, England, Bruges, Belgium, Amsterdam (Van Gogh Museum, Anne Frank House), Brussels, Dublin, Ireland, Connemara Coast, Ireland, Galway, Ireland, Glasgow, Scotland, Copenhagen, Denmark, Oslo, Norway, Bergen, Norway, Faroe Islands, Shetland Island, Scotland, Grainger Fjord, Norway, London, Vancouver, BC, Hawaii, Oahu, Maui, Tahiti, Bora Bora, Auckland, NZ, Bay of Islands, NZ, Sydney, AU, Adelaide, Kangaroo Island, Christchurch, NZ, Franz Joseph Glacier, back roads of NZ, Moeraki, NZ, Queenstown, NZ. Happily, almost every place we visited was new territory for us.
We also managed to see all my siblings, many of our nieces and nephews, some grandnieces and nephews, R's family, and the Canadian group of aunt, uncle and cousins, as well as longstanding dear, dear friends. Toss into the year that we sold one home, bought another, and sold another small property. Gosh, I think we were on the move.

  My gap-year has been astounding, but not one without unexpected complications, disappointments, delights, mistakes and missteps  -- just like life. I wish that everyone I love, cherish, care about in any way could have such a year, to travel, to grow, to change, to learn, to see, to appreciate -- with an emphasis on appreciating, how much we have, how few material items are required to make a good life. Then perhaps we could all discuss how one settles down after such a year. I haven't a clue so right now each day I'm just making it up. Just like life.

      Forward R and I move. More beds to locate and count. More experiences to enjoy.

    Mum and Joey. Kangaroo Island, Australia. 2014

    Feeding my Australian friends.

Beds -- 50+

Why am I counting the number of "gap year" beds? Good question. At first, the count was kind of a game, I guess. Something to keep me amused and interested.  But I could have counted cities visited, countries visited, cabs taken. But I selected beds.

A number of years ago, I completed a dissertation which included data collection and analysis. During the process, I came to appreciate data in a new way. Information can help us describe, understand and explain experiences. So perhaps counting beds is a way of capturing and understanding the year. My husband R has been tracking miles driven. Periodically, he reports our miles travelled (by car only -- not plane, bike, ship, train, or any other mode).  It seems we are both attempting to capture and understand our experiences via numbers.

 No matter, this is how the count began. Our bed in Chicago was old, purchased several states and moves ago. We decided it wasn't worth storing or moving west. Our plan was to dump the bed the day before moving day and sleep one night on our blow up mattress. Problem was the battery operated pump had unexpectedly died. No prob, we decided. We'll just sleep on our bedroom floor. It's carpeted! With a few quilts and all, it will be fine.  This is the kind of bad thinking that comes when people are overwhelmed from making too many decisions, have way too much to do, and have been living the stress generated by an imminent cross country move. R is 63 and I was closing in on 60 at the time. It  had been a long time since we'd slept on any floor. It was getting late and since the movers would arrive by 9:30am the next morning we snuggled down (more like lowered ourselves) to the bed/floor to sleep.

I wouldn't really describe our time on the floor as sleep.  At 2 am we were both awake, hips and backs loudly protesting their treatment. At 2:30 am we were up, drinking the first of many cups of coffee, and by 3 am R was working on packing up the car. Bed #1 is really a non-bed that launched the gap year.

We left Chicago that afternoon, unrested, sore, a little anxious, and excited. After the sleepless night on non-bed #1 any place we stayed would be a step up. That optimistic belief actually did not hold true -- unbeknownst to us, worse beds were in our future. That day in the car, I started the bed-counting-game, tracking the number on my iPhone. Traveling from the Midwest to the west took us through -- Davenport, IA, Kearney, NB, Colorado Springs, Cortez, CO, Flagstaff, AZ, Tucson, AZ and finally Palm Desert where we met up with family and friends. Seven beds. Who knew there would be so many more?

Why count beds?  At their most basic, beds represent rest, a place to sleep. I think tracking beds expresses my restlessness. More beds. More adventure. More cities, countries, experiences.  R likes to say this is our time to "pick up and go." Will the gap year cure the restlessness? Do I want it to?

Keep counting.

By the way, current count -- 53 beds.