New Beginnings

Let’s take a break from travel stories and see what is going on now. We are starting a new life, we just arrived on an island that will be our home for the following months, not sure for how long yet.

As I told you in our first post, in our search on how to combine the absolute love for our son with our passion for travel, we ended up taking a break from our “regular” lives. We just closed all our businesses in Romania, packed our stuff, rented our home and embarked on a journey with no clear end. We spent the last two weeks making plans, dealing with paperwork and sorting all our stuff on various buckets: to take with us, to keep for later, to sell or to donate to others.

I was never the person to put feelings into material possessions, so all this process was easier than I imagined and it was actually a very good experience: we realised we have too many things we don’t need, too many clothes and jewelries we don’t wear, too much stuff we don’t use! It’s just crazy how consumerism makes us all our own slaves.

I have to admit the most difficult part was deciding on Eric’s stuff; he’s not yet at the age to understand what is going on and why we are doing this, he can’t make real and conscious decisions, but it didn’t seem fair to decide all by myself what should happen with his things. Still, I needed to be rational and practical, there’s just a limited amount of luggage we can carry on a flight and there’s no need to store infant and toddler stuff until he is a grown up. So I just packed with us a few favourite toys and lots of books, as I’m not sure when it will be the next time I will be able to find Romanian books, plus all his clothes and that’s it. I kept explaining him, on his own understanding, that not all his belongings will fit on the plane and that we need to sell part of them to save money for later or to donate to other kids that need them more than him. I couldn’t believe how reasonable he was, kids really do understand much more than they seem! There was no problem having less toys to play with, but I was heartbroken during the last few days when he was walking around the house realising something is missing “where’s my couch?…oh…a guy bought it” or “my puppy toy is missing…I gave it to a little girl”. I hope this teaches him something about giving to others, and also about the relevance of experiences vs. material possessions.

We left Romania a few days ago, but we just arrived to our final destination; we split the journey in two parts, with an Amsterdam city break in between (more on that in a future post), to avoid traveling straight for 20 hours. That would have been too tiring, especially for Eric! So far, so good, he seems very happy with the new situation and adapted much better than I thought he would. I don’t think he understands much, but he is all day with his beloved parents in a relaxed and calm setup, which is pretty much one of his basic needs. I already miss dear people from back home and hope to be able to see them sooner than we expect but, right now, this is the best place for the three of us to be in.

Since everything is just too new and different, our perception changes dramatically one hour to the other, so it is too soon to share more of our experience. Let us get used a bit here and stay close for a future post about our new life.