Interlude

Hello and welcome to 2023, a bit late, we admit. We’ve been on hiatus from the blog since we returned from Portugal to the United States just before the holidays. Our home-away-from-home base has been Andrea’s brother’s house in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where we spent the holidays and attempted to deal with the culture shock of reentry. We were greeted by this poetic sunset from the Cummins family front porch.

We say “poetic” because in some aspects we have reached a sunset in the current phase of our travels. We enjoyed the holidays with family and then made a road trip back to Seattle to visit our house and stored belongings, get rid of clothes we were sick of wearing for months upon months, and pack our truck for our next adventure.

If you’ve been following the blog, you know that our last weeks in Portugal and Spain (well, since we haven’t made the post, maybe you didn’t know we jumped into Spain as well) were spent trying to run from the rain and the impending arrival of winter in Europe. We were only partially successful and have much to share from those adventures. Stay tuned, as we plan to continue with the blog in 2023.

Ultimately, our return to the States did not help with our fleeing winter. On the day we were ready to leave Colorado Springs for our road trip to Seattle, we were greeted with a lovely winter snow that had fallen overnight.

Our departure was a bit delayed while Chris plowed the driveway and we dug out the truck and got ready for travel. The delays continued as we drove past a 25-car pile-up on Northbound I-25 in South Denver and ended up taking more than 3 hours just to get to Fort Collins. For those of not familiar with the distances and driving times, lets just say it was unusually slow, long, and painful.

The snow and challenging driving weather continued to stay with us both going to and from Seattle. On our way to visit Jake’s mom in Northern Montana, we encountered show and icy roads. As we crossed the border into Eastern Washington on our way to Seattle, we encountered 3+ hours of dense fog. Neither of us could remember ever facing those conditions in the area before.

On our trip back from Seattle to Colorado, we decided on a southerly route only to be greeted by snowy conditions in Oregon and extreme high winds that threatened to close roads. This is typical of weather we expected as we passed through Wyoming, but there were times we feared we weren’t going to make it that far.

In spite of all the challenges, we got up each morning, scraped the windows, found passable coffee, and continued on the road. We have to say that the processed, sugary, stroke and diabetes-causing breakfasts we encountered at the typical American roadside hotels were a far cry from even the worst breakfast buffets we found on our previous travels. Quality standards in the United States are pathetically low, and must shock travelers from abroad.

While we were slowly regaining weight we had lost and losing health we had gained while traveling, (honestly, it is shocking what six days in a truck on the American highways will do to a functioning body) we did successfully return to Colorado Springs with everything we thought we’d need for our next adventure.

Where are we now? What’s next?

As we make this quick post to let all of you know we haven’t actually fallen off the planet, we are sitting in a hotel in Valladolid, Mexico on the Yucatan peninsula. After suffering winter in North America, we started to look for alternatives for where we could conduct a job and housing search without freezing to death or breaking what is left of the bank. The easy answer was just south of the border on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. We spent some miles to get here on the cheap and then spent the majority of January in and around Merida.

While we continue to search for the next challenges in our professional careers, we’re planning on staying mobile. Upon returning the the United States (again) on February 1, we’re going to begin a new phase of discovery in areas of our own country we have not yet explored. In addition to European adventures we have not yet shared and thoughts on successful long-term travel, we hope to include posts on some of Mexico and a road trip through the American South.

The UncommonNarrative Blog will continue into 2023. Happy travels to you all.