One year ago, we found out that Sheena was pregnant. There was one February day when we decided that we’d done what we wanted to do in this phase of life, so we might as well start trying to reproduce ourselves. I looked forward to what would surely be several months of trial and error, but one enchanting evening later Sheena was in a motherly way.
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When I was twelve years old, while sleeping on the floor of my dad’s living room, I had a dream that caused me to fall irrationally in love with Seattle. I had never been to Seattle, and had only a vague idea of its whereabouts (America). In the dream, and in recalling it afterward, I felt a complete sense of liberation. I was a fully autonomous and independent twelve-year-old without a care in the world, and I freely roamed the streets with a gang of other twelve-year-olds amid the deep snows of the Seattle winter. This demonstrates how little I knew about Seattle. In my dream, Seattle had been in the midst of an arctic winter, and I, along with my cohort of street kids, were whisked about the city on its efficient public transit system. This assumption of public transit furthermore demonstrates how little I knew of Seattle.
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The short-winded story: We’ve released our second book! 927 Days of Summer is now available as a paperback and e-book! Wahoo!
But behind every short-winded story, there is a long-winded story…
It recently occurred to me that if I were not myself, but a reader of this blog, I might be wondering what Brad and Sheena did with themselves upon their return from their 927 days of wonder. Give in to Sheena’s discovered love for miniature barking deer and start a deer farm? Capitalize on Brad’s affinity for replacing wheel bearings and start a VW repair shop? No, and no. Please. It was nothing like that. There was a short period of jubilation, followed by a brief period of soul-searching and uncertainty, and then I locked myself in my mother’s closet. For thirty hours. I don’t have any idea what Sheena was doing during that time because we had separated. Temporarily! We had separated temporarily because she thought that my idea of locking myself in a closet was asinine, and she had better things to do.
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Lately we’ve been almost altogether absent from all forms of online activity; Facebook left unattended, blog without update. I imagine the world has pretty much forgotten that we exist. So what’s the deal? Retraction from society? Playing the hermit? Having so much fun that there’s no time to stop and post a selfie to Instagram? Impossible! We don’t even have Instagram! Truth is the tell-worthy tales are piling up but I’m systematically suppressing them in order to stay focused; we hope to release our next book at the Overland Expo, and so every spare moment that I’m not working or eating or sleeping or giving Sheena a back rub, I’ve been writing new content for our book. Eye on the prize!
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After 927 days, 45,822 miles, 34 countries, five continents, and countless hours spent watching our very own real life documentary unfold through the big screen of Nacho’s windshield, we arrived right back where we started. When it comes to good decisions that we make in life, this will certainly go down as one of the better ones. But all good things must come to an end. We set out to drive around the world, and when we pulled up in the same driveway that we left almost three years ago, we had thereby accomplished our goal.
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Way back in the far off distant beginning, I wrote about the day that I quit my job. After I had broken the news that I would be leaving to the CEO of my company, he invited me to lunch and did his best to convince me not to go, and in the end suggested I see a shrink. For the sake of simplicity, in that story I opted not to mention that the company’s former CEO was also at lunch with us that day. Thus, it was both the former and current CEOs teaming up to try to convince me not to quit my perfectly good job to move into my van and drive around the world. But something funny happened at lunch that day.
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On a snowy day nearly three years ago I shat my last shit in my own house. Soon thereafter we crossed the border into Mexico and I saw a cinderblock shanty on the side of an embankment. It had a broken down truck next to it and there were various rusty signs in Spanish around it littering the roadside. I thought to myself, I have shat my last shit in my own house, and I’ve stepped out of my comfort zone for the next three years, and there will be nothing I can do about that. Our driftwood raft had lost sight of land, and one day, inshallah, we would find land again.
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