The phone rang, and rang again. I hesitated to answer it. I knew what the person on the other end was going to tell me. My heart sank into my stomach as I answered it. I saw her leave late Monday night from my kitchen window. I couldn’t bring myself to go outside and say goodbye, but I knew it was goodbye forever. The phone is still ringing. I get up to answer it and the voice on the other end says the words I dread to hear: Totaled! Oh Britney! Oh my heart! We love you so very much.
We have not posted a whole lot on our blog these past few months. We have been poorly behaved bloggers. Things in America have kept us busy and stressed. Politics and policy became more important than fun and cultural enrichment. Travel, for us, took a backseat.
Celebrating four years of being nomadic this month seems so surreal to me. For those of you that don’t know, or haven’t read our manifesto, Kenin and I both came from a retail work background and left our jobs after breaking down and nearly divorcing. We were working crazy hours and making great money, but we hardly ever saw each other. To make matters worse, when we did get time together, we spent it being exhausted and cranky. Neither of us ever planned on having a life full of money and status, but we worked hard and climbed that corporate ladder like there was a fire chasing us upward.
Eventually we found that we were utterly miserable and at a breaking point, so we made the choice to just walk away from it all. We embarked on a 30-day road trip to save our marriage and our sanity and we just couldn’t bring ourselves to go back to the back-breaking retail world and the consumerism that peddled it. Our marriage was more important to the both of us than the amount of money in our bank account. It became time for a major change.
We’ve been through quite a bit of ups and downs in our lives, and that’s still the most shining example of us “Dufresning it”.
When Kenin refers to getting out of any sticky situation in life he likes to refer to it as “Andy Dufresning” it. This is a reference to the main character, Andy Dufresne, from the Shawshank Redemption. When he escaped from Shawshank prison, Andy swam through a river of shit and came out “clean” on the other end, hence the coining of one of our favorite terms, “Defresning It”.
I recently spent a vacation on a cruise that ended up all over the news. I struggled quite a bit internally for a few days on whether I wanted to write this article or not. I decided to put my thoughts out there and maybe it would help me cope. I was enjoying 7-days in the beautiful blue Caribbean waters working on indulging in some food and drinks, enjoying a nice relaxing trip (or two) to the spa, and reading in the suns warm rays by the pool. I was thoroughly relaxed and close to finding my zen when all of a sudden, like a thief in the night, my tranquility was swept out to sea.
Over the course of the past 3-years we Ramblers have discovered that slow travel has become our preferred method of travel. When you mix slow travel with housesitting you get an almost unbeatable combination. The blend of nearly free accommodations and having plenty of time to really take in a destination are both really great benefits. However, we’ve recently discovered another reason that’s even better. Over the last couple of years, we’ve had the ability to live the lives of completely different people while staying in these individual homes. The funny thing is, it took an old friend of ours coming over for a visit to point this out to us. We never really realized how much each house sit has impacted and changed our perspectives on life and the way it is lived by each individual person. We became very introspective on how geography, culture, and even gender can influence a person’s home and ultimately a person’s life.
