End of Trip Mixed Feelings

How do I put my feelings about our year of travel in a blog post?  It's pretty hard when I am not quite sure how I am feeling at this point!  In one way I want to continue traveling indefinitely, but in another way I am ready to unpack my bags and not need to repack them again in a few days.  I knew when we started this trip that one day it would come to an end.  I guess now I must decide what impact this experience will have on my life.  Will I jump back into my old habits and routine and just think of all the cool places we saw?  I know this experience has changed me and I hope that some of the changes can be more lasting.

Here are a few things I hope I can take from this experience.

I hope I can be less materialistic when I return home.  That may be hard living in a very materialistic society.  I have learned that I don't need a lot of possessions to be happy.  I have seen people with very  few things but who are happy.  I hope I can find happiness in experiences and relationships with others instead of trying to find happiness with stuff.  

I hope I  can be more helpful to others because I sure appreciated the help we have received along the way.  Some of the help was as simple as someone taking a minute to point us in the right direction when we were lost (this happened a lot!) and some of the help was much more extensive like opening up their homes for us.  But we appreciated all the help, big, small and everything in between.  I want to be more aware of others and lend a helping hand whenever I can.

I hope I can keep my schedule at a manageable pace.  At times before we left I felt like we were so deep in the rat race of life that we weren't really enjoying life.  We were so busy running from one thing to the next that I don't think we really enjoyed any of the things we were doing!  I hope we can have a slightly slower pace of life than we had before so we have time to enjoy the little things along the way.

I hope I can look for the good.  As we have traveled we have found so much good in the world. There are so many beautiful places and wonderful people throughout this world.  I want to look for the best in each area, situation, and person.

I hope we can still have lots of family time together.  If someone asks me what the best part of our trip is I usually say, being with my family.  But being together as a family all the time was also one of the hardest parts of the trip!  I love our family and want to continue spending fun time together with them.  I hope we don't get back and then all just get involved in our own things and then not have time for family.  I hope we can make quality family time a regular part of our schedule.

Maybe I have unrealistic expectations of what I want to learn from this experience, but then some people thought we weren't to realistic when we first set out on this adventure!