HOME

           

 

And so we end our travels as we began them, on a long flight across the Atlantic.  Going home.  The word “home” has taken on new meaning.  For a third of a year, we have moved from one family’s home to another, occupying it for a week or two, making it our own temporary “home.”  But what turns a house into a home?  When does a structure of walls and ceilings become the intimate core of a person’s life:  their home?  We call them house exchanges but in fact they have been home exchanges because we have exchanged far more than a house.  We have exchanged kitchens and the homey smell of dinner cooking and coffee in the morning, and beds with someone’s favorite sheets put on them, clean and crisp.  We have exchanged neighborhoods.  We have exchanged corner markets, and the knowledge of which aisle has milk, which has bread.  We have exchanged seats on the subway and trolley, the local train and bus; views from the windows as we go by blocks and neighborhoods on our way to the city’s heart.  We have exchanged urban areas that appear at first incomprehensible and utterly foreign, and then morph into streets we have walked, museums we have visited, cafes where coffee and wine have been drunk.  We’ve learned the art of landing in a foreign place and unveiling its mysteries a day at a time.  We have learned the art of constructing a home out of other’s homes and other’s cities.

We have also brought home with us.  Our little netbook computers have let us do homework, write blog entries, do emails, research travel options, order tickets, pay bills.  They have been our traveling library, checkbook, classroom, podium, soapbox.  But the home we have carried has been far more than what electronic gizmos can bring.  We have created home through our shared adventures – the laughter and irritation, confusion and elation of traveling as a unit through one new experience, one new adventure, day after day.  Each morning we have known that we’d see something and do something we’d never done before.   This is what we will miss the most.  The thrill of stepping out the door into something new, every . . . .  single . . . .  day.  We have been our own core, our own little country, moving through time and space, unconstrained by jobs and workloads and daily obligations.

This trip has been one of circles.  Some have been planned intentionally, while others have emerged as surprises along the way.  I planned a trip with history at its core since we are history buffs and Europe is the historical mother ship for a family that is part German, part Austrian, part Norwegian, part Irish, a bit of this, a dash of that.   

We went to the farthest northern reach of the Roman Empire and walked the wall built by Hadrian to delineate the known from the unknown world.  We found remnants of this same empire in Sardinian fields where the round remains of a Roman bath sat, surrounded by grasses and silence.  We walked the streets of antiquity in Ostia Antica, peered into fragments of ancient Rome’s living rooms below the streets of modern Rome, stared across the still awe-inspiring expanse of the Coliseum, saw the heating apparatus for the Roman baths in Bath, and saw memories of the Empire scattered across Italy.  Everywhere we went the Romans had been before us, even up to Denmark, where Roman goods had made their way through trade.  

            When Rome fell, other cultures claimed the stage.  The Vikings launched their ships from Denmark, and after sailing for three days landed in England, which became part of their Empire for a few hundred years.  Then a millennia or so later, the remains of a Viking village – a silent, entombed ghost town – were found below the streets of York in England.  An archaeological dig turned into an underground tour where four-seater cable cars slowly carry you down the streets of the reconstructed Viking town while above you, on terra firma of the 21^st century, buses and trucks honk and rattle their way.   We sailed in a reconstructed Viking ship in Denmark, moving across waters that they’d sailed on when they were bound for the island of Britannia, on which they would build their wooden town whose remnant beams and streets we would see, hundreds of years later, exhumed in York.

            But the Vikings fell when William the Conqueror rose, sailing from the beaches of Normandy to England to claim it in the fateful battle of 1066.  We walked the fields of Battle where the conflagration took place; saw the White Tower that William built in what became the Tower of London; walked along the walls of his home castle in Caen, France.  And read the story of his triumph in the Bayeux Tapestry, woven with such precision that its images of ship-building and carpentry were studied by historians and wood-workers alike.

            William’s rule gave way to medieval times, through which we traveled again and again.  The half-timbered houses of Rennes in France, the walled beauty of Alghero, Sardinia, the lovely narrow streets of Izola and Piran in Slovenia, the fabulous cathedral of Salisbury, England, and of course the countless hilltop villages and towns of Italy – all are places in which the medieval and the modern peacefully co-exist.  And from the medieval to the 17^th century opulence of Amsterdam’s canal houses, rising three, four, five stories high in proud gables and arches along the canals.

            Then we skipped a few hundred years to land, once again, on the beaches of Normandy for a different invasion, this one not composed of horses and Normans headed to England under William the Conqueror’s banner, but Americans and Canadians and Brits headed to liberate German-occupied France.  Rusted German bunkers dot the clifftops along Omaha Beach and the other beaches of the great D-Day Invasion.  On the wall of Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam is a fragment of a map that her father drew of Normandy, the beaches carefully named, the scenes of clashes noted as he followed the course of the invasion on BBC radio broadcasts smuggled into the attic where he and his family and friends hid, almost successfully, from the Nazis.  Peering at the bit of map on the garret wall, I could picture the beaches, and the German bunkers, and the photos I saw of the battles that raged there.    

 

Circles and circles.  Along with the loops of history that we encountered throughout our travels, there was the constant circle formed by we three.  Before this trip began, I read articles about families who were changed by the experience of traveling together. I wondered if this would happen with us.  On our last night in Amsterdam, just before ending our travels in Europe, we strolled home to our house exchange apartment after a lovely dinner out.  We had just had the 115^th consecutive dinner together of just the three of us.  We walked down the street, talking and laughing.  We linked arms, falling in step together, utterly delighted to be in each other’s company, our steps as synchronized as our lives had become after four months of non-stop connection with each other.  When we talk about the things we’ll miss from traveling, what tops the list is just being together, the three of us, stepping out the door for a new adventure every day. 

 

Most trips are conscribed by necessity. They must align with school holidays, or a vacation of a week or two from work.  We have had the luxury of time.  And the luxury of homes.  Other people’s homes.  And the home we created along the way. 

And now, the home we return to.