BROKEN

That trip might have broken me.  Going into it I knew I'd face two big challenges:  too long away from home and too many people/socializing.  My introvert NEEDS quiet, alone, downtime between socializing and "going and doing".  And I'm really a homebody with no enormous desire to see the world, although there are some things I'd like to see and do if I could see and do them in an afternoon.  So I entered into the plan for 5 weeks in Great Britain with this trepidation: I might get homesick and suffer a bit from "too many people" burn out.  Well, that was an underestimation.

We started with 4 days in Illinois to attend a 3-day extravaganza of activities to celebration Hub's Class of '68 50th high school reunion.  I was only one year behind Hub so I know all those people too.  It was interesting/fun/tedious.  And frankly it was shocking to see how all those people had aged so much more than Hub and me.  Sad.  😉

Then we hopped a red-eye 747 from Chicago to Edinburgh for the first of our two scheduled tours.  Met the tour director who was a hoot; a woman about our age, native Scot, and full of fun and vitality and interesting stories to tell to enhance our trip.  The other 24 tour-mates were also very nice people; a few quiet ones, a few partiers.   But we didn't go to make lifelong friends, and since we like each other's company a lot, we didn't go out of our way to socialize at every opportunity.  Still....we basically all lived and ate and traveled together for the 10 day tour of Scotland.  Saw some cool things.  (Later blog post.)

When that tour was over, we had exactly 2 days to regroup before meeting our next tour director and tour group in Bath, England for our Best of England and North Wales tour.  One of those in between days was spent with a dear friends who live near Edinburgh who took us to cool, non-touristy places and cooked us a home-cooked meal in their lovely country cottage.  Highlight.  The other day was a flight and bumpy bus ride to Bath.

The new tour group was, shall we say, less vivacious.  And the tour guide rather dour.   We were already tired, wishing we'd only scheduled one tour, and sort of counting the days until it was all over.  We steeled ourselves for what we now knew was ahead -- a nonstop itinerary and living with a new group of people.  We were at this point embarking on a 14 day tour, with 5 days alone in London tacked on to the end.  We had barely begun.

We ended up learning that our tour mates were pleasant enough folks, but the tour guide never did win us over and in fact began to grate on us to the point we mostly tried to ignore him.  He added very little to the information we could read in a guide book.  He had a lot of rules.  We felt reprimanded at times which started us to giggling.  We ended up sitting in the back of the bus binging on shortbread cookies and making fun of him.  Small rebellions.  Saw some cool things.  (Later blog post.)

When that tour was finally, thankfully over, we still had our 5 days in London.  We moved to the luxe hotel we'd scheduled to pamper ourselves and sprung for an even better room -- a suite.  We were so relieved to be finally, blissfully alone.  But I was still homesick, having missed my granddaughters' first day of school, her birthday, her father's (our son's)birthday, and her parent's (our son and daughter in law's) wedding anniversary and likely a million things our other son and his girlfriend were up to.  We kept up with headlines, but gratefully missed the minutiae of the Kavanaugh debacle.  I worried about my garden and whether my friends would remember or recognize me.  I posted daily photos and trip updates to FB (when I had WiFi) to help me remember what we were seeing and doing because it all became a blur.

It really was a whirlwind.  Never enough time to truly ground in any one experience before we were on to the next.  The pace was not our pace.  Active extroverts had a blast.  Introspective introverts got tired.

I was so happy to arrive home!  But it was also disorienting to realize we'd left the end of August when it was still summer and returned in early October in autumn with darkness descending by 6:30 p.m.  I was jet lagged, fighting a head cold, enduring a cluster of every few days migraines, totally exhausted and feeling like I'd never find my equilibrium again.

I am improving but, after two weeks home, still not back 100%.  A friend who traveled to Poland this past summer for an extended stay told me it took him and his wife a month to recover.  I'm half way there.

It feels so incredibly disingenuous to complain when we know we are blessed by the opportunity to have taken this trip.  We saw and did and experienced; learned and grew.  We are truly grateful and with time will be more appreciative and joyful about the experience.  We have about 2000 photos to remind us of all we've forgotten in the blur.  Still, the fact remains:  I'm a homebody and an introvert and next time (there's a hopeful note!) I'll do it differently.

At least, that's the view from here....©