30 Days Of Indie Travel: Home Is Where Ever We Are 30 Days Of Indie Travel: Home Is Where Ever We Are

This month BootsnAll is hosting a project encouraging bloggers to look back on a year of travel and share stories of travel and fun. Sometimes we forget about the great places we go or the fabulous experiences we have; or perhaps there is some travel that we don’t at first consider to be ‘travel’. This is a great way to re-envision what travel means to us and realize that we all travel more than we think!

Todays Topic: Home

When packing up all your worldy belongings into a storage locker, selling your house and car, and saying sayanora to your job and good-bye to family and friends, the concept of ‘home’ starts to take on a whole other meaning.

We consciously thought about it as we wrapped each dish, took down each picture, and boxed up each piece of ourselves. How would we define ‘home’ when we had no home to return to?

Many people define home as the place where they grew up; where their parents and family reside; where they went to school and perhaps ‘found’ themselves. I never have.  On purpose.

I never wanted to be pulled back, held back, looking back. Once I finally left my home-town I was all forward facing; looking to the future; facing the possibilities. That doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate where I came from, or who is there supporting me. It just means that I am not defined by where I come from but, hopefully, by who I am on each day.

Home has, since then, been where ever I am living at the time. Be it a small dorm room on campus, a dingy bachelor apartment, a small basement suite, a swanky-ish condo or, currently, a fourth floor walk up apartment.

As we contemplated long term travel we knew that we would have to define home in a new way. How do you define home when you have no apartment, no car, no job; just what is on your back?

Exactly.

We chose to define home as the space that held our packs at any given time. Our bed for the night was referred to as ‘home’, the sleeper car of the train was a temporary ‘home’, the space between us on the bus was ‘home’, wherever we were right now was ‘home’.

Home implies a sense of belonging, of comfort, and ease. We wanted that to be with us wherever we were and so took it with us everywhere we went.

My hometown will always hold a special place in my heart but my home will always be where I am at the moment.

How do you define home?

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