Happy 2014 to all my readers!

I just wanted to check in to say that spending the winter in Saskatchewan in an RV continues to feel like one of the smarter decisions I’ve made in the past five years!

L is back on the beach in Texas and it’s apparently ‘freezing’, and the weather in New Orleans and Alabama where Croft and Norma are isn’t much better. New Mexico and Arizona aren’t having stellar winters either. Really, I’m better off plugged into shore power here, working like crazy, and falling into a reasonably predictable budget. I wouldn’t want another spring like last year, stuck below an unrelenting line of bad weather.

The thing that I’ve figured out in the last five years is when something is enough. I have seen so much of this continent in half a decade. It is just so cool to be able to say ‘when I was in Tuktoyaktuk’ or ‘the weather in Florida was dreadful last year when I was there.’ That’s enough for now.

I know I’ll start traveling again soon, but I have accumulated so many memories since 2008 that they can nourish me a while longer. I can finally savour being ‘here’ because I’m not dreaming of being ‘there.’ That is the curse of the nomad, to always be looking ahead to the next stop, which can sometimes make it difficult to enjoy the present.

Memories of travel do more to lighten my mood than anything else. The other night, a cousin emailed to ask me about my trip to Scotland in ’98. Followed a half hour of reminiscing that made my day. Even though by this summer it will have been 16 years since that trip, I was transported back there by my cousin’s questions. I was back on that parapet of Stirling castle at sunset munching on a snack as I journaled. I found myself walking around in circles in Glasgow looking for food my first night there. The smell of the Culloden battlefield wafted over me. I even turned green remembering the choppy North Sea crossing to the Orkney Islands.

My travel memories are my wealth and my coffers are full. If you cannot understand how important they are to me, how they enrich my existence, I cannot make you understand. But they are what matter most to me.

There will come a day in short order when my existing memories will no longer be enough and I will find myself plotting a new journey. For right now, they are all I need to sustain me through a bitter, yet beautiful, winter, because here was also part of the dream, life on the prairie in all seasons. I know that I will one day find myself in Cairo or any other warm and bustling city and reminiscing fondly of my cold and contemplative winter on the Saskatchewan plains.

But as I sit here today, to quote a line from my favourite movie of 2012, “This is enough. This is… it’s more than enough for now.”