My son and I were talking tonight about some of the things that will be strange about traveling for the year. He noted that he’ll really miss our house and his friends and how everything will be so different when we return. Then we started talking about the rhythm of our lives and how that is mostly separated out into weekdays–the days he goes to school and I go to work–and weekends, when we are home with few obligations. Aside from the time when we are in Ireland, where I will be ‘working’ and our schedules will be pretty set, the first five months of our journey will be not only rootless, they will also be free from these rhythms that we have become so used to. And while not everyday will be a ‘weekend day,’ free of schedules and appointments, neither will it be a ‘week’ day where we all go off on our separate ways in the morning and then meet up again in the afternoon. I suspect that the daily rhythms of those first five months will be a kind of hybrid of weekend and week days; that is, partly celebratory, emancipatory and free of obligations and partly prone to schedules and timetables and meeting deadlines. But of course all that will be unmoored from our everyday life in Denver, making for a strange and wonderful way of experiencing time and our relationship to each other.

This is my dad!