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Flying ‘home’ with zee German family in tow, we pick up our hire car at Stansted, hot foot it into London to pick up the English contingent, and a couple of hours later we’re sitting in front of a fire-place in a 400 year-old cottage in the Cotswolds.
Whether we’re ‘on the road’, or ‘back home’, our activities down the years have led family and friends to associate us with a certain way of life; tourism and leisure - our raison d’être - rather than work and structure; and when we’re around, it seems, we induce certain behavior and expectations in others.
Regardless of nationality, none of us had been to the Cotswolds before, nor had we previously known much about the place. Upon completion of our time we were universally impressed, further supporting a dream of mine - that if money wasn’t an obstacle, I’d want nothing more than to travel and know the country in which I was born.
Less than a month later we’re ‘home’ again, this time on the other side of the Atlantic, in Wisconsin, about to embark on an extended road trip to our new home in Alberta, Canada. Despite my being
English and Jennifer, American, the Cotswolds, Yellowstone or Badlands National Parks are equally foreign to us both. There is no longer an attempt to balance the competing fields of home/away or tourism/residence, because these days, when we are home we are tourists and when we are away we feel most at home.
True to form, in just over two weeks’ time we’ll be hosting some familiar English and German guests here in Canada, and together we’ll be embarking on a month-long camping tour of Alberta and British Columbia. We'll hopefully be able to perform the role of hosts and guests; betwixt and between tourism and resident; home and away. That's nowhere else I’d rather be.
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Fiona
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Aagghhhhh
gorgeous gorgeous pics as always!! Will you be touching down in Vancouver on the next trip?