As you know, it has been a few years since I have updated this website…and the question arises: Why update it now?  After feeling like all of that drive to explore, and live, and travel were free from my veins, what pulls me back?  And now as I look back at this travel site that I have had for half a decade, the rhythms of my life are beginning to become clear: I find myself full of wanderlust during those times where my emotions are at their most extreme…where love and hope, heartbreak and loneliness crescendo and crash like waves at my being.  I travel during those times of love and happiness where I feel like there is so much more to life and hope for its future, and during those times where I feel most lost and alone in life and like there is no hope.  After all, wanderlust is the art of getting lost on this earth in an effort to reconnect and find one’s self; and how peaceful and still we become when we make that reconnection.

So what brings me back to this travel blog?  It is loss, and it is love, and it is lost love.  And before I get back to posting all of my adventures from this summer (and get ready because there have been some amazing trips this summer and still more to come), I feel, dear reader, that it is best that you learn the events that led up to my summer wanderlust.

A few years ago when I last posted to this site, I was single and not dating, maybe even a bit tired, but feeling blessed in life.  I was a math and social science teacher at a Catholic high school that I loved.  I was coaching track and cross country after long days of teaching and interacting with students and families that I loved, here in this small town of Red Bluff, California that I call home.  My parents lived here, in the home where I grew up on a small ranch where the cows could be heard mooing lazy in the field.  We had dinners together several times a week, and talked about our days and drank wine together at the family home.  And we laughed.  And of course, I was still also a lawyer and spent my summers ghostwriting as a research attorney for the Shasta County Superior Court.  I actually wasn’t traveling much anymore during that time…honestly, for once in my life I hadn’t really felt the need to travel.  I was happy and content.

And then the bad times arrived.  As though I were to become the proverbial Job, life began tearing apart and tearing away everything, and I mean everything, that I loved.  The 2018 wildfires burned the towns of Redding and Paradise, and I watched in heartbreak as several friends, colleagues, students, and families that I knew suffered devastating loss.  As the smoke still hung in the air and burnt our throats, next the floods and snows came, causing yet more devastation over the 2018-2019 holidays.  That next spring, my family decided to move 1700 miles away leaving me alone here in this town, and they sold that family ranch that I loved.  I have not heard that lazy mooing of cows in the fields ever since.  During the summer of 2019 my grandfather was diagnosed with and died of pancreatic cancer.  I cried.  As I returned from the funeral to school for the fall of 2019, I learned that my beloved high school where I taught, Mercy High School, a nearly 140 year tradition in Red Bluff would be closing down.  I fought with families to keep it open, we raised nearly $1,000,000 in support to keep it open, but it still wasn’t enough apparently and the school shut its doors at the end of this year.  I gave the final graduation speech at the final graduation of that school, and watched as all of the students that I loved over the past few years stepped out and away forevermore.  And I cried.  And of course, the coronavirus has destroyed life as we know it, leaving many of us, myself included, more isolated than we ever have been in life.  And I cried.  And in losing Mercy High School, I had to turn back to law and litigating full time, that exact career I fought to get away from in my vocation to teach.   And I cried some more.

And all of that loss would have likely destroyed me and brought me to a mental breakdown, but for her.  But for her beauty, but for this amazing woman who for the first time in a long time brought a smile to my face and made me feel happy and like there was hope in this world.  But for Jennifer.

We oddly enough started dating right when the coronavirus struck and started its initial shutdown back in March.  Our first date was takeout Mexican and a movie on a couch, because everything was closed due to lockdown.  I immediately fell for her intelligence, her drive, her laugh, and the way she made me laugh.

And she looked like this:

And this:

And we looked like this:

And as Spring drew on, we spent more time together, and from my vantage and with her nearby, as everything around me was falling apart, the world nevertheless had hope and looked like this:

And this:

And she looked like this:

And this:

And we looked like this:

Until it was June, and I was in love with her to the point that I wanted to introduce her to my parents.  So we flew to Omaha together, where my parents now live.

And because of the coronavirus, the usually packed parking lot at the airport looked like this:

And our time in Omaha looked like this:

And this:

And this:

And then I came back home, and she continued her travels, on a road trip down to Kansas and meandering through the Midwest and out to Chicago.  And while she was out exploring the world, I came home and got back into my legal career.

And my diplomas and honoraria that she arranged for my wall were sitting on my floor and they looked like this:

And my business cards when they showed up looked like this:

And the first California Supreme Court case with my name published in it finally dropped and looked like this:

https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=3317766663817989225&hl=en&as_sdt=6&as_vis=1&oi=scholarr

But I was back in law, and growing tired of being back to the legal grind, and jealous of the travels and fun she was having while I was stuck behind a desk, spending each day buried in discovery or arguing on a phone.  And I smiled less than I used to smile, and I grew less patient than I used to be.  And I didn’t appreciate her enough.  She meant everything to me, she meant the world to me, and I didn’t appreciate her.  Until we were hardly talking by the Fourth of July, and shortly thereafter, following an argument, she left me.  She let me know that she did not feel love for me anymore, and that my career had changed me into something that was no longer fun or worth being around.

And I was devastated.  And I lost her from my life.  And she hasn’t returned.  And I realized I was alone.  And I realized that that moment in history too was part of the long list of horrifying things that have happened in my life over the past two years.  And I cried.

…And then I grabbed my shoes, and I started to travel.  To be continued.

Cheers,

Rob