Return

My two weeks of travel have come to an end, and now it's back to the grind. Sure, it's been a relatively easy re-entry, what with Kristi and Steve's fantastic wedding up at Warm Lake this past weekend, a trip that included a great mountain bike ride on the Eagle's Nest trail and road, but still. It ain't vacation, and it ain't in Amsterdam, so I'm gonna go ahead and be depressed about it anyway, thank you very much.

Two weeks is not enough. I mean, it is enough in that I feel like I did go somewhere for a decent length of time and was able to get work and everything else completely out of my system and adapt to a different pace of life, especially my sleep schedule. But last Wednesday morning, as I wandered the streets of Amsterdam for the last time, I felt all too deeply that I wanted another week or two. I wanted to see and feel more of that city before leaving it for god knows how long.

But, no such luck, and no more vacation time to play around with, so here I sit, back in my office, blogging over lunch, feeling all sorry for myself because I have to work for a living like most of the rest of the world. Poor me.

Highlights of the trip are tough to pin down in one sense, as just the acts of wandering the streets and neighborhoods of Paris and Amsterdam and Groningen were wonderful nearly every minute. Dinner at Robert et Louise in Paris was definitely one of the more memorable moments, as were the few hours spent watching football in a pub with an extensive English-speaking expat community the next day.

While the wedding weekend in Groningen, in the Netherlands, was without a doubt the highlight of the whole trip, other Dutch moments stand out with more individual clarity than the rest. Seeing Four Tet at the Paradiso was perhaps the most amazing and unique experience I had throughout this trip, the one that most made me feel I was experiencing something that just is not available to me here at home. And, of course, Wilco playing their tour-ender at that same venue was a pretty fantastic time as well.

In some ways, as it always is, it's nice to be home. Good to see Gus and Henry, good to see friends and to be able to cook my own food and to be in my house and to have my own bikes and all that stuff. But, there's still melancholy and longing for the places we just were, and there's still the time-tested means of best dealing with these things: planning the next trip.

New Zealand next fall for the Mountain Bike World Championships?

Myanmar next year for some SE Asia trekking and exploration?

A few weeks with my car and my mountain bike exploring British Columbia?

It's decisions like these that make time between travel more bearable.

And, it looks like the music offerings are still coming through town. Tonight, a band called the Moggs are doing an instore at the RX and a show later on at the Bouquet. I hadn't heard of them before, but the tracks available on their website are promising. I think I'll check them out.