12 Months On

12 Months On

So, I guess I didn’t exactly finish off this blog did I... I got kind of busy at the end of the trip and then busier when I got home. To anyone I hadn’t already bored into a stupor with my rambling, I’m sorry.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking quite a lot about the trip in the last few days, as it’s the one year anniversary of me setting out. As it happens, I’m writing this on a flight back to the US (well I started writing it there anyway). 369 days have passed since discovering my bike rather bent out of shape at JFK. This time I’m flying to Boston for a somewhat shorter 2½ week trip down the east coast.

I suppose I should start by finishing off the story from last year. I think I’d got as far as Montana. After that I headed back to the west coast on another lovely overnight train journey. I had a couple of days in Seattle, including a trip round a fantastic sci-fi museum (yes, I’m sad). I took advantage of being in a big city for the first time in six weeks by enjoying a, let’s call it, broader range of food than had been on offer in small town Wyoming and Montana. From there I headed on to Portland for another great couple of days with Sean and Laura from Colorado, as Sean also had a house in Portland.

In Portland there’s a local chain of pubs called McMenamins. In addition to having a few “normal” locations, they’ve also bought up some really random ones. The two that still spring to mind are an old school, where they’ve turned the classrooms into different bars, and an old poor house, which now has numerous themed bars, restaurants and even two 18 hole par three golf courses. I swear I lost more balls in hedges than I got in holes and it was pretty much dark by the time we’d finished, but ordering more beers from, I guess, “waiters” driving round on golf carts was awesome.

I can’t remember if I mentioned this earlier, but I’d rejigged my plans earlier in the trip to create a spare week at the end for a trip to Hawaii and a bit of downtime. I won’t go into details here, because I don’t really have space and I’m always mindful of a song by Frank Turner called “I Really Don’t Care What You Did On Your Gap Year.” I’ll just leave it with these pictures and the advice that, if you get a chance to go, you really should.

As for adjusting back to normal life, it was actually remarkably easy. I’d come back with a plan for things I wanted to change in my life, and I set off to make it happen. I hope no one reading this minds if I don’t share every detail of that here (I’m not really the type to share too much about my personal life) and some bits are very much that. I’m actually pleased to say that it’s going relatively well. I decided to stay at work in my old job. The balance between leaving and searching for something that I’d get more satisfaction out of vs. staying and continuing to fight for the way I felt things should be done came down on the side of the latter. I realised that I was spending too much time getting frustrated by the here and now, and not enough focusing on the long term and the direction I wanted things to move in. I’m pleased to say that this is actually going pretty well. Work was never a big part of the plan though.

The rest of it was based on getting to a point where I enjoyed my life outside work more, as the solution to the problem of achieving some kind of work/life balance. I’ll always have work related things pulling me in one direction (I can’t help caring about it), and, if the alternative is sitting around trying to find something to watch on TV, then it’s always going to be hard to avoid the lure of doing that extra little bit of work. Therefore less time for anything else, therefore even less outside work, therefore do more work, therefore less time for anything else... You get the idea. I needed a few things outside of work to make that side of my life more appealing. (This isn’t meant as a criticism of my friends in Leeds, before any gets offended. Entirely self inflicted.)

The first step in this was to make a physical move up to Edinburgh. As a city, I absolutely adore it, and the idea of living there really excited me. I moved about seven months ago now and found a beautiful flat in an old Georgian tenement block, and ever since I’ve been settling into the area and trying to make a life for myself there. Some things are going faster than others, but it was never going to be an overnight process. I’m even learning to drive! Yes, I should have done this a long time ago, but I really had never wanted a car before. The temptation of being able to get out into The Highlands at the weekend is strong enough to make the difference though. That and the fact that I now live 12 miles from work and, although I cycle in most of the time, it would be nice if my second option was a car rather than a half hour bus journey followed by a half hour walk.

Anyway, there you have my update. Thanks to those people who made nice comments about my blog. They were really appreciated. I don’t think blogging about my life is something I’ll continue with though. There just wouldn’t be enough to write about! Maybe a more political blog under a pseudonym. I was about to ask people to post suggestions, but that would defeat the point of the pseudonym really. It’s taken me a couple of sittings to write this, so I’m now on day four of the trip and on a train from Philadelphia to Washington D.C. I hope everyone else has had as good a year as me.

Andy