We arrived safely at Nancy's Dominican family's home in Ft. Lauderdale in mid-November. We had been driving since March of this year. We had successfully driven up the West Coast, across Canada, and down the East Coast, as was our plan from the start. We put approximately 12, 000mi on the odometer. Of course, after all this, Willie got tired...very tired. So tired, in fact, that she stopped, without warning, in the middle of an intersection several days after our arrival in Ft. Lauderdale--and she wouldn't restart. We coasted through the intersection to what happened to be a highway, just shy of a freeway onramp. The irony of the fact that our "For Sale" sign describes the van as "reliable" was not lost on us. In fact, it is possible that Willie's stopping was, as Nancy's family suggested, Willie's way of expressing her displeasure at being put up for sale.
As a result, there was very little vacationing to be had whilst in Florida. For the first two weeks, Willie was at the mechanic, receiving some extremely expensive repairs. For the last two weeks, we feverishly cleaned Willie and made her presentable, so that we weren't leaving Florida with a semi-functional, geriatric van in our names. First attempts at cleaning were repeatedly interrupted by Nancy's aunt's next-door neighbour, who appeared to be a compulsive liar. Either that, or he was a concert cellist; an ex-marine; a deep-sea diver; a registered architect (in twenty-seven states!); and collector of rare and exotic animals, including two Great Danes, two bobcats, a Black Mamba, and the "New Zealand Green Mamba". We thought this last one must be extremely rare, as New Zealand doesn't have snakes...
We did eventually get the van cleaned. Finally, one day, we got in the van and realised that it was completely empty of clothes, of food, of our various magnets and bumper stickers, empty of our artwork, empty of postcards we'd collected along the way...empty of us. She wasn't our Willie anymore, and suddenly, it truly felt like our trip, this "vacation" was coming to an end.
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| Cleaning, day one. |
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| Lucky the cat pays Steff's empty cupboard a visit. |
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| Shiny and clean! |
We did manage to escape the incredibly oppressive stress of trying to sell our home/vehicle/traveling companion with weeks, then days to spare by going to the beach one day.
We also celebrated Thanksgiving with Nancy's extended family. Or some of it, anyway. A little background: Nancy's mother has forty-one brothers and sisters. Nancy literally has hundreds of cousins. Thanksgiving was loud and raucous and gluttonous, and lots of fun. The dinner featured a pork roast, a ham, a turkey, several loaves of homemade challah (we made that), yuca, beans, cranberry sauce, various salads, and general merriment.
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| Some of the dinner spread. Nancy's uncle William volunteered to say a prayer for Thanksgiving, but promptly forgot that he had made this offer. In this photo, everyone, including William, is waiting for the prayer (or, in our case, the eating, which doesn't happen until the prayer is said) to start. |
We made friends with Nancy's cousin's daughter, who is as mischievous and daring as a toddler could possibly be. Here she has been caught setting up a ladder of sorts to access the leftover bread.
And of course, we found some great old family photos, including several of Nancy's mum, in her 20s. Surprise, Angela!
Steff befriended the neighbour's kittens. Everyday, William offered them to us (although they were not his), forgetting that we were leaving the country in the beginning of December.
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| Yin and Yang |
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| Mother Cat, or Sinatra (ol' blue eyes). |
Just as we were beginning to panic at being unable to sell the van, with six days left before our departure, an eccentric and tremendously verbose Greek family bought it. Granted, they paid us next to nothing for our beloved VW. On the other hand, however, living in Willie Westfalia meant that we never had to pay for a hotel room, or an interstate bus or train ticket, and we only ate in restaurants when we chose to do so. And despite everyone's doubts (including, to an extent, our own), she never really broke down. That is, at least, until it was convenient for everyone--relatively speaking. If she had broken down anywhere else on the trip, we'd have been in considerable trouble. Extra special thanks to Willie, for making this entire trip possible.
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| Nancy prepares for our final trip in Willie--to the Department of Motor Vehicles, to change the title and hand over the keys. I took this photo with the intention of making a sad face, but seeing it on a screen later on, we realised that I looked far sadder than I had intended. |
The farewell was bittersweet, but also an incredible relief, especially as she stalled on the way to the DMV (our fault) and took five or six tries to restart.
After Willie was sold, we felt free. We had tied up all of our loose ends, and all that was left to do was to pack, and donate all of what we couldn't pack or send home in the mail to Goodwill. We did this, bid our goodbyes to Nancy's grandmother, two aunts, two uncles, five cousins, their five children, along with their respective partners, jumped on a plane, and flew to Palmdale, California.
As we type this from Palmdale, we are repacking our bags, because tonight...we fly! From 10:15pm tonight, we will spend fourteen hours on a plane to Syndey, then three hours to Auckland. Home.
We are in a daze now, as the spheres of the many lives we have put together since our university graduation last year begin to fuse, and it reminds us forcibly of a movie we used to watch when we were little. In Peter Pan, Wendy agonises about her last night in the nursery. That is, until she takes a sabbatical in Neverland, learns a great deal about herself, and returns, ready to take that developmental leap out of the nursery. We are post-Neverland Wendys. We're ready to come home and plunge back into a life of responsibilities, and we feel better equipped to do it than we did last year. Don't exepect us to grow up, though!
You'll be hearing from us once we've soared through the skies to the other side of the planet, and caught up on sleep. We will update you with some parting thoughts.
Lots of love, and thanks for following our travels for all these months.
-Nancy and Steff
The Quest Quotient by Nancy Howie and Steff Werman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at thequestquotient2011.blogspot.com.
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