Six months are gone

It's done. For six months, I ate, slept, explored outside of Canada. The assessment of this sixth mont is really personnal because I knew it was the last stretch.

The sixth month, it's starting to come back in our head. It's preparing to avoid going crazy at the airport. It's stopping the screensaver, too, because we know there is no more tickets to buy and there are only a few cities to visit.

The sixth month, it's having a deadline. Feeling flexibilty slipping through our fingers because that 15th of August, we must be on a plane leaving Habana. No choice! 

At least, after all that time on the road, it is getting accustomed to any unforseen event. We can't call them all "unforseen"... because we stop planning. We live. That's all.

In those last weeks, I went back in holiday mode, knowing the mess in my luggage didn't matter anymore. Knowing that after August 15th, there was no other destination on my list. Nothing to get excited or to look forward to like in the past five months.

After all that time, I reached a state where I can accept goodbyes, leaving sad people without being over-depressed myself. Towards the end, the nostalgia came back, forced a last look behind before boarding that last plane.

I had to realize the wheel keeps on turning. When time comes to make an assessment, we meet people who just jumped in space, leaving for six months themselves, while they are excited about those first days on the road. We can see in them our naivety, six months earlier, in a hostel in San Diego. We feel like we need to pass the torch.

It also took six months to meet someone who would judge me. Someone who would insist to say six months are too short for what I wanted to accomplish. To say I've seen nothing, lived nothing, and that I can't pretend I've seen the world if I only spent a couple of weeks in each country. Like if there was a minimum time to live, feel other cultures. That "man" didn't make a lot of friends around the table we were eating at. Still, irony of fate happened three days before the end... And for those who are wondering : he was from Paris.

Here are the cities I visited in the last month :

Portugal Lagos, Lisbon
Brazil  Stopover in Recife, Rio de Janeiro, Paraty, Sao Paulo, Foz do Iguaçu
Argentina Puerto de Iguazu, Buenos Aires
Cuba Habana