This is the third of five posts about travel that celebrate the launch of my online class, Manifest Money for Spiritual Travel.
Traveling back home after a long absence can be as disorienting as leaving felt in the first place. Everything seems different, but you are stuck wishing it felt familiar.
When Diene and I traveled back to Senegal last, it was the first time he had been back home since he moved to Wisconsin. In most ways, he seemed as at home as he did when I first met him. But a few things had changed: he was more hurried then before, our pace of life having picked up dramatically in the US, and it was taking both of us a few days to shake that off. Impatience, a relatively American quality, was something we both had to work on overcoming now.
His family was doing some home improvement projects which required us to make several trips to neighboring cities for supplies. We rented a neighbor’s car to go to Mbour to get wire casing, but they didn’t have the wires we needed. So we continued on to Saly, where we got the wires, but came up short on the mortar. A trip to Joseman proved fruitless and by this time, it was too late and we’d have to continue tomorrow. The next day, we made four different stops before we found all the paint we needed.
Exhausted, we rode back home in mostly silence. Silence being preferable to the complaining us Americans are so good at. But I couldn’t take it; I had to let out a little whine.
“My God, what a day!” I said. “I’m do damn tired. And sweaty! Back home, at least the car ride back would probably be air conditioned.”
“Are you kidding?,” he asked, straight-faced. “At home, there would be no car ride. We’d get Home Depot to deliver it all to us.”
This was a character that hadn’t appeared in my book. Indeed, I am grateful for the absolute ease that Home Depot gives us as consumers.
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You can make money by writing and taking pictures as you travel. Really! I have done it and in my online class, Money for Travel, Lesson 3 details exactly how you can do it too. Whether you want to make money for a trip you are planning, or make a little extra cash to pay off a trip you’ve already taken, you can certainly do it. Enroll today.