It’s been a month and a half since Lea and I began settling back into life as estadounidenses. It hasn’t been without bumps or mental comparisons between life here and life in South America. In fact, the settling-in hasn’t settled all the way. It’s a slow process with flurries of activity and stretches of “What now?”
In my last two articles I covered two of the most challenging aspects of returning from a period of long term travel: finding a place to live and getting that all-important health insurance. Today I’m going to talk about all the other little things that we learned and/or made up along the way as we reintegrated into American society.
Since we’re no longer documenting our lives photographically, I don’t have pictures to share about our daily life in Atlanta – so instead I’ll entertain you with photos of South American birds. After all – they too travel far and build nests.
Where To Stay and For How Long?
By this I mean establishing short-term housing and not your eventual residence. Even if you can pick up the keys to a new apartment the day after you return (as we did) it’s still not going to be livable. If you’re not able to land an apartment from afar and are still engaged in your search, then figuring out where you’re going to reside in the meantime is priority one.
For us, we bridged the gap by booking a hotel for four nights in downtown Atlanta. We were able to do this cheaply because we’d built up a ton of Holiday Inn reward points and only wimped out twice to use them on our actual trip. A hotel isn’t a long-term solution, unless you get a room in an extended-stay. Even so, the costs build up and you may have to do that which we so often find difficult: ask for help. We have friends who extended an offer for us to couch-surf at their place while we got ourselves settled, and we have others whom we might have begged so as not to impose too long on any one relationship.
As I did in Part 1 of this series, let me reiterate that it is of vital importance to understand the turn-around time of the housing market where you plan to live, so you can know in advance how long you should expect to need other arrangements before moving into your permanent abode.
Movers
If, as I suggest you try your hardest, you’re able to line up an apartment while you’re still overseas, you’re going to need to move your belongings out of storage. While you’re still overseas, and if you don’t mind an international phone call or three, I encourage you to peruse the discounts many moving companies offer on Groupon.com. When researching movers, make sure to verify that both 1) where you have things stored, and 2) where you’re moving to, are in the moving companies’ operating territory. Prices go up steeply the farther you ask a company to drive.
If you’re relocating a longer distance than a moving company can handle for a reasonable price (such as from one city to another) you may want to use another tactic of ours: rent and drive your own moving truck, but hire the professionals to pack your belongings on one end and another group of movers to unpack on the other. Believe me, you’ll be glad for the investment.
Transport
Here’s another tricky issue. When you first move back to the States you’re going to have a lot of running around and buying stuff to do. If one of the first things you try to buy is a car you’re going to be in a world of hurt. Buying a car takes an awful lot of time and energy that, honestly, would be better put to use getting through other aspects of your move. We sold both of our ancient Honda Civics before we left the country, so we had no immediate transportation at hand except for Atlanta’s public transportation.
Enter our friend Melissa! I can’t say “thank you” enough – Melissa stayed for four days and drove us around as we made trips to our new apartment, our storage unit, and the Heart of American Darkness (Wal-Mart) for supplies. After she went home we still had a lot of moving to do, including a trip to Louisiana to pick up our cat, so we rented a car for ten days. This ended up being a hefty but necessary expense. It was made even more expensive by the fact that since we no longer owned cars, we didn’t have our own car insurance. Unless we wanted to take our chances and assume nothing bad would happen, we had to go with a company that would let us buy liability coverage along with the normal damage waiver on the car. This narrowed the field to Enterprise and Sixt. Sixt would have been the cheaper of the two, but their policies would only allow us to drive to neighboring states. Louisiana was outside the allowed territory, so our money went to Enterprise.
If you’re wondering if we’ve broken down and bought our own car by now, the answer is still No. We’re hoping not to – Atlanta’s MARTA system can take you nearly anywhere so long as you learn how to navigate the bus lines in addition to the subway. This is a lesson South America taught us well, and if we can keep it up it will save us a ton of money in the long run, as well as reducing our carbon footprint. (Because yes, we care about that. But mainly about saving money.)
Owning Real Furniture vs. Camping Out
Of course you want furniture. Our problem was that to fit our belongings in a smaller storage space, we got rid of a lot before leaving on our trip. This included the couch that our cat destroyed, the mattress that was ready to be replaced anyway, and both of our computer desks. (One was $15 from a yard sale and the other was rescued from a dumpster, so no big loss.) Once we moved into our new digs, though, we had to pull out our camping gear in order to sit or sleep. We made do on a cot, air mattress, and a camping chair until we could rectify the situation.
While we still had our rental car, we went to various furniture stores looking for items in our price range. We were disappointed to learn that what had once been a good discount store had in our absence doubled their prices. In the end we made a trip to Ikea for a couch, desk, and pantry cabinet (because whoever designed our kitchen didn’t think that food storage was important). While we kept our purchases frugal, the item we skimped on the least was our mattress – after ten months of concrete hostel beds we were pretty damn ready for comfort.
Grocery Staples & Cleaning Products
On the topic of having a kitchen (at last!) we now needed to stock it. Perishables like meat and veggies we’ll buy as we need, but while we still had a car we stockpiled non-perishable staples that we weren’t able to put into storage – flour, sugar, spices, noodles, rice, chili oil, soy sauce – all the things you keep in a pantry and use a little bit each time you cook. Likewise, we couldn’t store cleaning products –detergent, bleach, cleaners, hand soap. In addition, there were items that we knew we’d use in abundance – paper towels, cat litter, T.P., and the like.
Since we suspected it might be a long time before we had access to a car again, we bought enough pantry staples and cleaning supplies to last two months or more. This cost well over $1000 in Wal-Mart and grocery trips. In one instance we filled up a shopping cart, paid for it, took it out to our car, then went right back inside to fill cart #2.
Jobs
Unfortunately we have to pay for all this. I mentioned in an earlier post that while saving for long term travel you should also save for your return. We’re using those savings now, as slowly as we can help it, but the specter of gainful employment looms nigh.
The good thing is that like apartment hunting, your job search is something you can start while still overseas. Update your profile on LinkedIn, for example, while making your long-term break from employment into a positive. Lea did a wonderful job at this by setting specific goals for herself and keeping track of how well she met them. Read about that here and follow in her footsteps.
You can also apply for jobs and do interviews while abroad, as long as you have a decent internet connection or phone signal. Reach out to people in your professional network and let them know your return plans, so they can keep you apprised of employment opportunities. Again, this has worked well for Lea who had a few companies actively waiting for her return.
As for me? I’m taking the scary road of pursuing a total career change. I was a librarian for twenty years, always with stable government employment. Now I’m a self-employed writer, having to discipline myself to work every day as if I had a boss looming over my shoulder. So far that’s working out, though whether I can actually make a living remains to be seen.
Get By With a Little Help From Your Friends
Reconnect! This is the fun part and one of the most important. It may also take initiative, but the psychological dividends are enormous. When you travel long-term, you lose that sense of belonging to a community. Sure, you can “like” posts on Facebook, write articles for your travel blog, and send emails to friends and family, but as long as you’re gone that distance between you and those you care about grows and grows and grows.
When you return, be proactive. Call people. Tell them you’re back. Arrange to have lunch. Invite people over once your place is presentable – or even if it’s not; you can sometimes conscript them into helping your move. (I’ve been suckered in this way myself more than once.) But most of all, don’t get so wrapped up in the logistics of reassembling your home and career that you forget to reach out to your network of friends.
Here in Atlanta, Lea and I belong to Sunday Assembly, a secular community. Its big monthly meetup was the day after we returned. It would have been easy and understandable if we said “It’s too early, we’ve got too much stuff to do, we’ll wait and see folks next month.”
But we didn’t. We dropped everything we “needed” to do, which at that point was a pile the size of Denali, to spend time with a bunch of friends all at once whom we hadn’t seen in forever. Could we have been moving items out of storage or buying necessities at the grocery store? Sure. But it was better to nourish our hearts instead. As we’ve persevered through all the other tasks of jumpstarting our new/old lives, we’ve kept spending time with our friends as an essential part of that process.
Besides, while we’ve been away on our own adventures, so has everyone else. It’s as meaningful to hear their stories as it is to tell our own. And without the warmth of a community of friends, you can never truly feel “home.”
P.S.
This will be the last weekly installment of The Escape Hatch, at least until Lea and I flee the country again. But fear not! I’ve still got much to say on the subject of travel, and there are many other places we’ve been in the world. Expect a new article every two or three weeks, or sooner if inspiration should pounce. The Escape Hatch will always be open.
See you on the road!