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In three more months we will be leaving Singapore.  Leaving for a grand, new adventure.  Destination: unknown.  Just time to move along.

In 2010 my two children and I arrived in Singapore.  We had been living in Arizona for a year but knowing it was time for an adventure, we turned up here.  Three years later, with an ever-rising school tuition bill, it is time to move along.

The kids want to return to Arizona after Singapore, but that’s like going backwards to me.  We know life there already.  There will be no surprises, little adventure.  Oh I know there would be washing machine breaking adventure or car crash adventure, just not adventure adventure.  We would buy a house and the kids would graduate from high school and that will be tidy that.  It’s just, I don’t like tidy when tidy involves what feels like a cage.

So we need to get this straight, this has little to do with Arizona itself, as I am an Arizonan at heart.  I was raised in Arizona and I love it there.  I just do not wish to go there to grow old and die.  And that is what this feels like.  When I look at houses on the market there I think about living there alone and making sure there are not too many stairs or too large a yard for me to care for.  BUT, for crying out loud, I am young (enough).  So this is ridiculous.  I am young (enough), fit (enough), and vigorously immature so I’m looking to not settle, but to further explore.

Exploring is the name of our game, and I must say that we do it with style.  Here is how we roll.  (Royal “we” because the kiddies have not been on all of these adventures. They enter the scene when they enter the scene, but this is still our story.)

Going back a few years (cough, decades, cough) I made it to age of 21 having only been to two countries.  My homeland, the United States, and Mexico, the country five hours away from my hometown.  Then around that time, something inside me finally matured past the age of 9 and I felt brave enough to strike out to see the world.

My first exploration was a timid trip across the border to the north.  I had a week and a half or so before needing to return to college so I took a drive along the Pacific Coast Highway and eventually made my way to Vancouver.  I had no money but my sister had given me a bag of bagels and that was enough.  I slept in my little car most nights.  Ate only the bagels.  Any money I had went into the gas tank.

The experience was exhilarating.  I had finally found some legs (figuratively, of course) and I was off.  Within six months I was taking a gap year to live in Finland.  After that my mother joined me for a quick visit to Sweden and the Soviet Union.  (The USSR was about to take a big trip of its own and become Russia, but that’s another story.)

A few years later, after returning to college and finishing my undergraduate degree, I was ready for another expedition.  This time I spent a month traveling around Europe with my friend, The Abbess of Kells.  We met up in London, took the ferry to Calais, France where we rented a little Peugeot (in which we spent a lot of nights trying to sleep until elderly ladies tapped on our window to wake us in the morning to ask us to move our car from the center of their produce market), and we launched to Normandy, Paris, Dijon.  Next we drove to Switzerland to collect another friend, Migros, who after college graduation had moved to Switzerland to sell fruit at the market.  After a few days in Interlaken we continued over the Alps to Italy where we again slept in the car and a night or two in a tent at a campground near the beaches of Sestri Levante.  Money here went into the gas tank and to every single gelato shop that we spotted.  It did not go to the toll booth man on the expressway because we did not have any Italian lira.  We begged, maybe The Abbess offered to snog him – no, wait, that was elsewhere – and the toll booth man let us pass without paying, or snogging.

From Italy we continued up across the corner of Slovenia to Salzburg, where we all know how alive those hills can be with the sound of music.  Next from Salzburg to Prague where the stadium next to the hostel where we stayed would soon be alive with the sound of Pink Floyd on their last concert tour.  We, of course, stood on the street with signs until all three of us had the requisite concert tickets.

The Czech Republic was a trip in those days.  It was anxious to step out from its time behind the Iron Curtain but still finding it footing.  They had no money so outside of the city the roads were dark with no street signs.  In the smaller towns they still had their police who created random rules to bilk money from any non-locals.  We were busted and our car impounded for driving on the road. (It’s okay if you have to read that sentence twice.)

From the Czech Republic we drove to Germany, where though we drove through Dresden and Berlin, we actually didn’t stop until Hamburg, except of course to maybe sleep one night in the car on the side of the road.

And here, in Hamburg, is where I will have to leave it for tonight.  Those bold and adventurous children of mine will be home from school soon.  You remember, the school that is becoming too expensive so we have to leave Singapore.  Are you forgetting where this whole story started?