Over the course of the first four years of my daughter’s life she traveled with us to seventeen countries, many of them more than once. We had done sort of the opposite of what most of our friends seemed to do upon finding out about the coming of the first child; we sold our home and pulled up all our roots. Much of the travel of course involved planes and spanned four continents, but we also drove from Key West Florida to Alaska, then from Cape Horn to Lima, Peru.
So until she turned five it was difficult for Aya to understand that not everyone was nomadic, and she became alarmingly comfortable with the Earth as her home. She’d walk right up to a lion, or a bear, climb cliffs without ropes, and simply run off through airports in places like Singapore without the slightest concern for whether or not we were following her.
Follow her we did though, and then one day while harvesting grapes at our friend’s vineyard in Trevelin, Argentina she said “I want to live here. I want us to have a house. And I want to go to school.” Kid knows what she wants. And she knows she has the steering wheel almost always to herself. So here we are. We live in the same town where we sold the house upon receiving news of her existence. And as far as we can tell this is where we will stay. Travel will always occur. But the truth is it is nice to have a place now we can target when we want to go home.