Our last meal as a family together has come and gone. It was AWESOME (look forward to an album of foodie photos from this trip), and I have a sudden urge to perfect the chili lime sauce pictured here.

After I master the sauce, I’m trying to get a handle on the other things this experience has moved me to try or to change. My sister and brother-in-law do a really solid job of both parenting and partnering, and the family part of this trip has perhaps rekindled my hope in that part of life. Also, it’s encouraged me to find better ways to stay close(r) to my bio-fam (both close and extended). They’re all great people, and they bring a really important diversity of experience and opinion into my life.

It was important to me to feel the difference between our culture’s deference to The Rules and this culture’s relationship with something else – possibly respect, possibly tradition, possibly the constant threat of punitive action for falling afoul of the kelptocracy. As I’ve written before, I can only vaguely sense this and I’ll never understand it, but it has made an impression on me. It showed me that our way of living is only one way (a statement that is painfully obvious but means more to me now that I’ve actually experienced it).

Stunning admission: I haven’t left North America since I was 23. I don’t want to leave it so long the next time. Given what I learned on this trip, I can only imagine what I’d get out of, say, a visit to the family homeland in the former Yugoslavia.

Finally, this trip moved me to try writing in a new way. It’s kind of a combination diary and mass-postcard; I only intended to journal my thoughts each day on the trip and I was surprised these posts got around. It’s meant a lot to me to hear from old friends and be encouraged in doing this writing (Facebook sometimes seems like more of a minefield than an ad platform) – so thank you for posting comments 🙂 If I travel more, I’ll write more!