Magic #25

We've just unpacked our bags. Well...  sort of unpacked which is to say the contents of our four well traveled suitcases have been vomited onto the marble floor of our living room in Qingdao. Dirty laundry is slowly being attended too, books are being shelved, souvenir pamphlets set aside, but not yet filed, because with these most recent memories we are not so willing to quickly part. Not just yet anyway. 

This journey represented the 25th trip of its kind. The 25th time we have packed up three kids and flown to a new adventure. It is the 25th trip on which we have embarked since we moved to Asia nearly three years ago. This trip, like no other (perhaps because we're nearly our anniversary date of moving to China) has made me feel nostalgic. We are not sure at the moment what our exit strategy from Asia is, or when it will be, and as a result this trip, and many moments we've experienced as a family, seem to hold a special poignancy. On this trip we’ve lingered longer over our coffee or wine, we’ve watched the sun set, we’ve gazed up at the stars, and we’ve counted our blessings.

"Oh, Bea!" Eliza bubbled, as they sat, the three of them on the seawall with their daddy several nights into our stay, "You are so easy to love!" All three collapsed in giggles. 

I logged that moment, those words, the sunset, into my memory. I have forever etched in my mind that ethereal quality of the almost dusk, where the three girls we are privaledged to call our daughters stretched, legs intertwined in a sisterly fashion, on a sea wall on the island of Penang. It is a memory Sean and I will share someday in the future, when we reach back into the past, and remember the joys traveling in Asia, with three kids in tow, brought to our lives.

If you had told me three years and seven months ago (in Summer 2005, when Sean was first approached and asked to entertain the possibility of taking a position in CAT's Asia Pacific division) to list the top ten places in the world I would like to visit, China would not have made the list. The whole of Asia might have been trumped by continental Europe, the Mediterranean or the Galapagos islands. Three years and seven months ago it was with fear and a sense of worry about all we would be depriving our children of that we gave a tentative, “Yes.” It is proving to be one of the best "yeses" of our lives!

Twenty-five trips... each one of them a gift.