I'm home!
We’ve all ridden bikes before, we’ve all camped before and perhaps even travelled once or twice before. So, what makes this so special?
“Honey! I’m home!” Yells Shuresh as he pulls into camp. Directed at no one in particular, yet everyone laughs at that all too familiar feeling of rolling into camp to a dozen familiar faces.
There are close to 100 of us, not any one of us knowing another before the start. Everything we had in common with our friends back home has nothing to do with our new life on tour. Everything you had defined yourself by at home is now gone. Your home, your job, your friends, your fancy cloths and your free time. You favourite foods, your bedroom, your Sunday mornings and your Saturday nights, they’re all gone. It’s just you, whatever is left that is you, your bare necessities stuffed into 2 dusty old sacks and 100 strangers.
A motly crew to start and now, a family. Like it or not, like a ship that never ports, the SS TDA trugs on leaving none behind. Like it or not, everyone is looking out for you ,and whether you’ll admit to liking it or not, you really care about all the other chickens in the coup more and more each day.
Resembling any large extended family, there are brothers and sisters, twins you could even say, there are cousins and aunts and uncles of sorts, all woven together in the TDA family tree. Everyone sits down to dinner together, tries to remain civil, yet inevitably, like any circling of kids around the table, the conversation winds up in the gutter. Sigh. As if packed into horizontal bunkbeds, the nattering and teasing carries on from tent to tent well past sunset. Pranks are pulled, stories are told and day by day these 100 strangers, although still strange, are now what we call home.
-- Adele Woodyard
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Posted March 23, 2011 by Adele Woodyard
Tanzania | Tour Updates |
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