When I was younger, I used to hate geography. I wanted to learn my way around the back-roads and woods around my house. I didn’t care about the names and shapes of places I’d never been.

Oh, I understood about continents and oceans, and countries, states, and capitals, and climates and borders and whatnot. Just one of those things I vaguely know and can’t remember how I learned. I just never paid attention to the names for things. They were far away, not part of my little world.

I was also mostly unschooled, as a kid – which doesn’t mean I didn’t learn, it just means I was free. I did a lot of listening to grown-ups, talking, but not necessarily talking at me. I mostly read books and played with fractions, and stretched out on my trampoline in the sun, and sat on the porch during thunderstorms, and walked around barefoot in the dirt.

It was a good time.

A few years later, I’ve somehow become the kind of person who can decide to take a sabbatical from getting a math degree to go backpacking solo around Western Europe with several books and absolutely no plan.

Now that I see those two people written down next to each other, I am noticing that they have some things in common.

When backpacking Europe, a little knowledge of geography is nice to have. Google maps became my friend, and possibly a crutch. I think that physically traveling – working out the logistics of where things are relative to each other, of distance and time – has a way of teaching me things in a way that’ll stick. There’s a difference between staring at small, labeled dots in the middle of seemingly random squiggly shapes, and waking the streets of a city.

It’s something about the feel of the sidewalks under your soles, the subtle details in the colors and shapes of the buildings, the weather, the light, the breeze in your face. And then there’s the spirit in the people. Each place has a distinct character, a personality, a self. A city is living thing, made up of/maintained by/shat on by a lot of other living things… a city has a center, and a rhythm, and a history and constant growth, and just a touch of pride. They are all so different, and it’s beautiful.

When I got home to Münster I stayed in a hostel because I’d woken up covered in bug bites somewhere in Poland and I didn’t want to take the risk of bringing anything to Kathrin’s place by sleeping there.

And it was a nice hostel. The walls were stenciled with the words “I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list,” and also a rough map of this side of the world. I slept in the top bunk, that time. Just like when I was a kid. I also rebelled and slept with my feet pointed the wrong way so that I had a better view of the map on the wall. I thought about how far I’d come, all the places I’d been, how big it had felt. And then I was struck by how little Germany looks, compared to Europe. Compared to the whole world. There’s so much there I’ve never seen, and some that I never will.

I fell asleep staring at the map on that wall, and when I woke up, Kathrin was somehow miraculously there and shaking me awake because I’d overslept and missed the train we’d booked and I wasn’t answering my phone and she’d gotten worried, and I put on my boots and coat, and slung The Backpack (too heavy, that backpack, why did I pack so many clothes) over my shoulder, and we ran like hell to the train station at 5AM because I needed to catch a plane because Evie wants me home for Thanksgiving.

The last time my boots touched the earth in Europe was running with Kathrin through the mist and the dark of that morning. I was running too fast to stop and say a proper goodbye. (Train stations and airports exist in a sort of alternative dimension of their own, at least in my head, and somehow they don’t count.)

And so – well, you know, darn. I guess I’ll just have to go back.

In Leipzig, I met a man from San Francisco who has been traveling for nine months out of the year for seven years. I asked him how he does it. He says he’s an electrician and a Pizza Delivery Guy, and he travels to the more affordable countries, and he is extremely frugal. I told him I’d washed my laundry in the sink, for the first time, just a few days ago. We both agreed that this is not my last adventure away from home.

He was going home for Thanksgiving, too.

Because we all have to go home, once in a while. It’s where the deepest roots are. And I – I’ve asked myself to do and acknowledge and marvel at so much, and a person gets tired, after a while. It is important to remember that it’s more than okay to take breaks. It’s vitally important. And Evie wants me to be there.

So I’m coming back.

But now I’ve got my own map of the world, in my heart, and there are soo many blank spaces.

Filling them in as I go.