It's been about a week, and so far there haven't been any overarching themes or ground-shaking revelations. Just some percolations. But in an effort to give a real representation of the trip as we go, here's a few of the bigger ones:

It's really nice to live near family.

I've only ever lived near family when I was living with my parents as a kid, and then the occasional bits here or there when visiting from school. I've never really had the experience of just being able to go over to my aunt's house for dinner, or get breakfast with my cousin, or visit someone at work. Now, we can do that, and it's really meaningful to be able to have those moments. Those real-life moments, instead of just the annual holiday party where you talk for seven minutes and ask "so how have you been?" Being able to sit around the Thanksgiving table and share what we're grateful for... that was a moment that I was grateful for.

The whole point of this trip was to be closer to family, but it's already becoming clear that living near family would be something that would mean a lot to both of us.

It's really nice to be able to be helpful.

In the same vein, it feels so rewarding to be able to BE there for our families. It's one thing to be there over the phone, but it feels so much nicer to be able to dog sit for someone, or run an errand, or cook a dinner so they can take the night off. This makes me especially look forward to visiting our siblings with kids, so we can help as much as we can. When you're in person, there are just more ways to show love, and that part makes us happy.

It's probably going to be hard for me to carve out personal time.

I'm used to working at home alone all day long, and for most of the next year, it'll probably be a rare occurrence to be home alone. Those who don't yet know me well won't know that I'm actually a pretty extreme introvert -- I love being around people, but I also need a lot of time alone and a lot of recuperation time post-socializing. This will mostly be on me to communicate with people that a) I need some alone time (and then actually take it), and b) that if I'm ever off by myself, that doesn't mean I don't want to socialize or aren't happy, it just means I need to decompress a little. I, historically, have never been good at either of those things, and end up just being around people until I am completely depleted and can't function. I'll need to make a conscious effort not only to communicate well about this, but also to specifically carve out time for myself, even if it's just running errands on my own or going to bed a little earlier so I can read in my room.

Quantity of Time is not the same thing as Quality Time

While having more quantity of time together is really nice, it's very easy not to make actual Quality Time a priority. I could easily see Mike and I spending days solid together without actually doing much bonding, like talking or playing or going for walks or doing activities together. Same goes for the people we'll be staying with. Actual quality time requires an active choice and a prioritization of time, and we will make sure to stay aware of this so we don't just fall into the habit of quantity over quality.

Not knowing where anything is is frustrating.

Cooking in someone else's kitchen. Shopping in an unfamiliar grocery store. Things you usually can do without thinking about now take much longer and require lots of searching. This will be a good practice in patience, because for the next year, I won't know where anything is.

There's still not enough time.

The ironic lesson of them all. We're traveling for a year, and always feel like we don't have enough time. We'll be working on the itinerary, and we'll end up in a situation where we just have to rush through the in-between places instead of being able to savor and explore them. And even as we're here in Oceanside, our entire calendar is already full with weekend trips and birthday stuff and family visits and everything else, and it feels like we have very little time here that's just to hang out and live life. We tried to change the itinerary a bit to give us a little bit of extra time here, but circle back to the first problem of rushing through the in-between places, and we could only add three days. (Additional side lesson: the United States is really big and it takes a long time to drive across it.) There are so many places we'd like to go, things we'd like to do, and people we'd like to see. And meanwhile, it'd also be nice to just do nothing sometimes, too! I suspect that no matter what we do, a part of us will wish we could have done even more. Maybe this is just life, amplified.