Even Travel Writers Stay Home Sometimes

For the month of June, I stayed home. Now before you are picturing me morphed into a hermit, I better clarify. I did not go anywhere fun. Okay – that’s not exactly true either. I went to church, to various stores, to my daughter’s gymnastics and to baseball games. Lots and lots of baseball games since all three of our boys are playing. I also did a lot of chauffeuring my kids around. And did manage to see my own friends once or twice. Beyond that, I did stay home.

You see, we are getting ready to put our house on the market . After living here, for nine years, we have accumulated a rather large amount of stuff. When we moved in, I had three kids ages 5 and under. Now we have four kids, ages 8-14. We began homeschooling here. I started my blog here. And we started our family blasting business here. Lots of life has happened here. So much so that piles have continued to accumulate. Both for the sake of selling and the sake of living, I knew that this needed to change.

So I have been tackling the mess that was “neatly” hidden in storage areas and on shelves. Living in a larger house definitely means that you have more available space to fill. In order to get this done, I have had to stay home and say no. Especially no to travel. This is a rather unusual decision for a travel writer.

But it was not until my friend, Heather, said a casual comment about how many places we seem to go, that I realized that it does not seem that I chose to stay home. If you follow this blog, the story seems to be different. Scotia, Valentine and Chadron all seem to have been recent trips when in fact the first two were from last summer. Our Chadron trip was actually four years ago. I just had not written about the Sandoz experience yet. On my Facebook feed, I linked posts from many of our former adventures. But if you did not know this, you might assume that we are enjoying gallivanting around all of the time. When really we are choosing to stay home.

I do have several outings planned for the next couple of weeks. While my house still needs some work, we have made enough progress where I feel like I do not have to stay home all of the time. But I am glad that I made that choice for June, even if it was not exactly fun.

So if you see frequent posts from your favorite travel writer, know that perhaps they have also stored up content. Now some of my travel friends who no longer have kids at home can travel a bit more easily. But they still have a life at home. This is true across the spectrum for all bloggers and writers. They are not going all of the time. This can seem confusing. Like they can do it all. When really they are not. I can speak from experience. Even travel writers stay home sometimes.

P.S. Because of all of the cleaning/sorting that I have been doing, organizing giveaways was too much. So I postponed starting my blogiversary giveaways until next week. Please stay tuned for the opportunity to win some great Nebraska prizes! And one last thing, the feature image is of my basement. But not at its messiest sorting point when I had many of my books off the shelves. If you saw that, we might not still be friends. 🙂

P.P.S. You may also enjoy reading why I became a travel writer in the first place.