It’s crazy to believe that we’ve lived here for three seasons. I’m glad we’re saving the best for last, summer! We’ll start our tidings on a light, fun note by sharing what we miss about summers back in the US. I got pictures but you’ll have to bear through the beginning a bit!
What We Miss About Summer Back in the States
Tailgating
I’m not saying I miss a bunch of cars parked in a car park (aka parking lot…gotta use my UK lingo). We do miss the experience and energy of tailgating for a game (and even going to them), including food, drinks, and games.
On a side note, Brits definitely know how to incorporate drinks into activities, but it’s different. Everything feels very beer-centric in the US. In the UK, you might find a gin bar or people drinking bottles of wine and prosecco on the river or beach. We don’t quite sense the drinking frenzy you might feel at American events unless it’s rugby or football (aka soccer) day.
Speaking of which, we were in London during a football day. It gets intense. A postman literally yelled something to a fan of the opposing team. They had an “all in good fun” heated exchange. I think someone flipped the bird. I can’t quite remember. We expected that might happen between two people on the street, but between a postman driving by and someone walking…we’re not in Kansas, Todo. It was like college sports day but more! Okay, too many side tangents, back to summer!
Summer BBQ Culture
The act, the smell, the taste. It is funny because BBQ is a word used a lot here for cooking meat. Not like the BBQ sauce style meat that you’re thinking of, but like grilled meat is BBQ. However, the act of having a BBQ (even to cook your dinner, not a full-blown party) is not as popular from what we’ve seen or smelled. Interestingly, buns are not called hamburger buns but brioche buns. Fancy. The might be called hamburger buns elsewhere in the UK – I’m just using the grocery store for reference here.
New Memories with You!
Summer is where you tube, go to outdoor concerts, hang out, and do a lot of fun things. We miss being able to do these things with people we love back home.
The Heat
You might think we’re crazy to say that. When you have a wet, damp winter, you will want something to help shove you back the other way so you’re ready for winter again. The low 70’s (Fahrenheit) just doesn’t cut it for me, probably because it’s always windy and partly cloudy. Humidity is lower here than places we lived in the States during the summer, so it doesn’t bump up the “real feel.” I do appreciate the less humid summers though! We are in the midst of one of the hottest heat waves in UK history as I write this. So I am referring to missing heat outside of the heatwave!
Many people have been asking us how the heat is, so I’ll try to help give context or comparison. Yesterday was a high of 37 degrees Celsius (about 99 degrees Farenheit) with low humidity (maybe 18%) and low dew point. We’re used to hot, muggy summers so it didn’t feel unbearably hot to us. This piqued my curiosity so I checked the Wisconsin weather for an example comparison. With humidity in the mid 50% and higher dew point, the real feel in WI was 36 degrees Celsius yesterday.
As you probably know, the humidity or dew point (depending on what you prefer to use) makes a huge difference! I’m definitely not trying to undermine the importance of how dangerous this heatwave is to a place that is not used to high temps and doesn’t have infrastructure to help mitigate it! Luckily, since we’re used to higher “real feel” temps, we’ve tolerated it pretty well, even without AC. I wouldn’t want to endure it day in and day out or be out in the sun all day. And the bedrooms get hot at night! But we’re fairing better than most and definitely feel for the people and vulnerable populations who aren’t used to it!
Camping
Camping in this part of the UK is very different from what we’re used to. From what we’ve seen, camping is like pitching a tent on a huge field of grass. There are no campsite numbers, no fire pits, no picnic tables, no toilets, etc. It’s just like you drove to a field and decided this looks like a place to camp, let’s give it a go. We don’t have high hopes to go camping any time soon.
There are definitely things we love about summer too. For another tiding though 😉
Highs and Lows of Swashbuckling
As summer has approached and as restrictions have loosened up, we’ve also had more opportunity to explore outside our two-hour radius of the UK. We understand that not everyone feels comfortable jumping back into the world. The possibility of exploring new ways of life heavily influenced our decision to move here. So, it feels good to have that freedom. With this freedom, we experience this thirst we can’t quench. It almost feels akin binge-watching a TV show and having no control to stop watching episodes. Or eating the best brownies you’ve ever made and witnessing the freshly baked 8×8 pan mysteriously vanish in a couple of hours, sliver by sliver. Without care and thoughtfulness, balance disintegrates like a withering flower. Where are my 90s Yin and Yang drawers at?! We’re relearning this necessity of balance. It’s a hard one to master.
For us, it is easy to get addicted to traveling or trying new things. Needing that “high” to feel excited, content, or “good” makes it even harder to practice balance. We’re not arguing that it’s a bad habit to try new things and adventures often. This experience has opened up our world and our way of thinking beyond what we thought. Hopefully, our children’s too as they grow. The world needs more people to be comfortable with being in foreign (to them) situations. In our opinion, at least.
Swashbuckling runs through our blood. We realize we must balance this with finding joy and peace in downtime or mundane tasks. Metaphorically speaking, we don’t want to be the person at the gym who never does leg day! Yuck. Unattractive. We are so fortunate in this experience to kick off our Europe adventures with to Snowdonia, Venice, Lake Garda, and Germany during some weekends and school breaks. Yet, when we aren’t taking trips, we still feel the need to fill this void by going to London for the day or do some long day trip via train or car. If a calm day with no plans hits, we start to feel the hangover and restless.
The hangover feeling hit hard a few weekends ago after our Italy trip. We didn’t have any plans and felt really antsy. In reality, the weekend wasn’t void of plans or accomplishments. We saw friends. We got a lot of to-dos done that we’ve been putting off. It consisted of unglamorous things like changing brake pads on our bikes, organizing our shed, and getting haircuts. It’s probably a good thing we observed this feeling. It helped us reflect on how little time we had been putting into prioritizing relationships with other people near and far and feeling as part of a community lately. Those things also fill our happiness buckets up too. And in general, the icky hangover feeling helped us realize how we can intentionally practice grounding ourselves in moments that aren’t “highs.”
So we doctored ourselves by getting back into the routine of doing some things we practiced earlier in the year. We volunteered, litter picking in one of our favorite parks. We collected pine cones for the City who would visit some schools to make bug hotels with the students later that week. Our kids loved helping! It was nice to get a similar feel-good high from a simple task. The other day we biked to see how the tiny forest we helped plant in the spring was progressing. Lil Fox had been asking to see it. We’ve met up with friends at a few events, mostly centered around kids, but still wonderful to socialize with the adults.
I also started counting off all the mundane things I accomplish in a day or week. It helps make me feel more productive – if you haven’t tried it, you should! It’s oddly satisfying how numerating things like putting a dish in the dishwasher, brushing your teeth, going to the dentist, charging your phone, and getting the kids dressed start to add up and make you embody the spirit of a proud peacock, ha!
These things slowly help fill the little voids in our happiness bucket that all the big pebbles create (i.e., trips, day trips). It also helped us feel alive and more like whole human beings. We recognize we need to nurture the part of our life that continuously connects us to a group or sense of home. We love traveling and exploring constantly. We recognize that if it is unbalanced, we can also get a surreal feeling of being a fairy drifting on a cloud with disjointed portions of life and no sense of home (home may be spiritual, physical, or emotional).
We visit and marvel at these other ways of life, but they are not fully ours. Even when we visit places and do our best to be active participants and immerse ourselves in the culture of where we visit, it’s not quite the same as feeling a sense of belonging, at least for us. Maybe it would feel different if we stayed at these places for more than just a few days or a week. Or even if we had another family to share the experiences with.
Without that grounding, it makes us feel like faux anthropologist wallflowers, always observing, mesmerized, and infatuated. In this chapter of our life, our hobby is collecting precious, worldly gems of disjointed, discrete periods of time. It can feel like we’re creating a scrapbook that results in great stories, but doesn’t necessarily flow from one point to the next in our everyday life. We don’t have experiences or milestones that we can share and witness in real time with other special people in our lives. Planning out the upcoming trip ends up consuming free time. Less time is available to create and find joy in the present moments.
Some frequent travelers might disagree with this feeling. As I write this, I’m not sure I have the right words to describe it. It’s closest to the feeling that most get when they get ready for, go on, and return from a great vacation. The excitement of leaving, the sadness coming back, putting the rest of your life on hold. Except it’s happening more frequently. We’re definitely not complaining about this experience but want to share the gooey “behind the scenes” moments of this unique chapter of our life too! We are lucky to have this opportunity. We also don’t want to give an impression that life is perfect and we have it all figured out as glamourous jet setters haha.
Like I said earlier, we love all the travel and wouldn’t change any of it, but it’s how we can feel if we’re not in balance. We have the same worries as everyone else, are we raising our kids to be kind, compassionate human beings? Will they still learn how to be a dependable friend when they aren’t around a lot? Will they resent us when they’re older for not having weekends filled of soccer and playdates (although I think they’re a bit too young for getting upset about that)? When we are around we try to do activities that address those worries. There is always a light and dark side to all journeys! It feels important to us that we can take these experiences and use them to inform how we live our own life, not to escape our life entirely.
We also try to practice grace by recognizing that we have a finite period of this chapter in our life. When you find a timeline put on a period of your life, you approach things differently than living in oblivion. It impacts many decisions every day. Because of that, we tell ourselves it’s okay to be excited and not waste a second. With that thought, we also don’t want to regret letting these other constants in our lives fall to shambles.
While these “highs” can have a dark side to their addictiveness, they, and this experience, have generally resulted in more positive growth and changes for our family than negative. We shifted how we want to live and challenged our views on what makes a life a life. It has forced us to listen to how we talk to ourselves internally. We’ve reflected on how we should start to lead with why we should do something instead of why we shouldn’t. Better yet, ask why we are even pursuing or doing something in the first place. We start to recognize all these storytelling pieces we have with ourselves or each other before actually having the real conversation.
Woo – that was a lot to try to explain! Have any of you been in a similar situation or even reverse situation (i.e., too many little pebbles and not enough big ones filling your bucket up), storytelling, etc.? It doesn’t even have to be related to travel. What helped you?
Much love to you all and hope you are enjoying summer wherever you are!
