Posted By Talon Windwalker in Musings | 8 comments

We tend to be rather adventurous, always looking for something new to experience, or a new area to explore. Generally, when we first arrive in a new place, we drop our stuff off wherever we’re staying, and we hit the road to explore. We are coming up on our 2nd month in Romania, and most of that time has been spent in one city. In reviewing our last year, that’s the longest we’ve spent in one place since the oasis in Morocco a year ago. That is a lot of moving around. Now that we’ve kind of hit the brakes, we’re learning to embrace more of the mundane parts of life.

Although, even some of the mundane things can be an adventure. Now that we have a kitchen with an actual oven, I’ve hit my baking mood quite fiercely. Our first grocery store adventure was trying to find cream for Tigger’s favorite meal. Sounds easy, right? HA! It took me about 20 minutes of staring, asking, checking out translations on my phone, shaking containers, etc., before I finally found what I needed.

Only to discover it wasn’t the right type of cream once we got home.

Next came the adventure of finding yeast. I looked it up. An easy word. No problem. I asked a worker in the store where was the yeast (in Romanian). “What kind?” CRAP! He listed off several words, and I picked the one that seemed closest in my memory of translations.

Thankfully, the aisle also had some packages labeled in English so I could confirm it. PHEW.

Who knew grocery shopping could be such an adventure!

Now that we have a rather comfortable abode, we tend to enjoy our time at home. We go out for a walk most days. Since we have to carry all our groceries a good distance, we tend to make 2-3 trips a week to different markets depending on our needs. Only one lives up to our expectations for phenomenal produce, and that is a bit more of a walk.

Occasionally, we take side streets we haven’t walked down before just to see what we find.

But for the most part, we’re kind of settled. A big change from the last year of hopping around almost weekly in some cases. We had month-long housesits here and there, but we also spent a lot of time moving at a fairly quick pace (to us).

It was almost an adjustment to be okay with just staying put at home and not feeling a need to go out and do and see daily.

During long-term travel, there is really a lot to be said for just slowing completely down. Even coming to a complete halt for a while. Even if you aren’t traveling! So much of life, be it like ours or a more traditional one, is go, go, go, that there is extreme value in stopping and hitting refresh.

Although, we are both starting to feel the itch again.

We have our current apartment until we head for Vienna for the holidays, but we are tempted to do some short trips. I wrestle with that only because I think it would be nice to have more time of not moving before we begin hopping around for a while again after the new year. Even though there is so much to see and experience!

We might do some 1- to 2-day trips nearby, but as appealing as a weeklong trip is right now, the mundane keeps whispering in my ear: It’s okay to not move around for a while.

I think it may just be right.

What parts of “mundane life” do you thoroughly enjoy?