Empty Nesters on a Green Global Trek

This week there are two welcome temporary additions to our home, Casa Hubberts Peak.

First we have Fee, a young German woman travelling for five months solo in Central America, a veteran couchsurfer who has hosted 100 couchsurfers in Frankfurt. I am listed on “couchsurfers” as I figured that we have so many people staying at us anyway, that we may as well offer up a “couch” for a night or two. Strangers are just people you don’t yet know…. Backpacking in Nicaragua and on her way to Panama and Colombia, Fee (German for “fairy”) was funny, delightful and a good sport as we discovered that our pump for the blow up bed had become defunct and she manually blew air into that mattress for about an hour. Why is she sleeping on a blow up mattress in the sala?

Because of our other house guest, who is occupying the spare bedroom. Vikki is a young Brit, who has spent a few months living in Costa Rica volunteering on a farm and is now enjoying life in Nicaragua for a while. We were fellow dominatrix (see Oct 31 entry) at the Halloween party and when she expressed her desire to stay in Granada longer but with no lodging, I offered her our spare room for a while. Added bonus, she gets to take care of the animals while we travel to Dominican Republic and Haiti for ten days. To quote Vikki “I am the luckiest backpacker in the whole world.”

There is a palpable global trend of mid twenties travellers who are discovering the world by staying for a few weeks-months at a time in a handful of countries. This differs from previous patterns of either going to one country for long periods, or doing around the world travels. It is interesting to step back and look at the global trend (so far we have met Germans, Brits, Americans, Canadians, Spaniards, French… taking time to stop and live in Nicaragua for a while and then move on,) and observe that two of our own sons are doing the same thing. Ezra, travelling around America and Canada working on farms; Oren, arriving soon to Nicaragua for 6 months to get some on the job training with CO2 Bambu.

The experience of sequential residency is different from travelling and spending three days in a place, moving on, three days, moving on. It is a different skill set wherein one has to learn to be comfortable in a new environment and become part of the fabric for a period of time. It is about fine tuning skills to cope with a lot of change. Change is the only constant in our world. So those who improve their ability to incorporate and, in fact, invite change into their lives develop a core skill of great value in today’s world.