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Our collection of train, tram, airline, and various other tickets.
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You come home from something like this so changed, and walk into your old house and your old office and sit in your old car and catch up on the lives of all your old friends. And in time you change again, readapting, always affected by surroundings, language, relationships. You can come back and take a vacation from what you just did for a month. And you can also go about your business in a strange, transitional state of mind, not really in either place.

But you do what you have to and before you know it, a feeling turns into a memory of a feeling, and then eventually just memories of the places and people, which give you a competely different gut feeling than the one you were having when you did those things.

Every few days or so I still paw through all the train tickets we saved

Adventures are great both as a daily way of life and as a memory long after the fact. Putting all of your affairs back together when you finally come home, while a fairly mundane chore, is just part of the traveling way of life. We sorted a monstrous stack of mail, culling the three-quarters or more of its mass which we never wanted or asked for. Cars piled with dust, dirt and leaves needed TLC. Checkbook registers needed checking and updating. But surprisingly quickly things were right back in their proper places. And we could both devote our full attention to the colds we were coming down with.

Enthusiasm to tell the stories has carried out the endgame of this vacation for seven weeks now, and we are both adjusted more or less to being the people who once took this awesome trip for a month instead of the people basking in the afterglow of a lengthy vacation. But every few days or so I still open up one of our five overstuffed manila folders and paw through all the train tickets we saved. We printed and framed our photos in the living room too, to see the smiles of ourselves and our friends every day. And we're still trying to watch the Dutch evening news via download when we can. Just to enjoy hearing the language for a few minutes. To keep our listening comprehension strong for the next trip.