It’s hard to believe we’ve been home for almost 3 months now. It still feels like just a few days ago we were halfway across the world. Hopefully now that things have settled down some we will be able to slowly fill you all in on our trip from Berlin onward. But before we get started on that, a little bit about being home.

The first couple days after arriving back in Atlanta were a whirlwind of seeing friends and family who we hadn’t seen in a long time. We had a little party to get people together and catch up which was really nice. We wanted to serve some of our favorite foods from the trip so we ran all over the city and managed to find an awesome Turkish-Balkan grocery store not too far away! It was really cool to see all the now familiar foods from the trip and we were able to get some fresh breads and homemade Burek! (we were pretty excited). We had a great time getting to see everyone who was able to come to our party, and not nearly enough time to catch up with everyone there.

After the first couple weeks of just getting our lives back together again things went pretty much back to normal for me (Haegan) back working and riding my bike just like I had been before. Autumn got to catch up with some of the kids she used to babysit, but pretty soon she was getting ready for the next adventure, heading off to school. In between all that we got to hang out and ride bikes some and Autumn did her first bike race! (which I failed to get a picture of…) And just like that 3 weeks flew by and she was off to school.

Autumn is up at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minniesnowduh. It’s a long way away, but luckily just two and a half weeks after she left I was able to find a $30 round trip flight and surprised her by visiting for the weekend. She was pretty shocked (and still half asleep with no contacts in) when I showed up thanks to some help keeping it a secret from her roommate. Those first few weeks were really hard for both of us, it’s a strange transition to go from not spending more than 3 hours away from someone for 5 months to not seeing them at all. I was left trying to figure out what to do day to day to keep busy and Autumn was overwhelmed with so many new things. When we originally got home and thought back, we could only think of a handful of times where we were apart for more than a few minutes (which makes me wonder how we didn’t kill each other, but we didn’t) so it has been a process adjusting to the whole long distance thing.

I was prompted to write this having just come back from spending a week visiting for fall break . The 16 hour 1100 mile drive back left me thinking about the trip and how much I miss the slow paced travel on the bikes. We are already looking forward to some future trips once we recuperate some savings from the last trip. It was great to get up to visit for more than just two days and actually get a chance to see some of the surrounding area. We got to go visit Autumn’s home town (and old house) in Northfield and see some of the Twin Cities. I was a bit late to see fall in full effect, but the trees had just turned and it was still quite pretty.

Hopefully one of these days we will catch up on some back-dated posts about all the other amazing things we saw and did (I have a journal detailing every day to help remind us) Thanks so much to everyone who followed along from home and everyone we met along the way, it wouldn’t have been the same without you all!

That’s all for now, we are both alive and well and back to our normal lives as we continue to plan for more extraordinary adventures as soon as possible!