"Ah-ha!" moments continue to pop up. I had one yesterday as I rode eleven kilometres on an old sit-up-and-beg bike with only one functioning gear to a shop on the outskirts of Palma to get the rest of its gears working. It was downhill most of the way (I took the bus home 🤣), hence the arrival of random thoughts.

Montreal and Costa Rica together took up eight months of my untethered year. A full 50%. At the beginning, it was difficult to know how everything was going to unfold, even to know what I was doing, and it's only now, in hindsight, looking back from the home stretch, that I wonder why I was trying to reclaim the happiness and fun in locations from my past. I was so determined to find my place. Perhaps I hoped that if I insisted and forced and tried different tools, I could make this square peg fit into that round hole.

Montreal is a truly fabulous city, but I'm not ready to return to Canada. And no matter how happy I was in Costa Rica, it holds memories from the start of a marriage when we were young, foolhardy, able to overcome any and all obstacles in a new culture with a new language. We created our family there.

I could never match or recreate the equivalent of my time there, and to just settle because it "was fine" isn't enough.

Don't get me wrong. My past is worth celebrating. It was filled with love and adventure, the excitement of new babies, new countries, work, play and friends. But I am a different person now, without a partner, my girls far-flung, and in the enviable position of being able to choose what comes next.

So Switzerland rocked my boat rather than Spain, Portugal or France. It's a country that holds no past memories for me. And while I realise that of course I could be content creating a new life in a former home, my adventurous spirit clambers for change. Actually, it's more than that. It's that I have changed and in returning to old haunts I slip back into old habit patterns. Over the five weeks in Switzerland, traveling around Geneva, Nyon, Lausanne and beyond, I had stimulating conversations, improved my French, wrote, read, went to a writing conference, explored the history and, most importantly, saw growth and opportunity there for me. I felt utterly content all the time, in spite of near-constant rain, which says a lot.

London, even with its personal history, also works for me. London is where I came into my own. So even though it holds difficult memories of a frequently-absent husband and the end of a marriage, it is also a place that has great community, and now, with my acceptance to study at university, a purpose.

Another recent ah-ha! moment, whilst I was still in Switzerland: certain aspects of my past perplex me, the divorce in particular as it never occurred to me that we wouldn't do what was necessary to knit our marriage back together (is there a parallel here with my recent searches for a base? I don't think so as I believe it is possible to reconnect with people, although both parties have to want it; I see it with friendships). Anyway, I digress. I find it unhelpful to be surrounded by memories of my past. Which is why my creative writing, not this blog or my journal, from this past year has been filed. I am looking forward now, with new ideas.

I may have contradicted myself in this writing but that's just a sign of the freshness of these thoughts, the skin of the split cocoon still soft and glistening in the gentle Mediterranean light.

I still have three weeks left, though, before I reach the end of up my untethered travels. Three weeks more in Europe before I head to Toronto to meet my mother and continue on to Australia for Christmas. So I will not leap ahead of myself but remain here, alive and present, in my beautiful guest home in the hills outside the village of Puigpunyent in Mallorca, Spain.

In the morning, after the sun has finally shown its face, I fling open the door and windows to let in the light, the warmth, the birdsong. I can hear the occasional donkey braying, a rooster, the church bells in the distance. I make myself a cup of tea and watch the wind move through the olive trees below me in the valley.

Yes, this is pretty awesome.