Monday Mysteries: What comes next?

Today we have a very personal Monday Mystery: what’s going to be next for Chris and me as we transition to the next chapter and leave Germany?Although it’s hard to believe, today is our last full day in Tübingen. We’ve lived here since September 1st, 2011. I really can’t fathom how quickly the time has gone by. Although we’ve been mostly focused the past few weeks on sorting, organizing packing, and managing all the paperwork necessary to “unregister” our presence in Tübingen.  I’ve also been thinking about how to reflect back on our experiences here for this post. I think that in many ways for me a word that works very well to sum things up is “opportunity”. Over the last 3.5 year I’ve had an opportunity …

    1. … to learn German well enough to feel comfortable using it regularly
    2. … to teach practical photography workshops, both in English and in German.
    3. … to give lectures on the history of American photographers, including a whole series on American female photographers.
    4. … to meet and make friends with a wide variety of new friends and acquaintances, not only from Tübingen but also from all of the world.
    5. … to try a variety of foods, including — but not limited to — a wide variety of fried dough products, including doughnuts and donuts. 😉
    6. … to live in a medieval town straight out of a fairy tale:
A Fairy Tale View of Tübingen

A Fairy Tale View of Tübingen

I am grateful for all those opportunities and wouldn’t have missed having the chance for any of them for all the world. Now that the time has come to say goodbye to Tübingen, it’s the people, though, and not the rest that I will miss once we leave.

So tomorrow is the day when we need to be moving on. You probably are wondering, what are we doing next?  Good question. 😉 A lot of that is still a bit of a mystery, even to us. Our plan, which is only partially formed at this point, is to become tourists in Europe for the next 10 weeks, before returning to the U.S. in late June. We’re hoping to travel and visit friends and family in the U.S. for a while after that, before travelling further afield to places (we hope!) like Easter Island and Hawaii.

But where do we actually go from here? The immediate answer is London. Where do we go after that? Well … I’ll be continuing to detail our adventures about all that on a blog, just not on this blog. After all, the name of this blog is Two to Tübingen (22tue), and as of sometime tomorrow we will no longer be in Tübingen, nor we will be returning any time soon.

Now in searching for a new name for the blog, I considered that our blogs have always followed a naming pattern based on our location, the location coming from where we went in order to follow a job opportunity:

      • Two to YVR (22yvr) – written by Chris about our life in Vancouver
      • Two to BZ (22bz) – written by me about our life in Bolzano
      • Two to TÜ (22tue) – written by me about our life in Tübingen

You see the pattern for the title there, I’m sure: “Two to X”, with a url starting with “22”. The problem for naming the new blog, though, is that we are currently footloose and fancy free — i.e., we are unemployed, with no specific long-term location on the horizon.  I briefly considered “Two to X’ as the name (22x), actually, but that wasn’t completely satisfying, so I wanted something else.

At some point  Chris and I were discussing the issue of the new blog title when one of us commented that while we didn’t know exactly where the next adventure would take us, at least we knew that wherever it was, the two of us would be there together.

Awww.

But wait … that’s it! The perfect name for the new blog:

Two together … wherever

http://22gether.clfotonline.com/

I hope you’ll join me over on 22gether as Chris and I set off on our next adventure. It’s really a pleasure for me to be able to share all the stories and photos with so many of you via the blog. Thanks for the on-going support, comments, emails, etc.   I’m looking forward to continuing with the blogging — wherever we go, whatever we do.

Hmm, that sounds suspiciously like a song cue. But ending the final post on the 22tue site with a crazy Broadway show tune (from the musical Gypsy) isn’t so unexpected, I guess. It’s just the “what’s come next” that’s harder to predict. 😉 Follow the journey as it happens over on the new blog http://22gether.clfotonline. Posts there start tomorrow, March 31 – see you then!

 


Comments

Monday Mysteries: What comes next? — 1 Comment

  1. Looking forward to new posts and wishing you lots of amazing un/predictable opportunities wherever you go together!

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