Some of you may be wondering why the Burritowagon blog has been so quiet lately.  It’s not because we’ve been up to nothing, more that we’ve been up to something that has taken the past few months to fall into place.  But now that it has, it’s time to get blogging again and explain our absence.

After about 6 months in Sydney, we finally started to feel as though we were over the hump of adjustment.  Instead of constantly comparing the city and our lives here to what we had back home, we started to enjoy our Sydney experience for what it was – an opportunity to live in an incredibly picturesque city, experience a change in culture, and meet new people and have new experiences.  Instead of feeling burdened by thoughts of permanency, we shifted our focus to a more comfortable place, thinking of our time here as a temporary adventure.

Like all adventures in life, even those of a temporary nature, there are often downs with the ups.  We thought long and hard about what it would take for each of us to be happier with our daily lives.  It’s not that they were bad, but keeping on with the keeping on wasn’t exactly what we wanted either.

So what do you do when you’ve downsized your household, moved halfway around the world, and aren’t quite satisfied with this new life you have?  Well, if you’re us, you say “Hey, let’s take this Burritowagon out on the road!”.  And that’s exactly what we’re doing.  It wasn’t the easiest of decisions – there were the seeds of friendship we’d planted in Sydney’s soil that early on we thought we’d nurture for longer than the past 8 months – but we had to make the decisions that were best for us and hope that our new-found friends would understand.

And what were these decisions that have kept us busy and mostly silent for the past two months?  They included a move from Bondi back to Erskineville, the re-purging and re-packing of items into a storage unit in Sydney, and the extension of our New Zealand biking holiday from 5 weeks to 3 months.  In other words, we’ve decided to take some time off to ride and explore and let the chips fall where they may.

As I write this now, we are in Christchurch, New Zealand, staying with a wonderful cycling host family (WarmShowers) who has allowed us to camp out a few extra days while I recover from a cold and we get the bikes together and our panniers packed.  We plan to start riding south in the next few days, updating the blog whenever we have internet access.  It’s been a great ride so far here in the South Pacific, and now it’s time to turn it from one kind of ride into another.