The last 12 months should have made for a very good year.
They didn’t.
For those last 12 months, both of my children and their families have been stateside. The last time that happened — five years ago — Nicole and I made it up to Northern Virginia on four different occasions, spending a good amount of time with our favorite people in the world.
Not this time. Between Nicole’s health crisis last year and the pandemic, we have pretty much been stuck here in Georgia. In fact, the only time we made it north was a week at the beginning of April around my mother’s funeral.
We spent a little bit of time with our children and our grandchildren, but not nearly enough.
The Washington area was still pretty much shut down to the COVID-19 when we were there, and none of our children or grandchildren had been vaccinated. And now Pauline, her husband Johnathan and their six children are headed off to three years in Tunisia. Pauline is there already with the family dog, Johnathan and his three boys are traveling in a couple of days, and Pauline’s three will travel from Seattle to Tunisia at the beginning of August.
It feels strange already. Pauline and her three have been no further than one time zone away for the last nine years. The only one of the grandchildren with memories from far away is Artemis, who has born in Beijing in the fall of 2008 and lived three very early years in Indonesia.
Lexington was born in late 2011, and with the exception of a few months at the beginning of his life, has lived in the U.S., Jamaica or Guatemala. Albanie, the youngest, will be living far away from the U.S. for the first time.
Tunisia certainly looks interesting. It’s pretty much where the Arab Spring began a decade ago, and the BBC is saying that tourist-wise, Tunis could be the new Rome.
There are far worse places they could live, although I admit some nervousness at them being in a Muslim country where there has been at least some unrest. And of course, good old Libya is right next door. Indeed, Libya is part of the diplomatic portfolio handled out of Tunisia.
In a rapidly changing world, I think it will benefit my grandchildren a great deal to have a wide variety of living experiences. Certainly better preparation for the world than growing up in Tickle Me. Idaho.
God willing and the creek don’t rise, we will visit them in Tunis before too long. That will add another country and another continent to my only moderately impressive list of destinations I have visited. If there’s one thing that surprised me when I looked it up, it’s that while we think of North America as northern and Africa as southern, our home in Georgia is significantly to the south of Tunis when it comes to latitude.
In fact, to get to an east coast city that’s actually north of Tunis, you’d have to go all the way to Norfolk, Virginia.
Assuming I do make it there, it will tip the balance to four of seven continents for me. I’m never going to make it to Antarctica at my age, and Australia is sort of a dream for me. I suppose South America is possible.
I have been south of the equator once, when we visited French Polynesia in 1999.
Mostly these days, it isn’t where I go that matters to me. It’s who I see when I’m there. That’s why for the next few years, Tunis is high on my list.