Limerick for 18 May 2021.

When arriving back to a place once lived
Past thoughts can sometimes be grating
Because those memories that have faded
Come screeching back unaided
And the realization dawns
That the past is nothing more than that
Its antiquated

When I last wrote on my blog, I was one day away from embarking on one of the most soul searching moments of my life, living on the road, at the boarder between Texas and Mexico and I was planning to drive all the way from Pennsylvania to Ushuaia, Argentina alone at 33 years old. Well I am happy to tell you that the trip ended up being a success and 6 months long in total. Although I didn’t make it all the way to the tip of Argentina in Ushuaia, I did make it through 16 countries, driving as far South as Buenos Aries dropping my car off in Montevideo, Uruguay to ship it back to Texas.

Then the pandemic hit. I flew back from South America on 06 February and I got my van out of port Houston on 12 March just as everything was shutting down around me. Yet still I didn’t write. I got to the most interesting part of the story, crossing into Mexico, and then… radio silence. I am certain there are few people who pass through here but I realized after a month on the road how the trip had been designed for me by me and I just needed the space to enjoy it. As a one man band I had to do everything, maintenance check-ups on the van, setup camp and a security perimeter each night, drive, and I realized crossing into Mexico that I could not keep the burden of telling the story, I just needed to live it. Many people have told me since, nahhh you definitely need to write a book or a memoir or something. and although I have kept up with many of the stories here on this blog, I just am not ready for that. That time and space that I spent every waking minute in changed me forever and I want to tell bits and bobs of it along the way but I’m just not ready to tell the whole story.

Which is why I’m here today. For a little while now I have thought that it was time to close down this website. I have not felt like writing and telling my story and I’ve moved onto other projects, but after time, I feel drawn back to this space and what it represents to me and I’m feeling the need to write again, but this time about everything and anything. About the books I read and the things I do, about what I look forward to in the day, and anything else I can come up with. I’m glad I changed the website name to TheCasseyExcursion a long time ago because although this has primarily been a travel blog, but I just want to make it my daily space now.

So currently, I’m sitting in a 2 week quarantine in Norfolk Virginia, mulling around in my own head and although I’ve already done a 2 week quarantine previously, I feel like this was the time that I finally wanted to jump start this process and get back into it. So here goes nothing. See you tomorrow.

P.S. Because I love the idea of rap and people who can rap so much, I recently found an outlet to try my hand at it in the form of limericks. The one I wrote today has to do with having lived in Norfolk during my first tour in the Navy and remembering so much about it coming back.