My observant readers will have by now noted that we were supposed to have taken off back for Istanbul a week ago today but have been curiously quiet about whether or not we actually left. Those observant readers would then be able to confirm that we have not actually left by checking their spare bedroom and noting that all of our crap is still spread all over it and that my old model of an X1-class TIE fighter has not been returned to its box. But for the rest of you: the “Where are Seth and Sophie?” map is correct. We’re still in Pittsburgh. There are a bunch of reasons for that, which I’ll lay out in some separate posts over the next few days. For now, here’s the summary:

1) Sophie and I spent our planned two weeks in the US busily catching up with friends, seeing family, explaining to our nephew who Donkey Kong is, asking our niece whether her butt hurt because it pinched or because it inched, and generally not relaxing at all. On top of that, with the hardest part of the trip yet to come, we individually started realizing that we may not be as adventurous as we originally thought we were and that we were going to need some time to understand whether we want the rest of the journey to play out as we’d intended.

We of course ignored all of these things until the last possible minute, namely Tuesday 1/26, the first day we’d been alone together since we’d gotten back to the US. We admitted to each other that morning that neither of us was ready to fly back to Istanbul, let alone on to Egypt and India. But it now being less than 24 hours before we were supposed to get on planes for the second half of our non-refundable tickets, we were faced with a serious dilemma. We looked into each others eyes and knew what to do. We went to the Original Pancake House. There we drank eight cups of coffee and decided that it was worth losing a little money to delay our departure for at least another week. Then we set about figuring out the way to make that happen with the least financial consequences. Which brings me to…

2) I’ve been saying for a while that we’ve been massively over budget on this trip, but I’d avoided doing the analysis to figure out how severe the consequences of that would be. During our second week back in the US I did the math. It quickly metamorphosed into one of those Kabbalistic rituals in which naming the right sequence of numbers leads to the stars going out and the rivers turning into Postum. Essentially, it showed that if we’re lucky and very tight-walleted, we have enough money left for about 12 weeks of travel. Which would be great if we hadn’t planned on the remaining part of the journey being more like 24 weeks.

It became clear that we could no longer fool ourselves into thinking that we could jet around willy-nilly with the trip we had planned without it turning into touching down in a country, having our picture taken with the passport control officer, eating a duty-free Toblerone, then climbing on a plane to the next subcontinent. So…

3) We started researching how much it would cost to reroute our round-the-world ticket, and surprisingly discovered that the cheapest way of replanning the trip would be to actually completely cancel the remainder of that ticket and start from scratch with a new, shorter one. In fact, we discovered that we might be able to piece together a series of individual tickets that cost even less than our original RTW ticket.

Armed with that info, we suddenly had the world as our oyster again and felt like we had regained a sense of freedom that had been one of the original motivators for the whole trip. We could get excited about replanning, pare down and focus on where we really wanted to go, leave when we want, and no longer have to deal with the stress of YOU MUST DEPART TOMORROW that had been weighing us down. Then…

4) Late last week, I was hit with unexpected health problems. I am going to be fine, and I’ll write more about them eventually. But the long and short is that they mean we’re going to have to delay our departure for a little while. It’s unclear how long.

So here we are, still in Pittsburgh. We’re enjoying being back in the US, but it’s hard not having a real home and moving back and forth from parents’ house to parents’ house like our moonstone nursery has gone under. And it’s even harder feeling this trip implode and trying to understand my own feelings about the whole thing while watching a dream ram headfirst into reality. But what’s hardest is that I know you’re out there, and you’ve been telling me how inspirational this trip has been to you and how you can’t wait to hear about what comes next. I feel like I’m letting you down. Like I’m letting us down. I don’t like that.

But anyway, nothing’s over yet. It’s just delayed. In the meantime I have jokes about visas I want to tell you, and intricacies of airfare classes I want to explain, and thousands of pictures to make you look at, every one of which is really, really boring, but are worth it for the one of the car that looks like a dog with a rear windshield wiper for its tail.