One year ago this week, Greg carried our couch down three flights of stairs. We've now been gone longer than we'd planned, across more of the map than we'd dared sketch, and a few of you have asked the harder question lately: knowing what you know now, what would you undo?

A real list, then.

We moved too fast at the start. Those first months we treated the trip like a checklist and burned ourselves out. The best stretches were always the ones where we stayed long enough to get bored — and then got un-bored, which is where the actual place lives. We wrote about this learning in more detail here.

We over-packed and under-trusted. Half the gear came home unused. You can buy a raincoat almost anywhere on earth. What you can't buy back is the energy spent hauling things "just in case."

We under-budgeted for the boring stuff — visas, vaccines, the storage unit that quietly cost us more than expected over a year. Romance is free; logistics are not.

What we'd keep: all of it, basically. The night trains, the supra in Tbilisi, a five-year-old who now thinks of "home" as wherever the three of us put our bags down.

What's next: we're tired in a good way, and the spreadsheet is finally getting honest with us. So — a base for a while. Somewhere with a kitchen we don't have to give back, and a school for Ines, and a door that's ours. Not the end of the long way round. Just a longer pause in it.

Thank you for riding along. Truly.

— The Okafors