Voyage, voyage
After dropping my wife and daughter off at Seville airport around dawn, kissing them goodbye and hoping they would be fine, I drove to a nearby petrol station, filled up our Ford Transit escape vehicle, and continued toward Huelva in the morning sun. My head was full of racing thoughts and worries. It had been a difficult morning. ██████ had suffered a crisis of confidence. The plan had been for her and ████ to fly ahead to ████████ while I followed a few days later with the van on the ferry, sparing her the crossing because we knew how prone she was to seasickness. But the thought of being separated for almost a week, amid the chaos of constantly shifting travel restrictions, had suddenly become unbearable to her. We had talked through every alternative, but in the end decided to stick to the plan. It really did feel like some kind of escape.
I could hardly believe we had made it this far. After what had felt like half an eternity of endless preparations, weeks spent renovating the van, getting rid of clutter, sorting and packing our belongings, preparing our apartment for a sublet, we had finally hit the road. All our anxieties about roadblocks and checkpoints in fully locked-down France, and about unpredictable regional travel restrictions in Spain, had turned out to be just that: mere rumours.
It had taken us a day and a half to drive across Germany to the French border, which we passed without encountering any of the feared controls. After a stop in ███ ██████ in Occitania, where friends welcomed us with good food, wine, great conversation, and the luxury of a real bed, we continued west toward the Atlantic, the Pyrenees always to our left. Only the changed road signs told us we had entered Spain. Again: no borders, no police, nobody stopping us. After a dizzying drive through the tunnels and viaducts of the Spanish Basque Country, the landscape suddenly opened into the vast rolling plains of Castile y León beneath an overwhelming expanse of blue sky. It felt like freedom made landscape. That evening we camped on a small hill between ████████ and Valladolid under an orange-tinted sky, the wind carrying the scent of pine and thyme. The final stretch south into Andalusia had also gone smoothly, and we had reached Seville, where we spent the night parked in the middle of the city.
I exited the A-██ onto the A-███, taking a detour along the Andalusian coastline. I don’t remember exactly where I was when the next song came on the radio, but it was David Bowie’s epic track Heroes. I had never really been a Bowie fan, but I sang along, feeling my body relax and my worries begin to fade. Then, somewhere in the second or third verse, when the reverb in Bowie’s vocals kicked in...
...out of the blue, I burst into tears. Not just a little, I hadn’t cried like that in years. Tears streamed down my face as I all but yelled the lyrics while the blurry landscape rushed pas me:
We can beat them, forever and ever. Oh, we can be Heroes, just for one day.
It was a profound moment - a true hero’s journey moment. I felt somehow physically relieved and, at the same time, utterly overcome by despair and an almost unbearable feeling of nostalgia and grief.
As the song faded out, it gave way to the French 80s hit Voyage, Voyage by Desireless. The last time I had heard it was as a child, when it had been a hit on the radio decades earlier. It held no particular meaning for me, and yet the nostalgia and the strange synchronicity of that very moment was so overwhelming that my tears kept flowing.
Au dessus des vieux volcans, Glissent des ailes sous les tapis du vent, Voyage, voyage. Éternellement.
De nuages en marécages, De vent d'Espagne en pluie d'équateur. Voyage, voyage.
Vole dans les hauteurs, Au dessus des capitales, Des idées fatales, Regardent l'océan.
I almost had to pull the car over. Tears blurred the road ahead until I could barely see. My whole body shook, and I sobbed like a child. At the time, I couldn’t understand what was happening to me.
Only in retrospect do I see it clearly: some deeper part of me had already recognized what lay ahead. This was our turning point, the point of no return, the moment every hero's journey ultimately arrives at. An era was ending. A world was ending. After this, nothing would ever be the same.
What had begun as a temporary escape plan: to spend the winter months on ████████ until the chaos of the Covid-19 pandemic subsided, eventually became a two-year residency as expats. And true to what some part of me had sensed on that drive, nothing was ever the same again. We never returned to our old life in ██████. Instead, our journey carried us onward to ██████, where we would live for several more years.