TheWholeStory // episode_13

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November 10th, 2020

And just like that, we’re home. Just like that, it’s been six weeks since I’ve written. Six weeks of overwork, overwhelm and frustration at school and a roller coaster ride of racing, Germany, Spain and finally, the UK.

Now, I know you’re not going to be satisfied with me just skipping the last 6 weeks of a 12-week adventure. I owe you more than that at this point. The truth is, there IS a 6-week gap in my entries. Not a word, nothing. During that time, teaching school and living on the road was taking its toll– I was irritable, unhappy, stressed out, and didn’t feel like I was ever really present in my online classroom or with my family.?

It was grueling– the travel, the constantly shifting schedule, the daily uncertainty of where we were going next paired with the existential uncertainty of where we were going– like in life. We weren’t winning anything, that’s for sure and while we were Certainly all learning a lot, persistence tries your patience after a while.

In a rainy, muddy final race weekend in Oschersleben, Ellis went off track mid-race. Now, if a marshal touches your kart while you’re off track, that’s it– your’e out, and you can’t rejoin. Ellis hopped up, waving the marshals away and pulled his nearly 300lb kart from the mud just to get back on track and finish, p7. The kid has grit, I knew that for sure, but there’s no podium for that.??

When we left that final race of the season, I felt like a ship adrift. It was like saying goodbye to friends you meet at summer camp. I didn’t know if that was it, or if I’d ever see these people again or if they even cared. I didn’t know what we were supposed to do when we got home to America.?

On our way out of the EU, we visited ERA in Belgium and saw a glimpse of a potential future in their electric formula car. We went to the UK on a final pit stop, perhaps an homage to the unexpected beginning of this adventure, to have a final race weekend, in combustion, at a track called PFI with some new racing friends we met during the season. It was Ellis’s 15th birthday, so what else to do but spend it in a kart, putting him in the senior class for the very first time filled with some of the best kart racers in the world. Then, maybe uneventfully after 100 days on the road, we packed our bags for the last time in a London hotel room and headed for the airport.?

Everyone was excited for our return, but simultaneously & entirely paranoid about getting covid from the gypsy nomads who had been wandering Europe for 3 months. The boys got $200 rapid PCR tests in the airport, franks parents met us at the pickup to give us our dog back and let us borrow their car, air-kissing and apologizing for not having us stay with them for a few days. Our friends were hesitant about when or if they would see us and what precautions should be taken. It was awkward, and lonely.?

To make things more complicated, we had come home two weeks earlier than originally expected and the people renting our apartment weren’t ready to leave yet. So we spent two weeks in a shitty Airbnb in Jersey city, just wanting to be at home in our own house. Just wanting things to feel like home again. But they didn’t. And they certainly never would again.?