There's a specific kind of quiet that happens in a car at a border crossing. Not peaceful quiet. The kind where you've been sitting for three hours already, the AC's off to save battery, and nobody in the car is talking anymore because there's nothing left to say about waiting. Sometimes it was hours. Sometimes it ate a whole day. That was just part of it — the price of getting to cross into somewhere new.
For a year and a half, home wasn't a place. It was wherever we stopped that week. My family and I drove through Central America in two electric cars, a Tesla Model Y and a BMW iX, and somewhere along the way we hit over 200 cities. Not 200 stays in the same handful of places — 200 different Airbnbs, hotels, spare rooms, wherever we could find one. I'd wake up some mornings and genuinely forget which country I was in for a second, because the pattern was never the same twice. Some weeks I'd sleep in the same bed for seven nights straight. Other times it was a new place every single day. I didn't have a room. I didn't have a permanent bed, a permanent view, a permanent anything. Just whatever was next.
The car part is its own whole story. Electric cars and rural Central America don't exactly go together — there's no Supercharger every twenty miles like back home. We had to stop roughly every 200 miles just to find a charge, and a lot of the time the only outlet around was somewhere no local would even go near, because it had a reputation for being dangerous. We'd end up charging in the strangest spots you can imagine — a random restaurant kitchen's outlet, a hotel that had one plug that worked, literally in the middle of the desert, or someone's actual house because they were the only ones with the right setup nearby. Sometimes that charge took an afternoon. Sometimes it took days. There was a stretch where getting from one city to the next took over a week, just from charging alone. You learn real fast how to talk to strangers when your entire trip depends on some guy letting you plug a car into his kitchen outlet for six hours. Some of my best memories from the whole year came out of exactly that — sitting around with people who had zero reason to help us, and did anyway, just because that's who they were.
Out of every place we stopped, Antigua in Guatemala hit different. What got me about it is that it's not just some old heritage site frozen in time. Step inside a lot of the buildings and it's actually modern, nice, almost advanced in a way you wouldn't expect walking up to it from the outside. But then you step back out onto the streets and it's a heritage site again, except it doesn't feel old in a tired, run-down way — it feels old in a way that's actually beautiful, like you can feel the history sitting right there in the walls and the cobblestone under your feet. It's this weird, cool mix of two different worlds stacked on top of each other, and somehow both of them feel completely real at the same time. That, plus meeting people from completely different cultures and backgrounds than mine, over and over, in city after city — that's what actually stuck with me more than any single landmark. You start to realize how much of what you think is "normal" is just what you grew up around, and there's a hundred other totally different normals out there, all working just fine for the people living them.
The money thing is something I think about a lot, though. Down there, a full meal could cost five dollars. When I saw one that cost ten, my actual reaction was "whoa, that's pricy." Now I'm back in California, and a single meal is twenty or thirty dollars without blinking, and it messes with your head a little. You start seeing how much of what feels "normal" here is actually just expensive, and how much of what felt "normal" there was actually just enough. It's not even about the number on the menu — it's the fact that I had a whole different scale in my head for months, and now I'm back to the old one like nothing happened, except I actually notice it now. I'll be somewhere ordering food and catch myself doing the math, converting it back to what that same meal would've cost a few countries down, and it just hits different every time. And it wasn't just the prices. It was watching how a lot of people were living — not bad lives, just small ones, stuck in the same routine day after day with basically no room to do anything different. Not everyone, but enough that I noticed it everywhere. People who were just existing instead of actually living. That stuck with me, and honestly, it still does.
I came back different. Not in some big obvious way — I didn't come home and become a totally new person. But something shifted in how I see money, comfort, what actually counts as "having a lot," and what a home even is when you've had two hundred of them and none of them at the same time. Turns out you don't need one address to know exactly who you are. You just need to keep moving until you figure it out.