I have no fingernails left.

They’ve worn off along with the outer layer of the spoon I’ve been sanding. I’m carving it from a little piece of driftwood that I picked up on a windswept beach and am planning to inlay it with a piece of paua shell in the handle and carry it around the globe with me until I have a kitchen with a salt cellar or a sugar bowl. It will forever remind me that I’ve been to the end of the world.

I’ve been thinking a lot, this week, about the fact that, for an eastern Canadian, I can’t get any further from home than I am right now, on the South Island of New Zealand. For someone born in the northern and western hemispheres, half a year in the extreme end of the last significant land mass in the southern and eastern is a trip to the end of the world.

No matter where we go from here, it will always bring us closer to home. 

Today we’re chugging out the picturesque fjord that protects Picton from the open water of the Cook Strait between the North and South Island. Today is the day that we turn, irrevocably, toward home. Of course it will be many months before we return to familiar places, and “home” is a nebulous thought at best to folks like us. the reality is that our home goes with us and is made by us with little regard for geographical surroundings.  Still, it’s a day worth marking that defines the furthest extent of one’s orbital spin away from a point of origin.

On one hand, it is a monumental day, one that seems to stand still in a parade of days rushing past. On the other hand, it’s just another day. We drove over a mountain in the sunshine to find a mustard and rust coloured Chinese Junk moored in a postcard worthy harbour. Hannah pointed at it and whispered, “Look, it’s like the wise-eyed boat on the Yangtze River…” quoting from a book we read a thousand times when she was a piggy-tailed bouncer. It’s funny the things kids remember, and when. We took quick showers beside a gas station in Picton. The younger boys spent the time tossing their newly acquired parachutists into the air and chasing them into the grass as they landed. The teenagers have picked today to fight like cats and dogs, both entrenched in their “rightness.” It’s your pretty-average-normal travel day on which we mark a significant moment in our journey.

Life is like that, isn’t it? A curious blend of the monumental and the mundane.

Geography has little to do with that. There are dolphins cresting off of the prow of the ship. Gabe is knitting. Spectacular scenery paints a backdrop we may never see again. Hannah is drawing. The little boys are off exploring the ship, every time we switch vehicles of transport they are energized and interested, not in where we are, so much as in the machine itself. Part of me wants to jump up and down and shout, “We made it!! We’re in New Zealand! Everybody look!” Instead I munch peanuts and help the two Brits next to me with their crossword roadblock: Toddy; not totty. Tony is working. Salmon farms slide past.

I know that once our wheels touch the soil in Wellington it’s going to feel like the world is rushing forward at a mad dash towards August 12th and our flight to Australia. We’re already thinking about the logistics associated with that. I’m almost ashamed to admit that we feel as if our time here is almost done, with 10 weeks yet left on the clock. Ten weeks is a long time. Ten weeks is no time at all. How shall we spend it?

And so we float towards our fate, with he Thunder Pig tucked into the belly of the whale and a little kid on board who cheerfully whistled “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” as we embarked; hoping he doesn’t know something we don’t.