Sixteen hours is a long time. In sixteen hours, you could drive from Ottawa to Tilbury and back. You could watch the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy. You could work two full days in the office. You could listen to our iPod and never hear the same song twice. Sixteen hours is a long time.

Sixteen hours is how long Steve and I slept the night that we returned to Canada from Australia. Sixteen hours!! And I’m not talking with a few wake up calls in between or even a pee break for that matter…I mean that Steve and I went to bed at 11pm one night and woke up at 3pm the next afternoon. Do you even realize how much work that takes?!?! Even back in my teenage days, I’d never slept that long!

Both of us were caught quite off guard by our bodies’ sudden need to such extreme amounts of rest but, when we began to talk about it a bit, we both felt like we weren’t just coming home from a month’s vacation…we were coming home from a three month whirlwind. This is would actually be the first time in almost four months in which we weren’t packing or moving or travelling or changing jobs (this is Steve’s last week at the NRC), and at the risk of sounding too much like a mental health ad, for the first time in 2008, we get to come home and just “be”. We get to come home and enjoy our new house, enjoy the nice weather, settle into new jobs and take a breath.

For all the moments in which we wish we had more vacation time, nothing reminds me of how much I love home more than being away from it.