Mom Diane rejoins Earth Vagabonds

Last Updated on October 25, 2024 by Ellen

My amazing mother-in-law Mom Diane has rejoined us for more travel! This time, we are together in India. She’s crossing crazy intersections in New Delhi, trying new restaurants, traveling on subways and tuktuks and Uber cars. She’s wandering forts, watching locals, walking to mass every day at the closest Catholic church a mile away from where we are staying. It’s her fifth trip to India – and she has more energy than us.

I love my husband’s mother. She has become a good friend. Her visits bring joy. In fact, her world travel with her late husband Joe inspired Theo and I to travel full time in early retirement.

To have time with Mom Diane again is a gift for which I’m grateful. We met up with her in New Delhi after our six-week stay in Chennai. The first time Mom joined us was in southern Vietnam in springtime 2019. The next time was in December 2019, when she met up with us in the Philippines. That second time she stayed with us until October 2020, thanks to COVID.

At 83-years-young, Mom walks many miles each day in Delhi, starting with her morning church trips. Later, we all have adventures around town.

We’ve ridden subways to local attractions and wandered around Delhi streets. We’ve hit parks, a famous mosque, Hindu temples and statues of gods, the Red Fort, Raj Ghat (the Gandhi Memorial), some street markets, chai holes-in-the-wall, and more.

There is a lot of downtime, too. We play Scrabble many evenings, we talk about other travel adventures, family, God, our lives, current events and new discoveries we make through new experiences.

Delhi is a mega city, and (thankfully) we’ll be leaving soon for smaller Indian cities and the gorgeous countryside in the north near the Ganges River. It will be nice to get out of this traffic congestion and pollution, even though we have mostly stuck to parks and open areas in Delhi, it’s a huge and dirty city.

We will get to spend Mom’s 84th birthday with her next month! I’m thrilled at this time we get to have with the spouse’s mother — she’s my friend, and she’s my mom, too.

I’ll close with one of Theo’s favorite pictures so far from this ‘together again’ visit. See if you can guess which one is his favorite out of the three below. 😉 More adventures to come in the weeks ahead!

Travel now – Life is Now!