Our year started rather dramatically, as we raced back from the far edges of Eastern Europe to London through ten countries in seven days. It had a bit of Phileas Fogg about it as crisp winter landscapes rolled past the van's slightly foggy windows, stopping only for toilet breaks, supermarket raids, and the occasional reminder that adventure is not always glamorous, like the moment we ended up in a ditch in Turkey and were hauled out by a local farmer's tractor.
The point of that slightly unhinged dash was to get the van back to London in time for me to fly to Australia and help launch a Chinese electric vehicle on Sydney Harbour. One minute I was eating petrol station pastries in the Balkans, the next I was squinting into the bright sun, pretending to look normal near a lithium-filled car.
The world this year has felt like it is running on three coffees, a cracked phone screen, and pure stubbornness. Everything is louder and faster, but not necessarily smarter. We have got the climate doing its best impression of a warning light that nobody wants to look at, politics behaving like a reality show with higher stakes than anyone asked for, and technology sprinting ahead with that slightly unhinged confidence of a teenager who has just discovered power tools. Add in the background hum of conflict, prices that still feel vaguely insulting, and a general sense that everyone is a bit tired even when they are pretending they are fine, and you end up with a strange mix of dread and determination. Still, amongst the chaos, people keep turning up for each other in small, unyielding human ways, and I am choosing to believe that counts for more than the headlines.
This year also marked the end of ninety-nine years of my Grandma Betty Sykes. Her Celebration of Life was held across the road from the home she lived in for most of her life at The Wes Cricket Club in Almondbury, Huddersfield. Mum and Dad travelled over from Sydney, and we spent a few good days with extended family in Yorkshire, walking, talking, and remembering.
Siona has been leading the charge with our nomadic work and travel setup. She started a Strategy and Marketing consultancy and, it has quietly and steadily grown all year. Watching her build something from scratch has been equal parts inspiring and slightly intimidating. Si also introduced me to her family in South Carolina, which was all kinds of different, but filled with love, warmth, and very generous doses of Southern hospitality.
From there, we headed into one of the anchors of my year. This was my ninth burn in eleven years, with two of those years taken out by COVID, and it continues to be one of the biggest and most meaningful projects of my life. The camp has kept growing in a way that feels genuinely positive rather than just bigger for the sake of it. This year, we added a second semi-trailer and a 60-seater school bus, both now with full solar arrays on the roof, pushing the camp further into proper green infrastructure. Our 40-person, completely solar-powered art car also went through its phase two upgrades and is now humming along with fresh exterior paint, a new interior, and upgraded LED lighting.
After the burn, we slowed things right down. Jeff and Jess (brother and sister in law) had joined us at Burning Man, with Jetson (nephew) keeping Mum and Dad company on the shores of Lake Tahoe. From there, we all disappeared to their family holiday home in San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua, for a month, with my Auntie and Uncle. It was sun, swims, boozy dinners, and the strange relief of everyone being in the same place at the same time, with nowhere urgent to be. From Nicaragua, we carried that slower rhythm south. We spent the rest of the year chasing warmth and curiosity through Panama, Colombia and Ecuador, all of them rich, chaotic, beautiful, and full of the small moments that perhaps would not make a highlight reel but somehow become the bits you remember.
If there is a theme to the year, it is momentum. Some of it was joyful, some of it was exhausting, and some of it was the kind that only makes sense in hindsight. But when I look back, it feels like a year that held both ends of life at once. Big movement and big stillness. A lot of miles, and a few moments that made the whole thing feel surprisingly simple.
With love,
Kimber & Family