We arrived in Marrakech on July 1, the first stop after leaving Irvine.
This trip felt different before it even began.
The house was gone. The Audi was in storage. Most of our belongings were in storage. We weren't taking a vacation and then returning to our normal life in California.
We had simply left.
And Marrakech was where we landed.
La Maison Arabe
We stayed at La Maison Arabe in the medina.
Our room was small but quite nice, and Marrakech immediately felt very different from the places we'd been traveling recently.
That was part of why we had come.
After months of selling the house, packing and preparing to leave, we were finally doing the thing we'd spent so much time planning.
There was nothing left to prepare for.
We were traveling.
Exploring Marrakech
We spent much of our time exploring the city.
We visited Jardin Majorelle, the Yves Saint Laurent Museum and Bahia Palace. The places themselves were beautiful, particularly the architecture and details at Bahia Palace.
But Marrakech wasn't only about the individual sites.
There was the medina itself—the narrow streets, shops, people, traffic, colors and constant activity around us.
It was interesting.
It was also a lot.
Unlike places we'd eventually find in Portugal, Marrakech wasn't somewhere that immediately made us want to settle in and simply hang around for a few weeks.
We wanted to see it.
We wanted to experience it.
But we didn't particularly feel the urge to live there.
That distinction would become increasingly important as we traveled.
The Rugs
We also visited a gallery to look at Moroccan rugs.
Nobody was crowding us or trying to pressure us into buying something. We simply looked at the rugs—and ultimately bought several.
At another gallery, we bought a couple pieces of artwork as well.
There was something a little ridiculous about this.
We had just sold our house.
Most of our possessions were sitting in storage.
We had no idea where we would eventually live.
And on our first stop after leaving Irvine, we bought rugs and artwork for a home we didn't have.
Apparently becoming untethered didn't mean we'd stopped nesting.
The rugs would be shipped back to the United States, where they'd join everything else in storage and wait for us to figure out where home would eventually be.
A Slow Morning
On July 4, we slept late.
Neither of us had slept particularly well, and apparently we were still adjusting to the time change.
That morning also reminded us how far we'd traveled. We started thinking about future trips and the possibility of breaking long journeys into more manageable pieces rather than always enduring extremely long flights.
There was no reason anymore that every trip had to begin and end in California.
We had a light lunch.
Then we went to cooking class.
Cooking Moroccan Food
The cooking class became one of the experiences we'll remember from Marrakech.
We made chicken tagine with preserved lemon and olives, along with zaalouk, the Moroccan eggplant and tomato dish, and other parts of the meal. Then we ate what we'd made.
It was exactly the kind of experience we were beginning to discover we enjoyed while traveling.
Rather than simply looking at Morocco, we were doing something there.
And it planted another idea that we'd return to later: perhaps when we stayed somewhere longer, we could take classes like this for a week or two rather than treating them as one-off tourist activities.
What We'll Remember
We'll remember La Maison Arabe and our first experience of Marrakech.
We'll remember the medina and the sensory overload of being somewhere that felt unmistakably different from home.
We'll remember Jardin Majorelle and the Yves Saint Laurent Museum.
We'll remember the architecture at Bahia Palace, especially the ceilings.
We'll remember buying Moroccan rugs and artwork only days after leaving the house we'd just sold—and shipping them back to a country where we no longer had a home.
We'll remember sleeping late on July 4 because neither of us had adjusted completely to the time change.
And we'll remember making Moroccan food together—tagine with chicken, preserved lemons and olives, zaalouk, and the rest of our meal.
Mostly, we'll remember that Marrakech was the first place in a journey that no longer had Irvine waiting at the other end.
Would We Return?
We're very glad we went.
Marrakech was interesting, beautiful and different from anywhere we'd been before.
But it didn't produce the feeling we've since learned to pay attention to:
Could we happily stay here for a month?
Probably not.
Marrakech felt more like a place to explore than a place to settle into.
That doesn't diminish it.
We were beginning to understand that there are places we want to experience and places where we want to live for a while.
Marrakech belonged, for us, more to the first category.
On July 5, we left the city and headed into the Atlas Mountains.
And almost immediately, Morocco felt different.