Day 221, Bangkok, Thailand
Our best guess is that we’ll be traveling for around 400 days. We’ve lived in other countries for years at a time, but have never tried nomadic living for more than a summer. Now, more than halfway through this trip, it’s a good time to reflect on this style of travel and how it fits our family.
School
Traveling while kids have online school commitments is probably the biggest ongoing consideration around which we work. We can’t do full-time, constant exploring. Time for school has to be factored in. The best rhythm in Paris was to let the girls do their work during the day and reserve outings for mostly evenings and a couple of days mid-week when crowds were minimal. Now we are traveling around more, and are often in a location for one or two weeks. The girls usually do one day out, one day in to study. On those days Paul and I often go out without them. On the days I don’t want to go out, he does his monster treks and does serious distances on foot. We always work around school needs, exams, projects, and it has worked well.
Stuff
Regulating the volume of stuff you accumulate is another challenge to manage. In Paris it was winter, very cold. We ended up buying more boots and warm clothes. After Turkey, we headed into warmer climates, but knew we wanted to be in Japan for March, when it was still quite cold there. We shipped a box of stuff back to Florida from Paris for 160 Euros a box, no surface transport possible. In Thailand surface mail was available. So we cheaply shipped two boxes of coats, boots and winter wear to my cousin in Tokyo, one box of stuff to Canada and one to Florida. Now we are closer to traveling lighter, the way I like it. When we get back to Europe we will rent a car, so we won’t be lugging around extra stuff from place to place. But until then, we have to keep it light.
Privacy
Finding alone time can be difficult. We are traveling with two teenage girls who have always had a room of their own, a personal retreat. But none of our girls have ever been bedroom hermits, unless they are really really mad. Our family tends to naturally cluster rather than disperse. Typically we will congregate to the same room, and the girls will do their homework or entertainment on their laptops, or we watch something together. During this trip, they share a bedroom or sometimes we all share one. Noise-cancelling Bose have been the girls’ bedroom substitute. When they need time alone they
grab their laptop, headphone up, watch a few episodes of New Girl, and emerge happy once again. Best mood adjusting method ever!
Friends
Keeping up with friends. It’s one of the first questions people will ask, what about friends? I don’t know if they would still ask that if we had a house full of boys, perhaps they would. Regardless of gender, if you have a teen, you know the drill. With FB, instagram, snapchat, skype, free international data, the girls text their friends like they never left. Kids spend way more time sharing YouTube vids than they spend going to a movie. Madi’s friends are at different colleges and that’s how she’d be keeping in touch anyway. Cali is in constant contact with friends from Canada, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Florida. They manage to do a lot of socializing while still being on the other side of the world from their friends.
Interest
Understandably so, grandparents have the most consistent interest in our travels. My mom, who is 92, says she has trouble remembering her kids and grandkids names these days. But whenever I call her, without exception she remembers where we are, and where we are headed next. She will say, how is Istanbul? You are leaving for Thailand on Saturday, right? Her memory works perfectly when it comes to keeping track of where we are and what we’re doing. She is also my most vocal supporter when it comes to this adventure. Every call she expresses genuine excitement for us, says how great it is we can
do this with the girls, what they’ll see, learn, on and on. I feel energized about our travels when I get off the phone with her. I must get my travel DNA from her. My sister, who seems to share this travel-loving DNA, also shows a consistent interest in what we’re up to. Unlike my mom, my dad is hooked into the news and his main concern is our safety. Paul’s parents and my friend from Grebel are my consistent blog followers. I was having technical difficulties which Kier has now fixed so I can post again. I’m trying desperately to catch up now.
Safety
When we were planning this trip, we couldn’t know how much terrorism would affect our experience and shape our travel plans. We were in Paris when the November attacks took place, in the exact location in Istanbul a few days prior to those attacks, and were planning to visit Jakarta when those Paris-like attacks happened there. We’ve had to call parents a couple to times to tell them that we were safe. Now before we travel to a country we have to do much more research about its history, who has a beef with it, all the politics surrounding it. As much as I don’t like it, it has changed the way we travel.
What I do know, is we will emerge from this year a different family than we went in. You cannot spend this amount of concentrated time together without gaining a much deeper understanding and connection with each other. We’ve seen the best and worst parts of each other, have made unrepeatable memories, have had more opportunities to laugh, to work through differences of opinion, to enjoy each other. Since we have two girls in college and one about to enter high school, we know how fast the window of opportunity o do these things, is closing fast. I’m not taking any of this for granted.
