---

"Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans." - John Lennon

We are at the airport ready to begin our long awaited "vacances".


We have been busy since returning from the far-east almost 2 years ago.
Most of our energy was spent on "life" - Yaron started a new job, Hagit finished yet another university degree ( 3rd one - apparently she is as smart as she is beautiful y.b. ), we bought a new car. The uninspiring day to day we all share until we open the door (and pocketbooks) to temporarily leave it all behind. We get off the bandwagon, look how the rest of the world lives, ponder the meaning of life, only to conclude that the bandwagon isn’t that bad and we would like back on. As the Gashashim said: "we all like returning home. We like it so much that we would like to return again and again to the feeling of returning [back home]. For this we travel aboard." So you return home. Rest.. live you life. then you get a feeling you should be doing something else. you have a faint memory of that free feeling you get from backpacking and you get the itch to get back on the road. You wake up every morning and the first thing that comes to mind is "I NEED A VACATION". you start making plans. Where too? When? How long? How I will get there? Will my boss give me so much time off? (not that important - maybe I go anyway and find a new job…). And while you are doing that you live your life…



But we managed to overcome the mundane life even without travel. Like we said, we have been busy since returning from the far-east almost 2 years ago. You see, we are not the care-free single traveler we were before we got married. We are not even the happy-go-lucky couple we were on our last trip. A year ago a stork came and put Liya at our door step. Along with her we got all the "free inspiration" someone can have without leaving his doorstep. …..Just like travel, having a baby is not always easy. Like a bad guest-house you don’t always get a good night sleep and like a long bus ride it is not easy on the back. BUT if you look only on the down sides you will never travel or have children. With babies ,like travel, enduring the journey is all the fun. The little experiences and discoveries is what make it worthwhile and looking back it is always pleasant.


Now we are departing for an adventure that will combine both inspirations, travel and Liya. We expect that back-packing will never again be the same! We can no longer pack a bag, take a stick and go globetrotting. The next month was carefully planed so that Liya will have enough food, bottles, dipers, cloths, movies, games and general good feeling for the whole duration. We meticulously planed a route that will not have to drive more then a few hours every day so that Liya will not go crazy. We bought all the special baby-travel equipment we thought necessary. We did dry runs around Israel. But after all the planning we still don’t know what we will eat once we arrive this evening, what we will see tomorrow, where we will sleep in 5 days or where we will be in 3 weeks. With all the planning and packing we still hope to have an unexpected adventure of travel.



Although we are sure we are not the first parents to take a 1 year-old to an "off the beaten track" trip we still could not find any useful information on how to do it. All we could gather from our friends, family and even fellow-travelers-turn-parents are "don’t go", "why not go to someplace like Europe", "how adventurous of you - we would never dare" or the plain "you are crazy". Hopefully, when we return we will be able to supply information to other young-parent-travelers and inspiration to all that backpacking is always possible!


On second thought in all our travels we never ever saw a 1 year-old…

Hmmm…

Maybe we should have thought this over ...

Wait …

The announcer just called our flight.

Here we go…


[until next time - some photos we took in the last 2 years traveling in Israel]

---