Questions, questions

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I can’t believe it has been two and a half months since Scott turned in his notice at work on April 13^th, officially cementing our plans to travel, turning dreams into reality. Since then, I have had a lot of questions from friends and family, mainly about our exact plans but also how we came up with a crazy idea like this!

First, the plan…

We have tickets out of Los Angeles on August 30^th. We fly first to the UK to catch up with friends and family for a week before continuing on to Johannesburg, South Africa. We will spend September, October, and November in South Africa. Most of it will be in Kruger National Park, and a few weeks at the end will be in Addo Elephant Park. All of our accommodation in the park is booked (which was the kick-up-the-bum we needed to make the plunge – it was almost all booked out in April!) and is a mixture of tents and African-style round huts called “rondavel.” All four of us will be in the same room, and we mostly have a shared bathroom. It is going to be interesting!

From there, we head to South East Asia for the rest of the trip. We will spend all of December and part of January in Thailand. Again, we have booked much of the accommodation already seeing as it is the Christmas season. As I said in the last blog, booking is not our style at all, but sometimes you just have to go with the trend I guess. We got a shock when our first choice was booked out for most of December!

After Thailand, we are hoping to go back to our old way of travel. We have no flights or accommodation booked, and no clear plan, just the way we like it! We are secretly terrified that we will have to come home with our tail between our legs, our big “experiment” having failed miserably. However, we are hopeful to spend the rest of our time in The Philippines and Indonesia, finding a little niche community that we can live cheaply in while enjoying our lives without the stress of work. Unlike prior trips, we are not out to find new and exciting places. We just want to find a few cool spots to kick back in.

So that’s the basic plan. When I think about leaving in two months time, I start to get all jittery and nervous. Scott is still working until the middle of July, and having no grandparents’ house to drop the kids at has meant that I have pretty much got nothing done in terms of packing up the house. Our big concern right now is getting it rented out. We have had several interested parties come and take a look. Each time, I have to madly clean and tidy the house, shoveling all of the kids’ toys and junk into closets and slamming them shut before it all tumbles out. I pray that no-one asks to see inside a closet ha ha! Then, I have to make sure the kids stay outside as, anyone who has had a 2 and 4 year old knows, they can undo four hours of cleaning and tidying in about four minutes! So far the general feedback is that people like the place but don’t want to have to move again in a year or two. Totally understandable.

Now for the second question: How did we come up with a crazy plan like dragging two kids around the world for a year?

As I said in the last blog, once you have the travel bug, it is pretty much impossible to shake. I can’t honestly say when we first started to talk about traveling the world this time. It just started slowly and gained momentum the more we talked about it. One thing that shocked me was when I found a photo I had taken of a noticeboard in the Endless Summer Bar & Café. I’d been absent-mindedly reading stories about the history of surf when a certain paragraph struck me. It was talking about surfing, but I remember showing it to Scott and saying that it could just as easily be applied to long-term travel, and how maybe it was a sign that we should indeed go traveling again. I know we had talked about the idea of traveling as a family by this point. The shocking part is that I took the photo in June of 2014, two years ago and when Jake was just a few months old! Here is the paragraph that struck a chord in me:

What a day! Between waves, Velzy pointed up the hill to the morning traffic and all the souls on their way to work. “Look at those suckers, chained to their routine,” he said. “They don’t know what we’ve got,” he went on. “They don’t know this even exists. Morgan, you and the rest of you, never forget this: Don’t just do what everyone says ya gotta do. You don’t have to! Live life the way you want. Figure out how to do it; don’t follow bumper-to-bumper to the work camps.” This became a guide for me, I think, and for the others out that day, too.


It really is true. It is overwhelming and scary to think about doing this trip with two little kids, but it’s what we want to do and we are finding a way to do it. I just hope we can get it all together in the next two months. We don’t really have a choice!

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Photos

In the Endless Summer Bar Cafe
The surf story that struck a chord in me two years ago, so I know we've been talking about this trip for at least two years!

Up for rent!
Our cute town house will be home to someone else for a year...hopefully!