Advertisement
Published: December 19th 2019
3 months off the grid - no work, no school, all play! We’re travelling from December 1st 2019 to March 1st 2020, spending most of the time in New Zealand. I know that family and friends have asked where they can follow our moves, and it’s not until yesterday, that I reached the decision of writing our story here. Travelblog is set up by an old dive colleague who we worked with on Perhentian Islands off Malaysia, and seemed the obvious place to share our experiences.
I don't usually share lots of private thoughts and photos. But I've followed lots of other people and their travels, I've become inspired and learned a lot from their experiences. My hope is to pass this on, and maybe also inspire others.
So how do you even get startet on the idea of taking three months off? We live in Denmark, where you get 12 months' maternity/paternity leave. After Alba was born we didn't use the full 12 months before getting back to work and univesity, and this time can be "saved" for up to 9 years. So we always knew we had the possibility to do something like this, the question was:
Tinderbox 2019
We were gate keeping this gate to the production area for 11 hours straight. I don't know when we last had that many uninterrupted conversations? It gave us time to browse the world map and land a location for our longest yet family trip.WHEN, WHERE and HOW?
WHEN: Alba starts school in March 2020, and about a year before this date we started talking more seriously about doing something. First step is making sure it's possible to get the time off. It can be quite intimidating taking the idea of three months off to your boss. We're both serious about our jobs, and asking for three months off
could be percieved by some as the opposite. We're both in good places, and lucky enough to have flexible work, and the dates were booked before the summer holidays.
WHERE: We sat down one evening with a bottle of wine a blank piece of paper and started a brain storm. We found that we had very similar criteria, and the most important one for both of us was SUNESHINE. We needed to find somewhere that had 20+ degrees for the months of December to January. We looked at Caribbean, South America, South East Asia, Australia and New Zealand. All of these places would be great to travel as a family, but we also wanted to take Ollie and Alba to a place where they had not been before, and also new experiences for
Tinderbox 2019
Sunshine is our favourite - and we're chasing it where ever we go. (Also, it goes great with cold beer) our selves. That ruled out a few places, and the question of
where remained open for more than a month. Finally, when volunteering at music festival Tinderbox, we had uninterrupted time, and agreed on location: New Zealand.
HOW: Camper or car - that's the question! We did a list of pros and cons. Camper is super flexible, and it wouldn't be necessary too book ahead. But it's really expensive. We're quite messy (or if you ask Nick, I'm very messy - and he's right), and it would probably feel a bit cramped. Also it's a big wehicle to drive around for three months. Car would require us to book hotels, appartments or finding other accomodation. A quick search made it clear that we could still do this (car hire and hotel) at a lower cost for the duration than the cost of camper hire. We also found workaway.info and agreed that it would be fun to do volunteer work in exchange for accommodation as part of the trip. So the choice for us was a car combined with different types of accomodation.
So these choices were made and flights we booked. In this personality test I did at work earlier in the year, I answered lots of different questions about my preferences. One of the clearest tendencies was my preference to keep my options open. The opposite is making lists and planning forward. Nick is even less of a planner than me. You could say we both prefer making more spontanious choices ;-) This resulted in nothing being planned or booked until two weeks before departure. At that time we secured accomodation over Christmas, because it's a busy time, and many places were already pretty much sold out. We almost went back to the camper option in the proces, because of the hassle of planning ahead :-)
All set, we were ready for the adventure to begin.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.084s; Tpl: 0.01s; cc: 6; qc: 44; dbt: 0.0438s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Home and Away
Bob Carlsen
I didn't really do detailed planning of trips until we had kids...
Not being able to find a hotel room until midnight had something to do with that. When I was vacationing at Railey Beach in Thailand I met a Danish couple and their 2 year old and 3 month old who were on maternity/paternity leave. They did this after their first child was born and were doing it again. This seems to be a good incentive to having a baby every year and never having to go back to work!