“Remember that thanksgiving we spent in the campervan in New Zealand when we couldn’t find marshmallows for our fruit salad so we bought those ducky marshmallows and cut them up?” Amber said.
Sophia answers, “Yeah, [now with New Zealand on her mind] remember when Elizabeth kept touching that object that was supposed to bring fertility? She is going to have, like, a 100 babies!”
Elizabeth piping in with exasperated embarrassment, “I didn’t know!!!!” Everyone laughs.
We have been back several years from our world trip with our three girls and it is still common for them to have something trigger a trip memory. Next thing we know we have gone down the rabbit hole of memories giggling about the fun and sometimes about the misfortune.
All of us are so fond of the experiences we had. Much of our trip was not planned out before we left. We had 6 months’ worth of plane travel scheduled and a place to stay only in our first country when we left the states. That was pretty much it. It worked out well for us and here is why.
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A world trip needs to have a slower pace and that slower pace allows you to adjust your sails as you go. We have all been on a short vacation where the goal was to arrive at a place see everything possible from sunrise to sunset and then repeat for 3-10 days. It is fun, but so exhausting. You go back to work and you need a vacation to recover from your vacation. But since those vacations only come around every 9 months to a year, the fast pace makes it feel like you are getting the most out of it.
For a longer experience it is just not enjoyable to have this speed of traveling. In some ways, a longer trip is not really a vacation, it is just life; an amazing life, but still life. A certain amount of routine needs to exist with a longer trip. There were benefits to a slower pace too. Many times the slower pace allowed us to find out about and do wonderful things we would have never even known about.
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Nothing goes as planned. When things are scheduled out to much it can rob your joy. Things will change your plans. Weather events happen. Things get in the way of your schedule. A huge weather event kept us from visiting a country we had planned on visiting. It was disappointing, but if I had spent hundreds of hours planning on what we were doing to the last minute I wouldn’t have just been disappointed, I would have been devastated. It is better to have a few bullet points of places you want to see, experiences you want to have and add items to this list as time allows. It is helpful to form 3 categories: must see/do, nice to see/do, if we have time see/do. Or scrap all the lists and only keep a few must see items. See tip 5 below.
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Even when you have deliberately not over planned your schedule, throwing kids into the equation leads to the need for even more flexibility. If you plan something that you think the kids will love and they don’t, it is ok to bail out on it. If you push them too hard with an agenda, they will not have fun and their behavior will make sure that you don’t have fun in turn. Scale back your daily plans so that there is the possibility for down time as needed. Or if you know a day is going to be especially busy, schedule a slow paced day the second day. When taking an extended trip with school aged kids, Homeschooling will naturally keep the pace out of necessity. They need time to learn the traditional desk tasks. (on a side note, we found a good daily schedule that included homeschooling was to do the schooling in the morning, then activities after lunch into early evening and finally back “home” for a good night’s sleep).
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Don’t lose track of the big picture. You are traveling to build memories as a family. The kids will not even know if you missed something that others say is a must see. Make sure you have done the foot work for the important stuff of what needs to be done to keep your family safe such as choosing a safe place to stay and that you have any shots you may need for the country you visit. If your family is well and you are getting to have a new experience, everything else will come out in the wash.
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Planning an extended trip can be daunting and could lead to paralysis. Don’t let the need to have every detailed plan keep you from going on your trip. The kids are growing more each day. The more you wait, the older they get. It is ok to have only a general idea of what you might do at a destination. Don’t let the need to over plan lead to paralysis. It is ok to pick a destination choose one thing that you might do there, guess how long you might want to stay and go for it. To be honest, this is how most of our trip was planned. We fleshed out the details for the next destination or two in the evenings while the kids were sleeping or while they did independent homeschooling work.
Don’t let the details get you down. Get a rough plan and get out there and make some memories.
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