Traveling – Page 3 – Grand Adventures and Household Chores

September 12, 2015January 14, 2016

Luck

Just a few blocks from our apartment in Buenos Aires, I found a shop with the best chocolate truffles I’ve ever eaten. The texture, the chocolate, the flavors – it was all perfection.

The day of our flight to New Zealand, Brian bought a box for a coworker in Auckland. “Wait, you didn’t get any for us,” I joked. Well, not really joked. That afternoon, I bought a second box to eat during difficult travel moments when we need serotonin. Chocolate while traveling is a ritual for us at this point. (For fans of Harry Potter, just imagine that we’re trying to keep the dementors away.)

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September 28, 2015January 14, 2016

Devonport Library

I have to admit that I judge a city in part by how well it supports its libraries. The Devonport library is a sunny, relaxing space with views of trees and water. (Oh, and it has books too.)

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October 12, 2015January 14, 2016

Where We’ve Been And Where We’ll Be

Our one year travel anniversary passed in August fairly uneventfully. While we’ve had a few hard moments, our day-to-day life while traveling has not felt significantly more challenging than our day-to-day life at home. (Though, admittedly, we haven’t yet found a way to A/B test our lives.)

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January 29, 2016January 28, 2016

List of Preschools

Here is a running list of the preschools Theo has attended on a temporary basis on our trip. We were happy with all of them. Some schools, like Cheeky Monkeys in Bali and Kiddee House in Chiang Mai seem to more frequently take children on a short-term basis. For others, we just lucked out because they had an empty slot in their program.

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January 29, 2016January 28, 2016

Preschool As We Travel

For a little more than four months, we have been enrolling Theo in local preschools as we travel. Thus far, he’s attended school in New Zealand, Indonesia, India, Thailand, and Vietnam.

We aren’t particularly worried about keeping up with the academic aspects of school. Theo is young and seems to be soaking up information from the wider world in a very sponge-like manner. Instead, we like that school gives him an opportunity to learn to socialize with people who aren’t us on a regular basis. Just as important to us, sending Theo to school gives us adults extra time to work and explore independently.

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February 12, 2016February 12, 2016

Happy New Year Again – Celebrating Tet in Vietnam

Brian came down with the flu two days before we were scheduled to temporarily leave Hanoi for a two-night stay in the countryside. Luckily, he mostly recovered within those two days, and we departed on our car-train-car journey to our guesthouse as planned.

Theo’s favor (and presence in photos) is very much courted in Vietnam – not as intensely as in India, but close. On the train, a family with a child about Theo’s age gestured for him to come over, and he spent about an hour watching videos with the girl and eating various snacks the family plied upon him. (We eventually lured him back to us and re-implemented our comparatively draconian screen and snack policies, but the sight of him sitting with the girl was too cute to spoil at first.)

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February 26, 2016February 26, 2016

Where We’ve Been And Where We’re Going (Again)

I just booked our plane tickets back to the United States. Yikes.

We fly from Amsterdam to Chicago on August 19th. After a few days visiting my mom in Chicago, we’re going to drive, bus, or fly to Ohio.

And then, we plan to stay mostly in place for a while in Ohio – for at least a year, but almost certainly longer – so that Theo can go to school, make long-term friends, and develop a deeper relationship with his grandparents than facilitated by our weekly Skype sessions.

I admit that I feel melancholy. But I also feel silly about the melancholy, both because the end of the trip isn’t particularly close and because, even if it were, I can look forward to a very good life even when remaining relatively stationary.

So, tonight I’ll just let myself feel a little melancholy. Tomorrow I’ll remind myself of all the goods things to come.

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April 25, 2016April 24, 2016

Launching Aliens At High Speeds

As we made our way from Kyoto to Oiso, Brian and Theo played Kerbal Space Program on the Shinkansen bullet train. (I worked and looked out the window, but it’s harder to make an interesting post title out of that.)

May 3, 2016May 3, 2016

Theo Hates Deserts (But Camels Are Nice!)

Because traversing 1/3 of the globe all at once seemed like a poor idea, I split our journey between Japan and Morocco into two parts; after leaving Tokyo, we spent two nights in Abu Dhabi in a posh hotel that we booked for cheap through Etihad Airline’s stopover program.

I have to admit that mostly we just stayed in the hotel, with occasional excursions to the nearby mall for Indian, Thai, and Lebanese food. (Normally, I find malls pretty unappealing. However, if they all had food courts like this one, I expect I’d like them a lot more.)

Other than the mall, the only exploring we managed was half-day trip to the desert. Normally, Theo is a pretty good traveler. On this particular day, well, he wasn’t.

Apparently, Theo hates deserts. Continue reading “Theo Hates Deserts (But Camels Are Nice!)”

June 6, 2016June 6, 2016

Tanger to Barcelona By Ship

We acknowledge that our carbon footprint hasn’t been great during our almost two years of travel. Still, when possible, we’ve been trying to avoid planes, and instead default to trains or ships.

To travel between Tanger and Barcelona, we booked a cabin on a Grandi Navi Veloci ship. When the vessel was originally constructed, it was probably designed to feel like a cruise. However, most of the cruise elements seem to have been gutted, at least for this journey. The two pools were empty, aside from cigarettes butts. The beauty salon had been converted into storage. Many other rooms were just blocked off and closed, or converted to prayer rooms. Continue reading “Tanger to Barcelona By Ship”