“You are so LUCKY!!!!” “You are going to have the best time ever!” “You will learn so much!” are things our children hear frequently when they or we tell someone about our trip. It’s highly amusing because until the last couple of months they had nooooooo idea what they were in for! (And still don’t really!)

We decided that maybe we should do something ourselves to get their excitement rolling. After tossing around a few ideas we settled on each week looking up two cities we hoped to visit. When we do this we look on our world map to see where in the world this city is, look up which country it is in in the kids Lonely Planet Travel Book and then find a tourism clip on YouTube about it (the latter being the most looked forward to by our children), it’s fun to see what the ‘Top 10’ things to do in each place are. So far we have done: Derby, Dublin, Siem Reap, London, Kuala Lumpur, Copenhagen, New Orleans, Bacharach, Portland, Split, Kampala, Bangkok, Singapore, Dubai, New York, Prague, Galway, Venice, and Chiang Mai. The kids love the special time with us and are starting to pipe up with “Can we do that?” “Are we doing that?” When they see activities they want to do. I’m also working out which exact things are, not to be missed, what would be good to do if the budget can stretch, and what I’m not going to suggest we do!

In terms of prepping ourselves…we are lining up the ducks! As I said a few blogs back, BK and I have done this thing! It was actually our honeymoon. 20 countries in nine months. Yep put our partnership to the test pretty early on! From missing flights to French train strikes to getting ripped off in Mallorca and Zambia…..we’ve done it all!
This time it’s taking a bit more prep, the obvious question in the front of every decision….Are we ok putting our kids in that situation? Other questions are:
Is that going to be too much for the kids?
What can we do to enrich their education and/or experience? and, Does that accommodation have a pool for our water babies!!??

BK is lining work up that will fit with the travel life. He’s been very blessed by having an old boss already offer to top up any lull in work to 100% if he needs it.

I have booked one flight, a 50 minute flight for $3.98 each, it was on a ‘mega sale’ so I couldn’t really pass that up…it doesn’t include seat selection or food, hopefully we can use the toilet onboard if we need to! Ha! It also didn’t include checked luggage. The children will be ‘carry on’ luggage only but BK and I will have a full size pack each that we’ll have to pay for.
I also have booked some accommodation in SE Asia via Airbnb, Agoda and booking.com, three great booking engines with some great deals if you have the patience to scroll them all.
BUT no flight out of New Zealand yet. It’s not real until I’ve booked that I tell myself! Flights to Asia sales from a few companies are coming up soon so hopefully I will rectify that. I’m hoping for a Qantas flight to Singapore via Melbourne or Sydney, but an AirNZ or Singapore Airlines direct flight would be all good too!

Saving is going strongly and we should get to the expected amount before we leave. The pile of things i have acquired to take with us that I wrote about in the last blog continues to get larger. Stationery for the children has been added. I’m also compiling a list of things to buy the kids for Christmas so they have some surprises at least.

So that’s about the update from us.
Our jobs for the next couple of months include sell some more stuff!

Till next time,

Claire