Have kids..will travel
So we celebrate the year of 2017 as the year of travel freedom!! Our kids are finally old enough to travel all day on their own two feet, carry their own daypacks with water bottles, snacks and jackets…we are finally free to see the world!
Its not like we have not been traveling for past 10 years, we just kept it mostly to mainland US to make sure we would have access to clean bathrooms, quick diaper changes, and so on. Now with our kids aged 8 and 10, the whole world seems to have opened up.
After the first attempt to travel to Italy with a baby, we ran into logistical issues like finding a clean horizontal surface to change diapers(had to remove all bags off the luggage rack on the train twice during our 5 hour train ride, changed him on a blanket on a dirty train platform once), unable to get benadryl around the Colosseum when our son had an allergic attack when licking some gellato off my spoon and other such challenges put a damper on our enthusiasm.
So for the first five years of our kids’ lives, we traveled mostly to places accessible by car within a day’s drive. Air travel had been a nightmare the few times we tried, so we got anchored by a day’s radius of driving. Living in Florida, we made trips to the Florida Keys, St.Augustine, Miami, and many many trips to our beloved Smoky Mountains.
Our kids went on their half mile hike in the smokies when they were 4 and 2 and a half years old..and loved it! They went on their first big hike 5 miles on Alum Cave trail when Rianna was 3 and a half and Yuri 5 and we have never looked back.
The next 5 years, we started adding plane rides to the travel plans. We added a road trip to New York state and city one summer, carved out time for Jaipur, Agra, and Kerala when visiting family in India. Our biggest venture was a plane and road trip to San Francesco, Yosemite and Lake Tahoe on spring break last year. It went through beautifully, kids handled everything from delays in plane rides, to a 4 hour stop in San Francisco on day 1 to handle our rental car break in, to being stuck in our car in a snow storm in Yosemite! Posts about those trips coming up!
All of these adventures finally got our family ready for bigger, rougher adventures. We went on our first truly international trip to Peru this summer..stay tuned on more on that..
Floridians..