So. Welcome to my new blog: narrating kayoz goes travelling (with three kids!). We went overseas once before with Liam, when he was nearly two, and of course we’ve been on the odd road trip with Liam & Mikaela, but this will be the first trip of more than about a two hour drive with all three children.
So where are we going? Well, primarily back to the States. Chris has a lot of family over there, my brother and his wife and their new baby are there, and my best friend is there (with partner and children). So that’s always going to be a regular destination for us – at least in the sense they you can call something regular that you do at most once or twice a decade!
But, this time we are going via Europe. We’ll be spending a week in Barcelona (and maybe catching up with a friend from Lyon, in France, if she can make it down), and then another week on a Greek Island (Karpathos) in a house owned by some friends who have family over there. It’s not enough time, but we’ll have to make do. Then we have a little over a week in New York City/New Jersey/Pennsylvania (in the Pocono mountains), and then a few weeks in California/Oregon. The timing works out the way it does in large part because some of the our flights are using frequent flyer points (saved for years on our credit card, not from actually flying!), so we had to travel when we could get the seats. On the other hand, I would have preferred to have more time in all those places, which we simply couldn’t do anyway.
Are we a little excited? Hell yeah. Is the idea of an (almost) 8 week trip with several very long days on planes with three children, one still in nappies, a little daunting? Uh – yeah! Especially with the first ‘day’ of travel totalling more than 30 hours, taking us from Canberra, Australia to Barcelona, Spain. But it will all be part of the adventure.
Both Liam and Mikaela are really looking forward to visiting Greece, partly as a result of me passing on my interest in Greek mythology. I hope spending a week in a sleepy little Greek village on Karpathos won’t end up disappointing them, but I think everything will be sufficiently different to be interesting even for a five year old. Plus, there are beaches! Actually, I’m probably looking forward to Greece even more than they are, as I’ve never been there either. One week is far too little time of course, but I’ll take what I can get! I’ve never been to Spain either, nor NYC, so lots of firsts actually.
However we’re not actually on the eve of departure yet, and we’ve got lots to do before we get there, beginning with organising passports for all three kids!
So, next on the agenda: write a To Do list.
Edited to add: all those other posts showing on the front page? Under the category ‘Destination’? They’re just pretty pictures at the moment. But in a matter of months, I will be in those cities, taking pictures of my own 🙂
