The 1st quarter

It’s 90 days since we took our first flight and left Australia for Singapore.  In about an hour, we will take our second flight from Guilin in the South East of China to Chengdu in Sichuan province in the South West.

While waiting for the plane we’ve had some fun thinking and talking about our 90 days of travel.  It’s amazing that we can all recollect every day together so far.  This was definately a dream of mine before we left – I had visions when we were planning this trip that we would be able to reminesce about our great adventure together.

We have had quite a few  comments on our blog asking questions like – “Are you all enjoying it?”,  “Do you get enough downtime?” and “Don’t you get sick of living out of a suitcase?” etc.

The answer to most of those questions is based on the fact that this is not a vacation.  We still do homework, laundry and get up and organise breakfast every morning.  Obviously we do activities and some sightseeing that is specific to the area we’re in, but we still have a routine.  The lack of routine is, what I think, causes a holiday to be so exhausting.

We are also very mindful of not overdoing it with the kids, so we generally do an activity one day and try to follow up with a recovery/easy day the next, where we also try to fit in some schoolwork.

In the early weeks, we all went through our own forms of adjustment to travelling, both with being together all the time and with the foreign cultures.  The kids found it quite hard earlier on, with a couple of nights of one crying and then like dominoes, the whole crew would be crying.  I personally found this quite hard as I would then question my own motives for the trip – why was I putting the kids through this if we weren’t enjoying it?  By the end of the second week, they had got into the swing of things and got a bit more used to Asia and we were starting to get into the travel groove.

Also, Amanda and I found ourselves in a new position of having to work out our roles.  After a few “discussions”, we have continued to try to work to our strengths and make it all come together.  We try to plan in advance and I have the role of going out to book tickets etc, while Amanda stays with the kids.

To answer the question specifically of “Are we enjoying it?”  we can definately say “Yes!” especially as this now feels like normal life and has been for a while – and hey who would miss shopping, cleaning, gardening, cooking and going to work!!!

The other question – “Are we sick of living out of a suitcase?”  Easy answer is No!  Anyone who knows Amanda and I well knows that we are planners and we planned well in advance our travel wardrobe and how we were going to pack it.  We all have a very small number of clothes packed in labelled packing cubes -sounds anal I know, but it has paid off being so organised when we have stayed in 31 different locations in 90 days and we always know where everything is!!  (So far we have lost 1 item of clothing…)