Meandering Around the World

I am worried about lots of things. Most importantly, will my kids be bored, will they be fussy and miserable, will they hate us for taking them out of their school and away from their friends? Will they want to go home two months into the trip? And then, how will we cope when they are fussy and bored and hate us and want to go home?

Secondarily, I’m also worried about finding a pace for our travels. I like seeing or doing at least one new thing everyday when traveling but my kids (and spouse) love lazy days and we frequently find whole days go by where they have not gotten out of their pajamas, especially during vacations. So I know we are going to have to build in some regular down time but how? Given that we have gone halfway around to world to get to some place, it seems like blasphemy to sit around and watch TV for hours in a hotel room! Actually I am assuming most of the time we will not be staying at places fancy enough for english TV but that only means pent up desire will want to be met! Compromises will have to be made. They will be bringing movies loaded onto itouches and ipads so they can definitely get their fix while in transition on buses and trains and we will factor in beach stops where we really do just chill, not to mention already promised waterparks and zorbing (tho somehow that doesn’t seem to count as “lazy” but whatever) but there will be a certain amount of “we are in Borneo, we need to see some orangoutangs today”. Some people have suggested keeping one day a week quiet to just organize and do errands and that’s a good idea. But does that means just staying in our room and doing laundry or does a day of meandering around town and stopping for chai count? Do they have to get out of their pajamas? We’ll have to see.

We are not buying a RTW ticket because, frankly, there is no way we could stick to a preset itinerary and we know changing 5 or 6 tickets simultaneously will be ridiculously expensive, not to mention limited to whatever cheapo seats were on our RTW ticket category. More flexibility obviously allows us to pick and choose where we want to go and when we want to go. We have enough of a budget to decide on the fly where and how to move on and enough time to settle in one place if it turns out we like it. However, this does mean I will always have to be nailing down the next stop on our itinerary as we move. And personally, I am just a little bit worried about being stuck on the computer researching and booking tickets/accommodation rather than out exploring. Then I will begin wondering why it is I am the only one capable of sorting out logistics, get resentful and have a big blowout with hubby in front of the kids, everyone crying on the side of the road… Really, planning for all eventualities.

You may wonder why I am not worried about health issues but I figure, those could happen anywhere (my daughter picked up a MRSA infection in my uncle’s house in England, and broke an ankle stepping off a curb in New York city), they are not regulated to South America or South East Asia. We are planning vaccinations, already picking up malaria pills and going to be sensible about mosquitos in general. Quite frankly, if something happens, it happens and we will deal with it then. I hope it won’t!! But they have hospitals and doctors who are probably well versed in whatever tropical ailment we encounter. And going back to my kids’ love of lazy days, they’d probably jump at the excuse of a tummy bug to hang around in bed and play games on their Itouch. In their pajamas.

I am so not impressed with One World. Their RTW website is terrific, just click on a map and seemingly all your dots are connected. But then when you get to the nitty gritty of picking flights it all goes to hell in a handbag. To get from India to Thailand you have to go via Hong Kong, to go from Thailand to Malaysia, back vou go thru Hong Kong turning an 1 1/2 hr flight into a 9 hr ordeal. Not to mention the constant message “no flights available” meaning you might be stranded in some town for days till a “L” grade seat becomes available. Don’t think we are going to go with this company.

It’s difficult to balance the need for structure with flexibility. With 6 people we may not be able to afford to just jump on a plane at a moment’s notice, especially for the big jumps. On the other hand between Ming and Vincent people may be coming and going at various and random times as we meet up and reconnect. Maybe I should just think of myself and the 3 youngest as one pod and let Vincent and Ming join us as they will. We will probably end up with a skeleton RTW ticket from airtrek which we will fill in with local transport within SEA & SA but it depends on how easy it is to change the itinerary and what the fees will be to do that.

DE desperately wants to go back to his regular summer camp before the trip so that means we can’t leave till August which means it is well & truly only a 12 month trip since we have to arrive back in the states August a year later in order to give us a month to catch our breath and gear up for starting a new school..

Update – as of now, Dec. 2010, we still haven’t bought any tickets but I now think we will just buy the first few leg (NY – London – Estonia) and maybe the flight between China & India. We will be taking trains between Estonia, Russia & China. Once we are in India we will just buy the rest of the tickets as we go along.