Grateful, Together: A Reflection on Our Year(ish) World Tour
331 days. That’s how long we spent traveling the globe together. Accounting for sleep time, Meg, Sydney, Oliver and I spent 4,965 hours together. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average working parent in the US gets about 1.4 hours of face time with their teenage children per day. That means that our family crammed roughly ten years of togetherness into the past eleven months.
That was always a secret part of the plan.
I shared in my original blog post that Meg and I always carried the dream of spending a year abroad with our kids before the window of their childhood closed. What I didn’t share is that we also wanted to hold that window open a bit longer. We know that the few remaining years we have them at home will be more about their friends, independence, and activities than spending time with their parents. As a case in point, it would be a full two weeks after we returned to Columbus that we sat down, just the four of us, for dinner together. So this trip was also an exercise in forcing them to be close us for one more year.
To be clear, this was 100% not our kids’ idea. No twelve or fourteen year-old (ever) says they want to spend the next 5,000 waking hours with their parents and sibling.
And not all of those hours were bliss. We crammed into tiny Tokyo hotel rooms, spent 21 consecutive days driving and sleeping in a fart-filled camper van across New Zealand, and battled over the smallest possible amount of school work. We fought. We got on each other’s nerves. I swore more in my children’s presence (“Horse’s ass!”) in the last year than all previous years combined.
But we lived together. We learned together. We grew together. We have a stockpile of stories, memories, and inside jokes to relive for the rest of our lives. That was the theme of our last week, spent quietly in Belize. We swam, snorkeled, and fished along the world’s second longest barrier reef. But mostly we reflected. We made lists of our favorite experiences in each country. We remembered our favorite meals. We recalled unexpected moments that scared, surprised, delighted, and disappointed.
We also adapted. Our original plan was to “live” in twelve countries in twelve months. Meg and I would do yoga in the mornings. I’d bring home warm baguettes from a local bakery. The kids would joyfully and dutifully do their homeschool assignments before we explored the local sites. We might even learn a bit of the local language. This vision for our experience was, um, optimistic. Baguettes?
We pretty much crashed that plan from the start for two reasons. First, we learned that some friends would be in Switzerland when we would be spending a month in Slovenia. So we lopped two weeks off our AirBnB in Slovenia and shifted two weeks to the Jungfrau region of Switzerland. We ended up planning a lot of our trip around connecting with friends and family. Second, we got a little bored. After a lovely but rainy month in England’s Lake District, we decided to speed up our pace a bit.
In total, we visited 24 countries, staying in 75 hotels, homestays, camper vans, and AirBnBs along the way. We added unexpected visits to India, Japan, and Peru. We dropped Cuba and Chile. When we needed a break, we stayed in one place for two weeks, at most. Then we ramped things up again. We booked flights, accommodation, and experiences about six weeks out and adjusted things based on how we felt. Ultimately, we decided to come home about 10 days earlier than planned, so that our kids could enjoy a bit of summer before re-entering school.
We also held naive visions of the kids embracing homeschool. We created a template for researching each country we visited. Describe the country’s form of government. How do you say “hello,” “goodbye,” and “thank you” in the language? List three local foods. Nope. Nope. And nope. Trying to force structured learning became a fight that we quickly realized was ruining our experience. So we shifted to experiential learning. We hired guides for walking tours, booked cooking classes, and visited peoples’ homes. We were able to maintain both kids’ progress in math, gratefully. However, traditional, structured learning just didn’t work for us. So we ditched it.
Another unexpected aspect of our tour is that almost nothing went wrong. I never would have said, let alone published, these words before we returned home. But we traveled the world for 331 days without any major illness or injury. No one robbed or pickpocketed us. We didn’t even experience any travel issues. Across 56 flights and 38 airport selfies, we only had one cancellation (our VERY FIRST flight from Columbus to Iceland on United). Our bags were delayed only twice due to connections in “civilized” aiports like Heathrow and Houston. All I can say is that we were very, very lucky.
We often are asked which country or experience was our favorite? This is an impossible question to answer. But it’s a fun one because it forces each of us to think through the many amazing experiences we’ve had this year. I’m a nature guy. For me, the natural beauty of Iceland’s waterfalls, the Jungfrau Massif in Switzerland, glaciers and fjords in New Zealand, and the Peruvian Andes is hard to beat. But I also loved the throbbing urban energy of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, with all the amazing street food vendors and motorbikes whizzing everywhere. Reuniting with our friends in Lesotho and exposing our kids to a unique service experience. Feeding elephants in Thailand, swimming with whale sharks in Tanzania, watching a cheetah eat a wildebeest in Kenya, walking with a 100 year-old giant tortoise in the Galapagos… Now I just sound like an asshole. These are just a few highlights among too many to count.
A lot of people also ask how the whole experience changed the kids. Or us. I love this question. The answer is that only time will tell. Who knows how the experiences of the last year will manifest in the people that our children grow up to become? We’ve finished unpacking our bags but will be unpacking this trip for years.
We love all the questions people have asked us since we returned. And we are grateful that so many people are interested in our experiences. Whether it’s how we’ve changed, what country we liked most, or what we plan to do next, all I can say for certain is that I’m grateful. Grateful to have made this dream a reality. Grateful to have a life partner like Megan. Grateful for each other. Grateful we came through the whole thing in one piece.
Grateful to be home.
