Aren’t You Scared?
How we plan travel with our six children.
Dear Adventurous Reader,
One frequent thing we are told about our future travel plans is that they sound dangerous. How do we consider danger while traveling with six children?
How can we think about travel when the world is in such turmoil?
The world is full of wars, at least that is what we are told. The world is full of bad people doing bad things, looking to destroy all of civilization with one foul swoop.
Except it is not Full of them.
The world has fights and skirmishes. We vilify regions because of what we hear on the news, amplifying our bad thoughts in the process. We get our opinions and make generalizations from small snippets of press, because when we look at a region in 5 minutes, we want to see the good and bad in a flash.
Travel forces us to look at a country differently. Rather than “Is it safe?” we ask, “Where can we safely visit?” In doing so, we can see places we want to go, and then see if it is safe to visit or a place we should avoid.
“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.” — J.R.R. Tolkien
We were in Canada and we were not attacked by bears. We are in America now, and I have not been shot. We were in New Zealand and overheat in the hot springs.
Fear is what we are sold when we watch the news. Our research tells us different things about different countries. While the News says “It is dangerous”, our research often says “It is dangerous, but you can avoid the danger these ways…” A healthy dose of fear is a great motivation for better research into our future travel plans.
We wouldn’t enter a country if we thought that our lives were at risk.
Where To Next?
People often ask us where we are going next, we have a vibe that we aren’t finished traveling just yet. If you’d like to know, we are thinking either Central America or Europe — either place seems to be calling our name.
“They both sound dangerous.” A quote from my email this morning.
Danger, though, is a matter of research and understanding. It is easy to qualify a nation’s safety based on what we hear in the news, but it helps to zoom in, and find out more information. Lots of reading, and discussion helps us to make decisions on where to go.
Where Other People Have Walked Before…
In Canada, Gramps was a wonderful source of information on Mexico. We went over maps, laid out on the bench, and pointed at places of interest. Ways to get around. Things to be careful of. We discussed border crossings, local militia and how to travel on the roads of Mexico.
We talked to our good friends about their experiences in Central America. They had traveled there with younger children and said “As long as you get far away from the border as quickly as possible, you’ll be fine.” There are problems with drugs close to the borders.
We talked specifics of traveling the roads in our car, and we talked about great places to visit, and food to try.
Talks like this are helpful: they give us confidence to make decisions; they are filled with small tips and tricks. By talking to people who have experienced the area, we can explore the country in words before by sight.
Reading and Reading
Information, the more you have, the more informed the choices you make. Reading about an area give us confidence to travel. Where to visit. Places to stay. How to camp. What to look out for. Where families stay. Regions that are good or bad.
The Australian government has Smartraveller as a source of information about the world. It is helpful in finding out about regions they recommend traveling to, health information about those regions and information beyond standard news.
The Path Walked Before
We are a member of a families travel group on Facebook that has been an awesome resource. Reading news about families that are like us, asking questions, and reading over discussions, is a great way to become familiar with places to see and how safe it is in a country without being there.
We aren’t the first to travel to a country. We won’t be the last. We are just looking at how we should travel to have the best experience we can.
It is a Matter of Where You Place Risk
We wouldn’t travel if we lived in fear. We are doing the best we can, with the information we have, to make travel plans into the future. Part of it is courage, but courage without a solid foundation is not courage.
“On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.” Chuck Palahniuk
If we made all our travel plans from the News and the media, we’d stay at home. Part of traveling is accepting that danger is always around us, and that by by accepting that, we can make decisions to keep us as safe as possible.
As Australians we understand that a small insect can harm, or kill someone. We know better than to run into long grass, on a hot day, just in case of finding snakes. We don’t change into a new country unprepared and blindly hoping our safety will follow behind.
Research and investigation — from many sources — before crossing a border make us feel a little safer in our decisions.
But, if the food is good enough, we’ll go just about anywhere.
This post was originally posted on There and Somewhere. It is our little travel blog, where we talk about getting about with our six children. You should see what other cool adventures we are having…
