Preparations

February 8, 2018 – Frankfurt, Germany

We are leaving for our big trip very soon and are more than excited to do so. There are still plenty of things to be done before we can pass our keys to my sister, who will be housesitting our apartment while we are traveling.

The apartment has to be cleaned. Some (more) shopping has to be done. We have to get our Camera and GoPro ready and our memory cards free of the old pictures and videos that are typically stored on them (and from which you never know whether or not you have them saved somewhere already). We have to decide which clothes we take along, wash them and then FINALLY we have to pack our backpacks (which might be the biggest challenge after all), get to the airport, hop on a plane and fly to Singapore where our journey starts.

Before we do all that I’d love to tell you more about our trip around the globe first.

I honestly had this idea on my mind for a few years already. To take some time off work together as a family to explore our beautiful world. Joe and I both love traveling and we hope that Levi will too. As a matter of fact we are quite certain that he does already. We took him to Canada when he was just three and a half months old and he was the happiest boy ever. So as usual we are quite optimistic about this.

Our plan is to fly from Germany to Singapore where we will spend five nights. We are then heading to Christchurch, New Zealand where we will stay in a hotel for the first two nights before we rent our camper that will take us all across New Zealand in five weeks. I have a rough plan of spending about three weeks on the South Island and the remaining two on the North Island but we will see how it all works out when we get there. Our next stop is going to be Australia where we will be driving up the coast from Sydney to Cairns in four weeks. After that we have a couple of weeks left before heading home and we are still discussing on where to spend them. Most likely we will not decide before we leave but some ideas that we have are to stop at Uluru for a couple of days and then fly to San Francisco or New York City and back home from there. Or we might stop on the Hawaiian Islands instead or on a remote island in the South Pacific or we might fly home via an Asian city again. There are so many options and we will just see how we feel like then. In total we plan on traveling for about three months – so no need to get stressed out about things just now.

The intention of this trip is not primarily to see all the places we are about to visit (although it is quite a nice by-product) but mainly to spend quality time as a family of three. ‘Well, why don’t you do it at home then’ some might wonder. There are many reasons and I could honestly recite on this question for hours but let me try to make it short. Our time together at home would never be as intense as it will be during this trip. Joe would fix stuff in the apartment, we would clean up, go grocery shopping, do the laundry, clean up again and all those things that you just do when you’re at home. I know this as a fact because this is mainly what we do when we do have some days off together. This is not what we want during Joe’s paternal leave though. We want to be with our son and with each other one hundred percent. We want to explore things together and we do not want to be distracted by an apartment full of stuff that holds us back on the most important thing in life – to actually live it. It is for that very reason that we have planned this trip and it is for that very reason that we are both looking forward to it so, so much…