Making the Decision
I think making the decision to pack up your life and leave it all behind is the hardest step on this journey.
We have a good life. Chuck and I had good jobs. Our kids love their friends, activities and school. We are really settled living in this beautiful area of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. We ski all winter on the local mountains, and boat all summer. Our kids ski race, dance, play soccer/lacrosse/basketball/baseball, they do Parkour and have an amazing art class. We find time to travel in the pockets of time in our busy lives.
2017 and 2018 have been tough years for our family. We have struggled through illness and death consistently over the past two years. These types of experiences are an opportunity to evaluate what is really important in life. We did that. For us this is what is important:
-Spending time together as a family
-Living outside our comfort zone
-Growing our understanding about this world, its people, its environment and its opportunities
-Giving our children their best opportunity to learn
-Adventures
-Fun
-Experiences that become memories
After travelling with the kids when they were 5 months and 3 years old through Europe for 4 months, we knew that it would be amazing to travel around the world. We have talked about it occasionally over the past 7 years as a dream. When we created our family vision for living our best life, everything on it was travel and adventure related, there was no “stuff”.
When we realized we are in a position to pack up and leave, and that the timing for our kids was right, we just decided. We decided 2018 would be the last year of our “routine life”. Chuck retired first and I followed. Jacob is finishing up elementary school, and as the youngest kid in his grade he will benefit from a year of growth before entering Middle School. Sophie will miss Grade 3, Oh Well!
So we made the decision. That was the toughest part so far.
Creating the Dream
We made the decision about a year before we are leaving on this adventure. We have decided to start with a plan to leave for a year. Too early to really start booking we started with the dreaming, finding and following other travel families, Google Maps and Pinterest!
I started by googling and searching Facebook and Instagram for families that are travelling. I scoured their blogs and pages for ideas on where families enjoy travelling. looked hard for places that are off the beaten track, places that offer a learning opportunity for the kids and places that looked cool.
Anytime I saw somewhere I thought looked interesting I created a Pinterest Board (Tea Pea) for that country and then added that place, experience or whatever it was. I gathered a lot of itineraries, lists of best things to do, travel tips and some good general travel information. I love how Pinterest helps organize the information as specifically as you wish, and it is easy to find.
By dreaming and surfing the internet I have established some priorities and non-negotiable for our planned year of wandering. They are:
-Spending time in Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Victoria Falls). A region not travelled by many families.
-Finding as many places to ski along the way as possible.
-Travelling to locations that are hard to get to from home in Vancouver, Canada.
-Travelling to places we don’t have in our sites in the future (Eastern Europe, India and Australia are on the list for future trips).
-Greece is a must, Jacob finished reading “Percy Jackson” and is adamant he wants to visit the locations of the Greek Gods…Mount Olympus here we come!
-We won’t travel with an itinerary that doesn’t allow flexibility. We aren’t collecting countries, sites or experiences, we will wander and see where we end up.
This dreaming phase continued until we were 6 months out from our established Date of Departure…July 8, 2019. Then the planning needed to begin.
Creating the beginning of an itinerary
I always start our planning our adventures with way too much on the itinerary. I think this is normal. It is a process of putting on everything I dream of doing and then look at the logistics of the dream and pare it down to a reality. Cast a wide net and then reign it in.
I have created a Google Map where I have pinned our “set itinerary ” and our “wishlist”. It is constantly evolving and I edit it as we book flights, transportation and lodging. It is fun to look at and play with. It also helps see what route makes the most sense.
Creating the beginning of an itinerary actually happened quite easily for us. We knew we were going to travel in a mostly Easterly direction and that Africa is a priority. Africa in the winter offers some of the best wildlife viewing because the vegetation is at its lowest offering fewer places for the animals to hide. It also happens to coincide with our departure from home. We decided that we would make our way to Southern Africa as a starting point…with a few stops along the way! So what makes sense to us?
The launching place from Vancouver for most international travel is London, England. So we knew we would begin in London. Considering our travel priorities, we decided we would not stay long in London, but use it as a place to work on our jet lag. We planned 3 full days in London and will fill the time with a trip to the Harry Potter Studio Tour, the musical Wicked and some site seeing in between (either walking or on a hop on/hop off bus).
Having spent 4 months in Europe we also knew we didn’t want to use our time returning to any of the countries visited. Spain has not yet made that list so we decided it would be our next stop. We will travel from London to Barcelona, Spain. I looked quite extensively at the best mode of travel within Spain and decided that as it will be high season, that we would like some flexibility to wander, that the best would be to rent a car. So we will spend 10 days travelling from Barcelona to Gibraltar by car.
Our next destination, that I have wanted to visit for such a long time, is Morocco. The ferry travels from Tarifa, Spain to Tangier, Morocco. We will spend 2 weeks wandering in Morocco including Chefchaouen, Fes, a camel trek into the Sahara Desert with Sahara Camel Trips, Marrekesh, Essaouira and Casablanca.
From Casablanca we will fly to Johannesburg. Oh what a long flight (via Dubai), but it will be so worth it! We spent a long time trying to decide whether to take a tour our self drive, but we have decided on self drive. It has been an interesting conversation as there is a lot of fear for safety for travel to Africa from our friends and family. Africa as a continent is so mysterious to us in North America, and we seem to talk about the continent as if it were a country. For our previous travel to Tanzania we hired a company to guide us and loved the experience. By reading and talking to other travellers we have discovered that Namibia and Botswana are some of the safest countries in the world. We won’t be spending much time in Johannesburg, but will use it as a launch pad for the rest of our travel.
Now planning for a self drive in Southern Africa has been intimidating and we haven’t found a lot of information. What we have found is a travel agent who is helping us with our itinerary and bookings. We have hired a 4WD Toyota Hilux with two tents on top for our 6 week journey and are working on finalizing our plans.
This is the end of what we are actually “booking”. We are working so hard to book this first part as it will be high season, the beginning of our adventures and the furthest out of our comfort zone. As a result we are introducing some comfort into the planning and journey…a little bit of “certainty”.
From Southern Africa we have a loose plan that is flexible enough to change depending on what we feel like doing. That plan includes the following:
-1 week of vacation from our adventure in Seychelles
-2 weeks in Ethiopia, including the Danakil Depression
-2 weeks in Egypt including a Nile cruise
-2-4 weeks in Greece, maybe renting a camper?
All of our plans are flexible. We realize that we will have to see what we want as a family. If we love somewhere we will stay for awhile, if we hate somewhere we will leave, if we love travelling our year may become longer, if we are really unhappy we will come home.
