DH and I just finished a month long, work intense project that I’ll be writing about in a few blogs down the road. In the meantime, now that every spare second isn’t taken up, back to our regularly scheduled blog!
Last blog I wrote about the things I wish I had done differently when we went to southern Spain for three weeks last summer. This blog is about what we did correctly on that trip. Continue reading “International Travel with 2 boys: What we did RIGHT”
Not many people take a five-year-old boy on a transatlantic flight. Now I know why. Going to Europe with young kids is like having the proverbial root canal without lidocaine. Maybe your family deals with jet lag better than mine (if so, props to you), but my kids start to act like hooligans when confronted with jet lag. And yes, our parental patience is shorter when we’re sleep deprived (why’d we become doctors again then?) 😉
3 weeks is a long time to travel with a 5 and 7 year old. We used this trip (which was a home exchange) to “test and scale” for a bigger trip down the road. Originally we had been thinking about doing a “gap year” next year to travel extensively. After a lot of thought, we decided no. Sure, a gap travel year sounds awesome on paper, but the actual day to day of it isn’t something we’re interested in doing right now. So we decided to do something else instead (stay tuned for future news about these plans—they’re big. Well, at least for us.)
Am I glad we took the kids to southern Spain, etc. for 3 weeks this past summer? Yes. It was incredible, unbelievable, surreal—and amazing memories were made. But it was also a very difficult journey that stretched us to our limits (I know: first world problems. Sorry). Lucky you though: I took notes during that trip so I could share my scar tissue with you. Read on to avoid my mistakes.
Continue reading “International Travel with 2 boys: Hard Lessons Learned”
Last week I wrote about Home Exchange and discussed the common objections to it. In this week’s blog I’ll give you tips to save yourself headaches with a home exchange:
Continue reading “Frugal Travel-The-World and Stay-for-free Option! (Part II)”
What if I told you there’s a way to stay for free in people’s homes all over the world and they won’t be home? There’s just a few catches: a) you have to pay a yearly fee to be part of this awesome club and b) you have to be willing to let them stay in your house too. It’s called Home Exchange, and I love this program.
Since I was an exchange student to Germany, I’ve always been interested in this concept of home exchange (seeing this movie helped too). When we had our huge doctor McMansion in New York, my husband had zero interest in swapping homes.
Then we sold that house and moved, met a teacher who told us about this wonderful thing called home exchange—had we ever heard of it? We should look into it, you know, because she’d used it for ten years with her four kids and traveled all over the US with home exchange. She never had a bad experience in the decade she participated in the program!
Well now.
This is the part where I should confess we’re on the tail end of a three-week home exchange at a beach house in Southern Spain in a gated community with a pool. Did I mention this house stay was free? Continue reading “Frugal Travel-The-World and Stay-for-free Option! (Part I)”
