I’m hosting an exciting event in San Francisco on October 18 that’s part of a nationwide network of events called Meet, Plan, Go! to help others plan and fulfill their extended-travel dreams. I hope you’ll read more about it—and find out why we went on our journey, in spite of a list of reasons not to, and concluded “it’s the best thing we ever did.”

Related posts:

1. How To Plan A Year-Long Family Travel Itinerary
2. Happy New Year and New Blog

The lookout next to our lodge in the Blue Mountains (click to enlarge).

The alternative title for this post could be, “How We Ended Up Off A Beaten Path Near The Blue Mountains.”

Our home for the week is at the end of a road in a thick, misty gum tree forest where wild parrots fly overhead and the cliffs of the Blue Mountains plunge into a forested canyon. In the mornings, the parrots flock for a feast of birdseed offered up by Colly and Kyle’s outstretched hands.

"A bird in the hand is worth a loo in the bush" -- the parrots make up for some of the inconvenient aspects of this eco lodge.

We’re exploring nearby trails, enjoying the offbeat towns of Blackheath and Katoomba, and unplugging at a cabin at the Jemby-Rinjah Eco Lodge, which is deep in the woods with no traffic noise, no Internet access and very few other guests. I love the simple, natural way of life — but I admit I was shocked to discover that the cabin’s toilet lacks what we all take for granted: running water and a flusher. It’s just a seat above a pit, a.k.a. “a roto loo composting system.”  At least I have good reason now to argue that the others should put the lid down when they’re done!

Whenever we find ourselves in a weird and wild place like this, I think to myself, We’re a long way from Piedmont — how did we get here? The simple answer is that we reserved this cabin about two months ago. We figured we wanted a rustic setting after two weeks in Sydney, but didn’t want to drive too far or spend money on a flight to elsewhere in Australia. The Blue Mountains National Park seemed like a no-brainer. Our research turned up a New York Times article recommending this affordable eco-lodge, and that was enough to convince us to book it.

As the above example suggests, planning an itinerary is a very unscientific and subjective process that involves looking inward at values and priorities as well as looking outward at the world of possibilities. It’s always a balancing act between dreams and reality — that is, limitless interests versus limited time and resources. Sometimes it’s fascinating, but just as often it’s frustrating.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the process not only because we’re in the throes of researching the final leg of our trip, but also because we spent a lovely half-day with a family in Sydney who invited us over to get advice on how they should plan their year-long trip around the world. Our conversation brought back so many memories of how bewildered we felt one year ago when we stared at the map on the One World airline website and tried to figure out which continents — let alone which countries and cities — we should visit, and how to make the route work out.

We’re less methodical and less organized than some traveling families we know who plan and budget every detail far in advance of departure. If Morgan and I were traveling without kids, we’d probably plan even less and be more like the backpackers we were on our college trip overseas. But the reality is that traveling with two kids means we can’t just “wing it”; we have to book places in advance so we’re assured we have a relatively affordable and pleasant place to sleep and to minimize the stress of getting from one point to another. Long-term family travel differs significantly from single or couple’s travel in part because we need apartment-style lodging that can sleep all four of us and has a kitchen for cooking meals, which usually takes more work to find than a standard hotel room.

Our cabin here has the kind of cozy kitchen we seek when researching rentals.

The problem with travel planning is it can turn into a giant time suck. We could easily spend eight hours a day on the Internet reading about destinations, debating one over the other, comparing lodging options, and then trading emails with apartment managers and arranging overseas wire transfers to those who won’t take credit cards. We have spent days like that, and it’s no fun. Rather than searching for “the best” deal in “the best” place, we found it’s better to research just enough to feel that a choice seems pretty darn good, and then go for it.

Over the past year, we’ve developed these guiding principles to plan our itinerary, and I hope they might help other families contemplating a far-flung, months-long journey:

Less is more. The biggest mistake any family can make in planning an itinerary is trying to go to too many places and do too much. Packing, checking out of a place, driving or flying, and then checking in and settling into somewhere new is stressful on the kids and kills the better part of a day. We’ve discovered we’re happiest when we go for depth over breadth; this is, we move around less and settle into a community for a couple of weeks. During two months in New Zealand, we experienced both road-tripping — sleeping in a new town almost every night — and two-week stays at a couple of main destinations (Nelson and Queenstown). It was exciting to see so much, but overall we had a more satisfying time at the two-week spots, where we could really get to know the community and establish normal family routines such as planning meals and doing schoolwork.

A year ago, we considered choosing one major destination per month and renting an apartment there for four weeks. That would have been a cheaper way to go — the more you move around, the more money you’re likely to spend on lodging and everything else — but in hindsight I’m glad we didn’t do that; we probably would start to feel restless after a couple of weeks, and we don’t want to sacrifice too many opportunities to explore different places. For whatever reason, one to two weeks feels like the optimal amount of time to spend in any one location.

Accept the fact you can’t see every “must-see.” While we were in Argentina, we agonized over whether we should buy plane tickets and take a few days to see Iguazu Falls. Now we’re in Australia, and people are telling us we’re crazy to miss the Great Barrier Reef. I feel certain, however, that we’ve done the right thing by skipping both those destinations because of the time, money and effort it would take to get there. We’ve got enough “must-sees” on our calendar. Plus, some of the most interesting travel times happen outside of typical tourist destinations, in ordinary towns where real people really live.

Book far in advance for holiday seasons, but otherwise it’s okay to fill in the details as you go. There is no way we could have planned everything before we left home — it would have taken too much time, and we were preoccupied with packing and moving out. All we did was determine the outline of the itinerary so we could purchase the One World tickets (and even then we changed dates and destinations along the way), and we found apartments in our first two major destinations. We also found a special place to stay during the week of Christmas. Otherwise, we’ve been ironing out the details and booking lodging approximately two months in advance of where we’ll be. It has worked out well, although we learned the hard way that we should have booked earlier for the holiday season Down Under (mid-December through January) because some places we wanted to stay were already full. Similarly, if we were going to be in Europe over summer, we would have to book much farther in advance.

One advantage to staggering the process and letting the itinerary evolve more organically (for lack of a better word) is we’re more open to change. For example, we initially planned to go to Athens and a still-to-be-determined Greek Island, with a side trip to Ephesus, Turkey, to see the Roman ruins there. Then, about three months ago, we started hearing a steady drumbeat of Istanbul, Istanbul, Istanbul. An article here, a friend’s recommendation there — it was strange how we seemed to be receiving signals to go there. We resisted because getting there seems expensive, complicated and culturally too confusing. But then a couple of others whose opinions I respect mentioned something out of the blue about how they loved Istanbul. Meanwhile, the more we heard about Athens, the less alluring it seemed. The upshot is we’re going to change things around to go to Istanbul and spend more time in Turkey, less in mainland Greece.

Our front porch this week leads to a dense gum tree forest. Our kids are always happier in settings like this (and by extension, so are we), where they can wander outside and play, than in big cities.

Limit time in big cities, or at least balance it with time in the countryside. If we go to Istanbul, it’ll be for a week at most. We’ve found that big cities have two main drawbacks: they’re expensive, and they’re stressful on the kids. Colly and Kyle enjoy the city sites for a few days, but then the noise, the crowds, and the inability to go outside the front door and play freely starts to wear on them.

Plan around a hobby. For some, this might be art history or regional cuisine or mountain climbing. For Morgan and me, it’s trail running. We picked destinations with scenic trails and are taking detours to trail running events, which is why a campground in Daylesford, outside of Melbourne, is on our itinerary next weekend — it’s the site of a “dirt fest” with trail running, mountain biking and events for kids. I’m sure there are at least a hundred other destinations in Southern Australia that are more attractive and culturally significant than Daylesford, but we figure we’ll have fun connecting with other families and doing something we enjoy there. We never would have discovered the West Coast of New Zealand if not for the trail running event that prompted us to go there.

Morgan during a run/hike on a cliffside trail in the Blue Mountain range.

Don’t be shy — hook up with locals even if you barely know them. Tap into networks such as alumni groups, Facebook and friends-of-friends in order to meet people in your destinations, especially if those locals have kids that your kids can play with. In New Zealand, we met up with a friend-of-a-friend via Facebook and ended up having a magical day touring an area that only a local would know, and through this person we met a wonderful family who gave us the use of their house. Then we connected with really old friends who have kids our kids’ ages and spent a blissful two weeks in their home. I look forward to returning the favor to the family from Sydney when they swing through Northern California. Meeting new people and forming relationships is part of the joy of traveling — of life, really.

Use tried-and-true websites. We cast a wide net on the web when we research but return repeatedly to these sites: Trip Advisor, Lonely Planet and The NY Times Travel section. Morgan also is a master at using Google Earth and Google Maps to “see” a place in advance. We’ve actually decided against certain apartments because the street view on Google reveals they’re in a place that looks particularly shabby or inconvenient. We also rely on other traveling families’ blogs for recommendations (such as those listed on the right hand column of our blog). We don’t carry many guidebooks because we don’t want the weight; we read a few select books mainly to get an overview on a country or region, rather than specific recommendations.

Remember, “Wherever you go, there you are.” I start feeling flutters of anxiety about the big gaps in our itinerary that we still need to fill for April and May, but then the Jon Kabat-Zinn title Wherever You Go, There You Are pops in my head and helps me relax, having faith that we can make the best of wherever we end up if we have the right attitude. Whether we have a positive experience traveling depends less on the destinations themselves and more on what we do as a family — how we interact with each other, and with other people and the surroundings — wherever we go.

You can stand at the edge of the Grand Canyon and have a pretty lousy time if you’re annoyed by other tourists, pissed off at your spouse and frustrated that your kids don’t feel like hiking. Or, you can find yourself in a remote corner of Patagonia, smelling of carsickness after a difficult drive, and laugh uncontrollably upon discovering that your lodge lacks a view but has a bizarre collection of gnome figurines. As Morgan put it, “You can end up in some pretty weird places, but they can be a lot of fun.”

This is the iconic Blue Mountains shot: the legendary Three Sisters rock, which all the tour buses stop by to see. It's pretty, but ...

... we had a better time discovering this out-of-the-way waterfall on the other side of the canyon than staring at the Three Sisters.

Related posts:

1. One Year Later: The Time-Capsule Travel Letters and the ‘Eat Pray Love’ Backlash
2. Byways by the Blue Mountains
3. Announcing “Meet, Plan, Go!” for Extended Travel and Career Break Planning

The Sydney skyline as seen from a ferry.

As you can guess from the photo, we’ve started the five-week Australian leg of our journey! This past week was a blur as I left Morgan and the kids for a short trip back to California. The three of them transitioned from New Zealand to here, and I rejoined them midweek.

I felt the way this guy looks after I crossed the date line twice in a week. Morgan and the kids saw this koala at the Sydney Zoo.

At first I felt as bushed as a koala who looks drunk on eucalyptus midday. (Little-known fact from Friends of the Koalas: “Contrary to popular belief, eucalyptus leaves do not make koalas drunk. Koalas appear drunk or lazy because they have developed a low-energy lifestyle to compensate for their extremely low-energy diet.” What a bummer to discover — I liked the idea that this lovable species had evolved to be fat, lazy and perpetually buzzed.)

In the midst of the past week, each of us took time to mark the halfway point in our journey by doing the following exercise: write a letter to ourselves and the other family members. Reflect on the trip so far, making note of what memories stand out and our feelings about the past six months. Then imagine the second half of the journey (when we’ll go from Australia to Hong Kong, Spain, Italy, Greece and Turkey) and write down some hopes and expectations for those months. Don’t share the letter with anyone yet; seal it up and set it aside. Then, on the last night before returning home, open and take turns reading them to one another and reflecting further — not only about where we went and what we did, but also why we did it, how it affected us and what we’ll do next.

I have my friend Carolyn to thank (the one who hosted us in Queenstown, who’s an accomplished educator and world traveler) for suggesting this exercise, because it prompted me to think more deeply about how this trip has changed and surprised us. There’s no way I can fit all those ideas into a blog post, but I’d like to share some.

Here, then, are some surprises and revelations  in no particular order:

I really like my family. This wasn’t obvious to me before. Of course I love them — but did I like their company so much that I could spend all day, every day with them? As we planned this trip in early 2009, I seriously worried we would get sick of each other. I braced for the inevitability that we would bicker and get in one another’s way. What happened instead is they became my closest friends. We do bicker (that really is inevitable), but nonetheless I am happiest when we are sharing small spaces, such as a car or a hotel room, and when they are in sight or earshot. This is one reason I don’t miss our big house with its separate areas. Back home I occasionally found myself thinking “I need my space” or “my kids are driving me crazy,” but those thoughts don’t enter my head now.

Colly and Kyle are de facto BFFs. They’re reluctant to admit it, but the kids have developed a bond and have more fun together than ever before (see the earlier post on how long-term travel affects play and sibling relationships).

We don’t need much stuff. Traveling has made us less materialistic, less cluttered and more frugal. We have pared down to the essentials, and we value every item in our bags. I swear to God, nobody needs more than three pairs of shoes (sandals, running shoes, and close-toed leather shoes that are dressy but still good for walking around). We have purchased almost nothing as souvenirs, preferring to spend money on experiences and eating rather than on stuff. I look at price tags like never before and try to take home leftovers to make two meals out of one. We have to shop here in Sydney to replace some worn-out grubbies and to get some decent outfits for places like Barcelona and Rome, and the trip to the mall looms like a chore on our to-do list.

Kyle soaks in the Sydney Harbour scene. He's not the only one who's overdue for a haircut!

Related to the point above: We really don’t need all those toiletries and expensive skin and hair care products. I packed a mini-pharmacy when we left and discovered we didn’t need half the things we brought, and if we did need something, then we could buy a comparable product wherever we are. Brand loyalty faded quickly. My must-have conditioner from a salon ran out, and I replaced it with a product I had never heard of, at a mini-mart in Mendoza, for about one-tenth the cost, and my hair looked and felt pretty much the same. The idea of spending money to get my eyebrows and toenails done monthly now seems crazy. I recently wrote to a friend that these months of roadtripping have revived a latent hippie streak in Morgan and me, and we’re all overdue for haircuts.

I’m bigger. I weighed myself for the first time in months, and the scale confirmed what my tighter clothes and mirror told me: I’m enjoying the regional cuisine a little too much. I’ve got saddlebags that look well stocked for the long ride ahead. Lo que sea (whatever).

Long-term travel has leveled the playing field in our marriage. Morgan and I have a twenty-five year relationship with all the peaks, valleys and rocky terrain of a good trail run. These months away have helped our marriage in ways I didn’t expect, mainly because we’re more collaborative and united — we have to be, because we’re stuck together and need each other in these utterly foreign environments. We now work together on the essential things that often determine the (im)balance of power in a marriage, such as who controls the money, who cares for the house and who keeps the all-important calendar. The kids now look to their dad for answers and direction every bit as much or more than they come to me.  (One small example: Last night Colly asked me a question about makeup but went to Morgan for help with her hair.) Of course there’s still some division of labor — e.g. I do more than half of the homeschooling, he does more than half of the travel planning — but we trust one other to swap roles far more than we did before.

This notion hit me when I left them for my solo trip last week. I did not make multiple lists with endless reminders for Morgan about what he should do in my absence, and when he and the kids Skyped or emailed me details about their day, I did not second guess what they had or hadn’t done. I did not interrogate them about whether they were using sunscreen and flossing. I just felt happy for them and missed them. I trusted Morgan and respected him to a degree I know I wouldn’t have six months ago.

Morgan reading his Kindle in our Sydney apartment.

We’re reading books instead of the news. I’m guilty of political apathy. I’m not reading past many headlines. But I am reading — novels, memoirs, travel blogs — and savoring literature in a way I didn’t back home, where I had to deliberately make time to read just one book a month and my attention span shortened to article length. Morgan is reading about twice as much as I am, going off at least once during the day to read on his Kindle. And Colly and Kyle have become bookworms — they wander off and read, sometimes surreptitiously because they don’t want me to tell them to put away their books and get something else done. I truly doubt they would have discovered reading for pleasure back home, where reading is lumped together with homework and their time is so sliced and diced.

We’re not doing a lot of things we thought we’d do. Before we left, I had noble plans for various things we’d accomplish. I wanted to make a commitment to “voluntourism” — i.e., to volunteer for a worthy cause in each of our major destinations. I had images of the four of us pulling weeds in an organic farm in the countryside or handing out food at a soup kitchen in a city. None of that panned out. Volunteering takes time to set up, and takes time away from sightseeing, and quite frankly we have enough logistical wrinkles to iron out on a daily and weekly basis, so I let it go. I also wanted to attend a local church at least once a month, thinking it would be a good way to get a sense of the community we’re in, but we haven’t set foot in a church since we left the Bay Area (except to view the architecture). Like voluntourism, going to church felt like something we “should” do rather than really wanted to, so we let it go. Ditto with learning Italian (we started a “daily phrase” program but it petered out; I lost interest because it’s hard enough to study Spanish occasionally). And what about my fledgling career as a travel writer? Oh, yeah, I meant to get to that — I have all my notes from last year’s multimedia and travel writing seminars somewhere, along with ideas of stories to pitch to various websites and publications, and … well, this blog is about as far as I’ve gotten.

So far, no regrets. I wasn’t at all sure this trip would live up to the “no regrets” phrase in the blog’s tagline. The risks were huge: We jeopardized a career, strained relationships, risked our kids’ education and raided our savings. What if it all turned out to be a colossal mistake? What if we spent 11 months drifting around feeling homesick and anxious? What if we spent the whole time fighting? We had a long list of reasons not to leave home and go out on this longest of limbs. One thing that helped us make it happen was a refrain we heard from others who had taken time as a family for a similar trip: “It’s the best thing we ever did.” We heard it over and over, and now I’d say the same: It’s the best thing we ever did.

My favorite picture of the Sydney Opera House, courtesy of Colly.

Related posts:

1. Santiago’s Surprises
2. Sydney Wet and Wild
3. How To Plan A Year-Long Family Travel Itinerary