I have said it before, and I will say it again… traveling with a child is perhaps one of the greatest things in the world. Yes, it is hard. Yes it can be exhausting. But it is inspiring and it is breathtaking, and it opens up the world to children in ways that the typical classroom cannot. I am sure my perspective is different from many. I am raising my daughter away from my family and away from the place where I grew up. While my daughter is American she doesn’t know the 50 States, but she knows that there are mountains for skiing in Lebanon and that you can float in the Dead Sea in Jordan… she is 5 years old. She knows how to say Hello in Vietnamese and how to say the alphabet in Arabic, English and French. She took a ride on the head of an elephant down the streets of Jaipur during an Indian wedding and played with a baby black tip shark in the Indian Ocean. Yes, there are draw backs to living away from a family support system, I am very comfortable admitting this. She does not have the same interactions with her cousins or extended family, and this is often difficult. But I suppose there are trade offs with every single life decision. I promised to myself a long time ago that I am not going to live with regrets. I am going to life the best life I can, and I hope to bestow the same kind of life upon my daughter.
We travel – a lot. It is one of my favorite things to do – ever. When I am not traveling I am planning for my next holiday. These holidays might never EVER happen, but I love to plan. Planning for holidays was a bit easier before we had a child, but now we have a 3 1/2 year old, and we made the conscious decision that we did not want to stop traveling – so we didn’t. We still travel. A LOT. Singapore, India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, England, Ireland, Scotland, France, Italy, The Netherlands, The Seychelles – yes. We still travel. And truth we told some aspects of travel are more enjoyable with a kid. I say some because there is little downtime when you travel with a small child. There are no long mornings of lounging around. Planning almost always needs to happen. Certain parts of the world are probably better left for later in life, and other are wide open. That is what I am going to focus on… the other parts. The wide open parts. The parts we do focus on. The parts that we have explored from top to bottom.
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