family gap year – Under 6 Overseas

344 Days Abroad

Published on July 26, 2019January 29, 2020 by karaLeave a comment

We have been abroad for 11 months and during that time we have travelled to 13 countries (14 if you count an afternoon killing time and dodging vendors at the border in Myanmar for a visa run.) We have been on more flights that I care to count and probably triple that in hotel rooms. We have dipped our toes in the Andaman Sea, the Gulf of Thailand, the South China Sea, the Java Sea and the Mediterranean. We have hired Ubers, GoJeks and Grabs, and ridden bicycles with kids in ergos, kids in seats, kids in tag-a-longs, and kids holding on for dear life. We have been in a horse-drawn cart and several bicycle rickshaws. We have chartered a helicopter, a flight and several boats. We’ve ridden in tuk-tuks, in songthaews and on the back of scooter-taxis. We’ve been on underground boats and open-ocean ferries, taken light-rail or subways, a diesel train through the countryside and a kiddie train around the mall. We’ve travelled by water buffalo, double-decker bus, gondola and longtail boat. We have rented cars and driven on both the right and the left-sides of the road and we have walked hundreds of miles.

The vast majority of the 344 days we’ve been away from home were spent just living a regular life, you know, grocery shopping, going to work or school or running errands, exercising and playing at parks. But strings of normal days have been punctuated with special events–the bucket list items–where we found ourselves awestruck, or dumbstruck, or starstruck, or physically struck (by cars, which actually happened twice.) We climbed the ancient Mesoamerican pyramids of Teotihuacan and stared into the blank eyes of the mummies of Guanajuato while in Mexico. We have kissed the Blarney Stone in Ireland, visited Stonehenge in England and participated in the Highland Games in Scotland. We searched for the Loch Ness monster, saw the Mona Lisa and stood in the front row of a Mumford and Sons concert. We bungee jumped. We hand fed elephants in Thailand and were blessed by a monk for safe travels. We visited the Angkor Wat temples and donated blood at a local hospital in Cambodia. We watched the light and sound show featuring over 42 buildings in Hong Kong from a sky bar patio. We released a lantern at the Loy Krathong festival and took a cable car over waterfalls and jungles before crossing the Golden Bridge in Vietnam. In Indonesia, we swam with sea turtles and snorkeled over a sunken statue. We saw both the Himalayan mountains of Annapurna and Everest. We witnessed the washing of a body with holy water from a Hindu temple and the cremation of the remains on the river bank in Nepal. Of course, Ben trekked to Everest base camp where he stared with his bare eyes at the tallest mountain in the world in all of its glorious wonder. We stood in Catherine de Medici’s bedroom and saw the collapsed roof of the Notre Dame Cathedral. On a brief layover in the United Arab Emirates, the kids and I visited the Burj Khalifa-the tallest building in the world. We have swung over the rice terraces in Bali, visited the Hanoi Hilton and broke into an abandoned women’s prison in Chiang Mai. We have seen the Liberty Bell, the White House and the Discovery space shuttle. And thanks to that monk’s blessing, we have managed to do with only one visit to ER and one minor bout of food poisoning.

Visiting the elephant sanctuary in Thailand

We have also grown a lot as individuals on our journey. The kids have been forced to travel for nearly a year without a stroller, making them confident road crossers and traffic minders. They have learned how to step off of escalators without help and how to buckle their own seatbelts. They have learned to drink out of water bottles in a moving car, to hold their own umbrellas upright, to get by with only a handful of toys and to go to bed by themselves without constant cuddling. We are impressed by both kids’ resilience with which they accept that they have no home, can’t speak regularly to their old friends, have to constantly leave new friends and have no control over their environment. And they have become more resourceful and patient than I could imagine. We have also travelled for 11 months without losing Falcon’s beloved Monkey Man which I consider a straight up miracle. We have kept our special, plastic, color-changing Chewbacca spoon that Falcon uses daily for his cereal, as well as more important items such as our wallets, ID cards, and cell phones.

Personally, I have gone a year without really wearing any make-up. I haven’t curled or blow dried my hair once. I occasionally pluck rogue eyebrows (although I don’t think that they ever really recovered from the over-plucking look of the 90’s.) My clothes are tattered from months of wear and line drying, and they have weathered the loss of 15 pounds in Nepal and gain of 10ish pounds in France. Grey hairs and sunspots have popped up like left and right, despite lasering the crap out of them in Thailand. Overall, one could say that I have succumbed to a low maintenance, somewhat cavewoman-like appearance. And to compound any stress that I have about returning home, I have agreed to attend my 20-year high school reunion on the way back. In fact, I will fly straight from Mexico into the heart of that madness, stretched out clothes, frazzled hair and all.

We have missed celebrating holidays like Christmas, Thanksgiving and Easter. Mother’s and Father’s days fell on different days in Europe than America so we felt a little disconnected from those holidays as well. Several of our friends have moved away from our hometown and my sister welcomed a new baby in our absence. I never thought that I would say this but we miss having a routine. We struggle not being productive, having time to ourselves and exercising. Although we have thankfully avoided some of this bizarre American presidency, we have been completely out of the loop of American politics, including the ability of vote. And…we have spent our entire savings and then some. We have cycled through a bazillion pairs of sunglasses, umbrellas, chapsticks and jars of peanut butter. We left with about 220 pounds of stuff for our move to Thailand and we will be returning with 120 pounds of bare essentials.

Overall, it’s hard to put into words all that we have seen and done without sounding vain or crazy. This year abroad may not have had resulted in a spiritual awakening or significantly altered the course of our lives but we will be returning mentally renewed and more confident. Our goal was to learn things and to have fun, and I think that we achieved that. We have checked off a lot of the items on our initial bucket list. But over the course of the past year, our bucket list has probably doubled in size, as there are many places that we would like to revisit when the kids get older and new places that we have heard about but didn’t have time to visit. For now though, we look forward to settling down a bit, planning our next adventures and binge watching some good ole American reality TV.

Let’s Go Where the WiFi is Weak

Published on April 28, 2019January 25, 2020 by karaLeave a comment

We left a balmy 85 degree Bali, Indonesia in the morning and found ourselves 4,600 feet up in Kathmandu by nightfall. We pulled sweaters out of our bags as we ran across the tarmac and felt instantly vindicated for carrying unused warm clothes around for so long. It goes against my penny-pinching instincts but we have learned from experience that it alleviates a lot of marital strife to pay extra for someone to meet us at the airport. Thankfully, a stout Nepali fellow from our hotel greeted us as we exited. Our trolley cart got caught in the potholes, a kid tantrum-ed and fell asleep which basically incapacitated one adult, there were what seemed to be a million taxi drivers yelling at the same time, clouds of dirt were illuminated by the headlights of many freakishly small minivans, and it smelled primal. Welcome to Nepal. Namaste dammit, namaste.

Of all the Western-mind blowing things in Nepal, there are a few completely bonkers places that I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you about. The first of which is Pashupatinath Temple. We have seen a lot of temples in the past 8 months, but this one was our first active Hindu temple. Without passing any judgement, Hinduism to an ignorant outsider is really intimidating with its pantheon of multi-armed, half-animal, half-human deities and kinda sexual overtones. Also intimidating are the 300ish very aggressive monkeys that live on the temple grounds. So, we hired a guide to better understand the temple’s significance AND to offer another line of defense against the straight-up rabid primates. I kid you not, he told us not to even look at the monkeys as you pass them because they would attack. We carried the kids on our backs, and Falcon spent the next hour with his face buried in my hair as he channeled his inner “happy place” far from Kathmandu.

I was blessed by a Sadhu, but of course I smeared the red powder and it looks like I killed someone.

Dating back to 400 B.C., Pashupatinath Temple is one of the most sacred temples in the world and (to make a long story short) is said to be the built on the site of where Shiva somehow lost a horn, which I think we can all agree is a pleasantry for “penis.” The inner sanctum of the temple is rightfully reserved for practicing Hindus and is a pilgrimage site for people nearing death, as it is believed that those who die in the temple will be reincarnated as a human, regardless of their actions during life. Because of this, elderly Hindus who are not likely to recover, are housed in a section of the temple as they await death. When a person does finally pass away, a ceremony is conducted on the banks of the Bagmati River or “Mini-Ganges” as our guide called it. The glorified, trash strewn stream runs through the center of the temple, and bodies are hauled down the water’s edge, washed with water running down from the temple, and then carried by family members to platforms for cremation. As you can imagine, we were totally fascinated. Funeral pyres burned in the background, and troops of the rage-screaming monkeys leapt from building to building, as our poor guide waited for us to finish peppering him with questions that were just utterly and completely mundane for him. Like, “Duh, of course the bodies and wood ashes from the cremation are just pushed into the river afterwards.” And, “No, it doesn’t bother anyone that there is a concert happening directly across the river from where someone’s mother is crying hysterically as a fire is lit in her husband’s mouth.”

Three funeral pyres on the banks of the Bagmati River.

Male relatives preparing a family member’s body for cremation by placing it on the concrete slab by the river and then pouring holy water from the temple over it.

Like this place isn’t wild enough, there is a shrine to Kali, the destroyer Goddess, where human sacrifices used to be made. Today, the Gods are appeased on holidays with animal sacrifices of cattle, ducks, goats and rabbits inside the walls of small stone temple adorned with an array of sexual acts. The temple is also home a handful of sadhus, or wandering holy men, that live in caves on the property. It is said that they have renounced worldly life and hope through meditation and contemplation to improve their karma and that of the community at large. The few that we saw sat together asking for exorbitant amounts of money in exchange for a small blessing and photo with their insanely long dreadlocks over your shoulder. Finally, as I mentioned earlier, after the cremation the remains are swept into a heaping, smoking pile in the Bagmati river-stream. Over the course of the 1-2 hours that we were there, we saw four cremations and it struck me how much debris was entering the water just from this temple. When I asked the guide about it, he mentioned that it was part of the cycle of life. Women do their washing downstream as the ashes and fat from the fires act like soap and help to clean clothes, and further down, the muck from the river bed is harvested to make bricks. All I could think was that although one’s soul maybe coming back as human, it seemed a little disheartening to know that one’s body is coming back as someone else’s tidy undies.

Our Year of Adventure

Published on February 10, 2019March 11, 2019 by karaLeave a comment

Our plan to travel the world was conceived many years ago, but was set into motion in September 2017. It had been 4 years since Ben and I had gotten married, 3 years since we had become parents, 1 year since I had been laid off, and to be honest, our lives had become a little stagnant. In order to spice things up, I ended up drafting a list of options from which Ben could choose: 1) move to another town where I could find a meaningful job, 2) try for a third baby or 3) travel full-time with our children. Each option had implications for our careers, for our relationships with our friends and family, and for our finances. After careful consideration, we decided to follow our dreams and started planning for the trip of a lifetime.

From the get-go, I think most people doubted that this trip would come to fruition. We had jobs, a house, a small savings, cars, loans, friends and family, and commitments just like everyone else. It’s hard for anyone to imagine leaving it all behind. But honestly, the hardest part of this journey so far was merely just making the decision to go. The rest of the pieces fell into place after. Fast forward to now, nearly 6 months into said trip, and I still feel like our plans are met with incredulity. It’s probably just me, but I feel ridiculous when I call home and tell my mom things like, “Ben wants to hike to Everest so we are going to Nepal.” I know her brain is flashing red and she’s racing through questions like, “Who really goes to Everest? How does one afford that? Don’t you need oxygen and gear to withstand a polar vortex? Where do you find a sherpa? Where will the kids be?” I imagine her silently rolling her eyes when I tell her that we are considering a side-business selling cardstock (purchased in Vietnam, carted across the world for 6 months and then sold on Etsy), and how far-fetched is sounds to say out loud that we plan to live with a family we’ve never met–in France–for free–for a month. But all of it is true.

When we planned this trip, I anticipated having a grand adventure, full of family time, visiting new sites and ticking off a few boxes from our bucket list. However sappy it sounds, what we’ve found is that everything is possible. That is not to say that we haven’t had some misfires. Anyone remember THIS post? But overall, we are proud about what we’ve accomplished so far and are excited about what we have lined up for 2019. Here’s a peek into where we’ve been and where we are going.

I am acutely aware of how absurd it all sounds that we tote our toddlers around the world, but once we settled in Thailand, it just became the norm. We have been inspired by families we have met that piece together jobs that allow them to travel or live wherever they want, that don’t let having one or two or three or four kids keep them from going where their hearts desire and that support each other in following their dreams. We are so glad that we made the decision to live and travel abroad, and we feel incredibly lucky to be living this life.

I also want to shout out some families that we have met in person and/or communicate with on Instagram that are truly #livingthedream. 🙂 All have quit their normal 9-5 jobs and are traveling the world with their kids. If you have a minute, check them out.

Full-blown Crisis Mode

Published on November 30, 2018January 29, 2020 by kara2 Comments

Existential crisis, that is. One might expect this from a recent college grad: someone undertaking a gap year abroad, before they start their career, find a significant other to settle down with and have kids. This is not what is expected of a 35+ year old woman who has graduated from college twice, who can count trips abroad on hands AND toes, who has had a career, found a significant other (uhhh, twice), settled down and had kids. We have just completed 100 days abroad and I thought that I would have been neck-deep in projects by now. I would be volunteering in an orphanage, I would be amazing my family with culinary Thai-American fusion delights, I would be on my way to fluency in Thai, driving a scooter carefree down the roadways, writing children’s travel books, maintaining a successful travel blog and spending my spare time becoming a svelte, tan Muay Thai fighting mom warrior. Alas, this has just not been the case.

Ben finished his TEFL (teaching English as a Foreign Language) certification and began working part-time as an English teacher to young teens. This has really challenged him and generally keeps him out of trouble most weekends. His obsession with CrossFit resurfaced briefly until a new, minor injury sidelined him. He is taking some private Thai lessons and has a scooter to zip around town. The kids have found their groove going to daycare twice a week and have made some expat friends that meet around town for playdates. However, we had an epic fail trying to enroll them into extracurricular activities. It turns out that American kids (or maybe just my American kids) are not as disciplined as Thai kids, and they spent the majority of a karate class making faces at themselves in the mirror. Needless to say, the teacher very politely refused to let them return so we spend our afternoons playing soccer in the yard instead.

I’ve found that even abroad, I’m only really good at cleaning the house. I compared my idleness to all of Ben’s activity and started stressing out. I also found myself wondering why we came here. What did I want to get out of this trip? Was it meeting my expectations? And most importantly, how will things be different in Oregon when we return home? I looked back on my original bucket list to see how we were faring and I was pretty pleased to see that we had ticked off many of the items.

Make paper out of elephant poop
Take a Thai cooking class
Ride a motorcycle across Laos (Ben)
Lose the baby weight
Scuba dive (Kara)
Raise a lantern during Loi Krathong –the Lantern Festival
Fight Muay Thai
Volunteering TBD
Take a junk cruise in Halong Bay, Vietnam
Eat lots of new fruit
Explore the Gardens by the Bay in Singapore
Teach the kids how to swim
See the sunrise over Angkor Wat
Master the art of using chopsticks
Teach English (Ben)
Jump off the cliffs at Chiang Mai’s Grand Canyon (Kara)

I started to have a change of heart about this crisis-thing. Moving abroad with two little kids and setting up a new life takes time and the fact that we got on a plane with one-way tickets is an achievement all on it’s own. It doesn’t necessarily have be defined by rushing through the typical backpacking checklists of 1) see the temple, 2) ride the elephants, 3) try Muay Thai once, 4) ride a tuk-tuk, etc. Furthermore, I should be proud of the things that I have accomplished this week. I rented a car and taught myself how to drive on the left-hand side of the road–in traffic–where lanes are just guidelines and speed limits don’t matter. I completed a doula training course and I can either use these new skills to help my friends in labor or start a brand new business. And I weighed myself at the little gym in our building and I have semi-intentionally lost 10 pounds since we arrived 3 months ago. Ben may be more decisive and outgoing in his planning, but I was accomplishing things too.

I’m still hoping to discover some hidden talent for like, reiki, drum circling, essential oil application, or shamanism. 😉 Instead of fretting over getting weird diseases, I really want to rekindle my passion for studying diseases. I dream of learning a useful language or writing something and getting paid for it, starting an Etsy shop, or even doubling down and getting all those plastic surgeries I’ve joked about having over the years. Ultimately, I decided that the goal of this gap year should be to do what makes us happiest. If that means that we move to Nepal for a month so that Ben can hike to Everest base camp, then that’s what we do. If it means that I get Thai massages twice a week and grow out bushy eyebrows from not plucking, then that’s what I do. If Falcon wants to eat peanut butter for every meal, and Blue wants to play in the sand on a beach for hours then we will try to accommodate them (within reason). Hopefully, in the process we will learn more about ourselves, discover new passions and skills to achieve them, at the very least, get all this stuff out of our systems so that we can return home refreshed and more well-rounded.