Traveling the world for the year with our three boys
4/19-5/17/23
I’m adding this over a year after the end of our trip just to include pictures that I’d shared on Instagram/Facebook and tie them to countries on the blog.
Country counter after these places:
48th-50th countries of our trip
Me: 73 countries (including 48 eating McDonald’s)
Karen: 78 countries
Henry: 62 countries
Charlie: 60 countries
James: 57 countries
3/15-4/18/23
I’m adding this over a year after the end of our trip just to include pictures that I’d shared on Instagram/Facebook and tie them to countries on the blog.
Country counter after these places:
45th-47th countries of our trip
Me: 72 countries (including 47 eating McDonald’s)
Karen: 75 countries
Henry: 59 countries
Charlie: 57 countries
James: 54 countries
2/23-3/14/23
I’m adding this over a year after the end of our trip just to include pictures that I’d shared on Instagram/Facebook and tie them to countries on the blog.
Country counter after these places:
43rd-44th countries of our trip
Me: 72 countries (including 46 eating McDonald’s)
Karen: 74 countries
Henry: 58 countries
Charlie: 54 countries
James: 51 countries
2/7-2/22/23
I’m adding this over a year after the end of our trip just to include pictures that I’d shared on Instagram/Facebook and tie them to countries on the blog.
Country counter after these places:
42nd country of our trip
Me: 72 countries (including 45 eating McDonald’s)
Karen: 74 countries
Henry: 56 countries
Charlie: 52 countries
James: 49 countries
1/13-2/6/23
I’m adding this over a year after the end of our trip just to include pictures that I’d shared on Instagram/Facebook and tie them to countries on the blog.
Country counter after these places:
36th-41st countries of our trip
Me: 72 countries (including 45 eating McDonald’s)
Karen: 74 countries
Henry: 55 countries
Charlie: 51 countries
James: 48 countries
12/18/22-1/11/23
I’m adding this over a year after the end of our trip just to include pictures that I’d shared on Instagram/Facebook and tie them to countries on the blog.
Country counter after these places:
32nd-35th countries of our trip
Me: 71 countries (including 42 eating McDonald’s)
Karen: 71 countries
Henry: 49 countries
Charlie: 45 countries
James: 42 countries
12/11/22-12/17/22
Here’s one more guest post from 8-year-old James’ private blog. I thought he needed one more nice one after the India post. As before, my Instagram posts and country counter are below his work.
To start, everyone LOVED Sri Lanka! After India, we flew to Colombo, Sri Lanka, where we stayed at a not-a-very-nice place but it offered airport transportation in a huge bus. Luckily, breakfast at the hotel was delicious and had really, really good bread and butter. There was some fruit, but the mango and passion fruit looked identical so each bite was a fun surprise, sometimes not a good surprise.
From the hotel, we visited Colombo’s fort area for the afternoon and ate lunch. We immediately took a beautiful train ride to Kandy. When we exited the train station, there were loud bats everywhere! We all really liked it because we like bats. We walked up a huge hill to our hotel, which was really nice (the hotel, not the walk!). They served us ginger tea and biscuits and then we went to bed.
On our first whole day in Kandy, we had a really good breakfast with jackfruit and delicious coconut honey pancakes. (The pancakes were my favorite food in Sri Lanka.) The hotel overlooked Bogambara Lake, which we walked around. On our walk, we saw a GIGANTIC lizard! (It was about as tall as me!)
We saw tons of birds and ducks, and we ate at a restaurant called the Hideout Lounge. We also visited the Temple of the Tooth, which has the Buddha’s tooth and a very boring museum on world religions.
The best part of Kandy (other than the food), was the Kandian dance, which had nine parts including firewalking. The dancers did tons of backflips and acrobatics and had extreme balancing skills. The firewalking was the best part. People somehow stuck the fire on their tongues and juggled flaming torches.
On our last night in Kandy, we took three-hour long cooking class. We cooked 14 meals, including 10 curries and an excellently spiced chicken. We could only eat a fifth of it. I didn’t really like it because it was too long and too much food and I don’t really like curries. The host family was really nice though.
After Kandy, we took another beautiful train back to Colombo (the train was at 6 am!
Because it was dark and my bag was heavy, I fell down and got a massive, bleeding cut on my knee. It bugged me for three months afterwards but I don’t have a scar anymore). We visited a museum and walked around Colombo, in the burning heat. The best part was that we ate lunch at a very fancy restaurant. The chefs are brothers and both used to run Michelin starred restaurants in France. I don’t remember what I ordered, but I did get chocolate mousse for dessert! It was delicious.
We took a train after lunch to Galle, on the southern coast of Sri Lanka. We stayed in a small hotel but there were tons of mosquitos everywhere that only swarmed me. I lost a lot of blood to mosquitos that week! From our hotel deck, we saw monkeys, peacocks, and kingfishers. Every single restaurant in Galle was closed until 10 am! We walked around the old fort and a man offered to jump off a cliff for money, but we said no. My family went swimming in the ocean, but I didn’t because of my knee. I also pet a lot of stray dogs.
After Galle, we got a taxi to Colombo and flew back to Delhi, India for one night. When we arrived in Dehli, we had the worst immigration experience ever! It took over one and half hours, even though we already had our Indian visas! Mom and Dad still get angry whenever they think about it. But then we stayed in a very nice hotel for one night before flying to Nepal. There were cows on the road outside the hotel.
Here are my Instagram posts with the country counter after:
As a bonus, here’s my Instagram post commemorating the first 6 months of the trip, which is a mark we hit right before coming to Sri Lanka:
Country counter after Sri Lanka:
India: 11/29/22-12/10/22
Lest you start to think that all of James’ posts are long and lovely, I’m including this one that he wrote while angry that we assigned him blogging for English homework. (The topic didn’t help much either.) I’m leaving it unedited as he submitted it to us.
Before I start I will say that I have stoped doing blog posts in order now so I will only do the big hits. We flew to India at 2am and went to bed then, 38 hours after we landed I threw up 3 times. 20 mins later, I threw up 3 times again and it happed every 20 mins for 2 hours and 40 mins. Then, the next day was a school day and and so was the next for a week total.
ps. mom and dad open up the door in the hostal and look down [This was a picture he drew for us, not a bag of poop, when we were in our hostal in Hiroshima.]
As you can see from the above, James (a) didn’t spend more than 5 minutes on this post and (b) did not really enjoy his time in India much. He and everyone else in my family got sick there multiple times, so I suppose he has his reasons. We had a tour guide in Nepal who said that NEPAL stands for “Never Ending Peace and Love” and INDIA stands for “I’ll Never Do It Again.” I’m sorry to say, that’s probably how the rest of my family feels about it. (Karen adds that our cooking instructor in Sri Lanka remarked when we said we were in India, “oh, but India is so dirty!” As you’ll see in the next post, we loved Sri Lanka, which had much of the charm of India, while being a little tidier around the edges.)
In fact, we were originally planning to spend another week in India, but the recurring illnesses led us to move onwards to Nepal (and then Thailand) earlier than originally planned.
Although this post is very negative, I still really like India, but sadly doubt I’ll be returning there with my family anytime soon, if at all. (Note, however, that I didn’t get sick there during this trip, which wasn’t my experience in previous trips!)
All that said, here are my Instagram posts from India, with country counter at the end:
Country counter after India:
We’re home! One year ago today, we landed in Stockholm for the very start of our trip and 3 1/2 weeks ago we left Colombia to return back to the states. We stopped at my parents in St Louis, but have now spent the last two weeks in Chicago slowly unpacking things into our house after 343 days of travel.
Here’s my Instagram post with my favorite all-family pictures from the second half of the trip:
And here’s the “halfway through” post I did with similar pictures from the first half of the trip. I think the boys are bigger!
Also, although we’re home and busy reconstructing our lives here, not to worry, I’ll continue to post about the trip! I’ve got a few more blog posts from James and I also plan to write more from my perspective. Stay tuned!
11/20/22-11/28/22
Here’s another post, shared with permission, from 8-year-old James’ private blog. My Instagram posts appear below James’ writing. (Besides the Instagram posts, picture credits are all to James as well.)
Jordan was another big hit in our family, and we enjoyed it very much. Dad liked the inexpensive cost of travel, Mom liked the cardamon coffee, Charlie and I loved Wadi Rum (more on that later), and Henry liked looking at his phone all day.
First, we walked over the border of Israel to Jordan with our heavy backpacks like true travelers. After a short taxi, we stayed in Aqaba, a city on the Red Sea, for a few days. We stayed in a small hotel and watched “The Mummy” one night. We ate at a restaurant that only served chicken and rice, which I thought was strange and confusing. We swam in the Red Sea for a few hours, and we tried to find colorful fish with our new goggles.
After Aqaba, we rented a car and drove to Wadi Rum for a desert experience and camel rides. Wadi Rum, also known as “The Valley of the Moon,” is the largest valley in Jordan and is near Saudi Arabia. It is also a desert with tons of mountains and canyons, and we spent at least seven hours exploring them. Our open-air jeep made six stops in Wadi Rum. The first one was to climb up a steep, rocky mountain to see a really good view of the valley (I didn’t climb up). We also climbed up a lot of super awesome sand dunes; one of them had a big rocky hill on top.
We also walked one kilometer through a sandy canyon and went sandsurfing at the massive sandhill at the top!
full screen view
The most important stop was lunch! Our jeep drivers cooked an incredible chili-tomato-feta dish that was delicious. (It was like shakshuka but with feta cheese instead of eggs.) The next stop was a natural rock arch, which we could climb up. To end the day, we drank tea on top of a hill and watched the sun set. We spent the night in a beautiful Bedouin tent, but it was freezing outside.
After a buffet breakfast the next morning, we took a two hour camel ride through Wadi Rum back to the village where we started.
Mom and I had to share a camel and I was super crushed. About one kilometer from the village, I got off the camel and my legs felt wobbly and weird! It was really hard to walk at first, but I perservered! Because the Bedouin breakfast was sad, we ate a second breakfast in the village. The second breakfast was also sad, but two sad breakfasts equals one decent breakfast. It’s just math, people!
After Wadi Rum, we drove to the city of Petra. The actual city of Petra was terrible. It was really hilly and driving was awful. We couldn’t find good food, but I ate decent mac & cheese at a place called Meat on Fire.
While the city of Petra was a bust, the ancient city of Petra was incredible! We woke up before dawn to see the sun rise over the mountains and avoid other tourists. To get to the famous Treasury, we walked one mile through a very narrow canyon (parts were only one meter wide) that was full of water because of the recent rains. At the end of the canyon was the Treasury and it was stunning. We kept walking through the ancient city and saw the old theater.
We also saw a few hills and dogs.
To get to the Monastery, we had to hike over a mountain because it was on top. The mountain was as tall as a sixty story building! While there were steps carved into the sandstone, it was very hard to walk up; Mom even fell hard on her way down! At the Monastery, there was a snack area and we really needed the rest. While the Treasury and Monastery were incredible, the best part of the day was the view from the mountains!
After Petra, we drove the King’s Highway to Madaba and Amman. In Madaba, we stayed at The Black Iris and I wish we stayed there longer. Because it rained all day, I stayed in the hotel with Henry and Charlie while Mom and Dad saw the ancient Roman mosaics and a bunch of churches. We then drove to Amman, where we visited the Jordan Museum. The museum had interactive games in the kids section and a lot of other things about Jordan. We also visited Rainbow Street, drank hot chocolate at a cafe, and bought cookies from a bake sale that was raising money for Syrian refugees.
From Amman, we flew to India and got really sick.
In case you’re wondering, I’ll do at least one more James guest post so you can read about that last part. Here are my Instagram posts with the country counter after:
Country counter after Jordan:
