Six months on the road…

Pretty much unnoticed we passed the half way point of our Big Adventure a few days ago. Six months on the road with our little world traveler! And what’s even better… we have another six months to go!

So far:
🙂 We traveled by plane, train, car, bus, boat, motorcycle, scooter, horse carriage and becak, 
🙂 visited 5 countries,
🙂 went to 16 destinations,
🙂 took 11 flights,
🙂 and stayed in 20 hotels, apartments and bungalows and 1 night on a boat.

For Jace there were a lot of ‘firsts’:
🙂 first time swimming in the ocean in Dahab
🙂 first time sleeping in a hotel
🙂 first time on the metro in Kuala Lumpur
🙂 first time on a motorbike on Bali
🙂 first time he celebrated his birthday abroad 
🙂 first time seeing a temple and a buddha statue
to name only a few…

Some of our own highlights:
🙂 Mau’s brother Robin coming to visit his little nephew (and us…) in Dahab for 10 days
🙂 House exchange with DigitalNomad.nl family in Sanur, Bali and having our own private pool
🙂 Meeting our friend Tracey again in Sanur and being her neighbour for two weeks in Amed
🙂 Discovering and exploring a huge empty temple complex we found on the way from Sanur to Ubud when we were on a scooter trip
🙂 Preparing offerings together with our hostess’ mother at our homestay in Ubud, Bali
🙂 Attending a big cremation ceremony of the village priest in Ubud, Bali
🙂 Watching a Barong Dance performance on Nusa Lembongan. They called it ‘trance dance’. Little did we know that lots of people in the audience would actually be going into trance and had to be restrained by local priests.
🙂 Celebrating Jace’s second birthday at Sendowan Baru guesthouse in Amurang, North Sulawesi 
🙂 Being able to observe a big group of black macaques in Tangkoko NP in North Sulawesi from only a few steps away
🙂 Being able to dive together on Bunaken, because the Dutch owner of the resort offered to babysit Jace
🙂 Spending a night on a boat in Halong Bay, Vietnam
🙂 Riding from Nha Trang to Dalat in Vietnam on a motorcycle

And some more general things we love about this trip:
🙂 being able to spend so much time together as a family
🙂 discovering new places together
🙂 watching Jace try loads of different types of food and loving most of them
🙂 meeting lots of new and inspiring people
🙂 being outside so much and seeing Jace run around and play with everything he finds
🙂 watching our little boy grow and learn and seeing him so at ease wherever we are

Of course it’s not always easy. Like all young parents we struggle with raising a very active and stubborn toddler, but we’ve added an extra hurdle by doing it while traveling. Also we’re still adjusting to this new way of traveling as a family. If you’ve read our post about traveling with a child, you’ve noticed that there’s quite a few things that change when it’s not just the two of you anymore. That being said, we’ve had so many amazing experiences, met so many fantastic new people and seen so many great places, we wouldn’t have missed that for the world!

Jace is generally a very happy child and it’s a lot of fun to watch him discover all these new places, new people, new tastes, new animals… He smiles a lot and is constantly running around checking out his new environment. He loves to go exploring with us 🙂 We know he won’t actually remember this trip, but we hope this sense of discovery, the idea that anything is possible, all the impressions he gets and the foods he tastes will stay with him when he grows up.

We’re very much looking forward to our next 6 months on the road!