Our lowlights and highlights of 2016

For us 2016 was mostly about transitioning back to life in The Netherlands. Our wish to travel longterm, but not being able to, made it a pretty difficult year. Now that the year has come to an end, I realize we aren’t making ourselves any happier if we continue thinking in limitations. So it’s time to start looking at possibilities instead! To gain some perspective, let’s look back at all … Read more

6 months home: how are we adjusting?

Last week (July 21st to be exact) it was 6 months ago since we came back. We miss being on the road! It was nice to see family and friends again, to have a place of our own for a while, to eat some typical Dutch food, to be able to cook our own meals… Jace loves going to daycare two afternoons a week and visiting his two sets of … Read more

Things that I won’t miss about traveling

We’ve been back in The Netherlands for 4 days now and I already miss traveling. The freedom, the sunshine, the unpredictability of being on the road… It feels weird being back in the same tiny apartment, while we ourselves have changed so much after traveling for so long. Also, after living out of a suitcase for nearly 10 months, it feels a bit suffocating to have so much ‘stuff’. We’ll … Read more

12 things I’ll miss when this Big Adventure is over

Recently someone told me ‘freedom is inside you’. I thought that was really interesting because one of the things that I will definitely miss when we get back to Holland is the amazing sense of FREEDOM that traveling gives me. I’d love to figure out how to retain that feeling once we get back! We’ve had this amazing time together as a family and we were really lucky we were … Read more

From Bangkok to Bohol (via Manila)

After spending a couple of days in Bangkok, enjoying the Thai food and buying some stuff we couldn’t find in Sri Lanka, it was time to move to another country again. Next on the list: Philippines!! When we left Sri Lanka we knew we wanted to go to the Philippines next, but because the flight connection wasn’t very good we decided to make a stopover in Bangkok for a couple … Read more

Sriwijaya Airlines

Yesterday we decided to take a flight from Makassar in South-Sulawesi to Manado in North-Sulawesi. We were stuck in a hotel in Makassar, a noisy and dirty city we didn’t like, and did not want to spend Jace’s second birthday in a hotel room in a big city. Because we decided to go to Manado last minute there were no direct flights anymore. We ended up flying wit Sriwijaya Air … Read more

Kuala Lumpur: first time in a big city with our son

On August 1st we took a flight from Bali, Indonesia to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. We’ve been in Kuala Lumpur for 9 days now and had a pretty good time here. Jace loves the public transport and gets a lot of attention. He waves at everybody 🙂 The flight over here was pretty uneventful. We left at 5PM, arriving in KL around 8PM and then had to take a taxi to … Read more

Travel with kids: 10 major differences

Travel with kids, is it really so different? Yes it is! Before we left on our Big Adventure, long term traveling around South East Asia, we had some ideas about how traveling with an infant and later a toddler would be different from traveling as a couple. But the reality is always different! In this post we share the 10 major differences we discovered. Having traveled a fair bit as … Read more

Review: Manduca babycarrier

We’ve had our Manduca babycarrier since our little one was about 1 month old. It seemed more practical than the 5 meter long wrap that frankly I was struggling with a bit. In the first 1,5 years however we used the wrap a few times and hardly used the carrier. Where we lived it was so much more convenient to take him in the pram. But on the road things … Read more

From Dahab via Dubai to Bali

Yesterday late in the evening we made it to Bali. After two days of traveling all three of us were exhausted. The little guy is a born world traveler and, as on the trip to Egypt, did wonderful. We are so proud of him! I was a bit worried about the 8,5 hour flight on day 2, but he was very relaxed and flirting with all the flight attendants. When … Read more

Leaving!

After 12 years of dreaming and a very quick three months once the decision was finally made, today is the day we leave for our big trip! We leave our 40m2 rental apartment in Haarlem, Holland in the safe hands of a good friend and we’re off to see the world. Obviously it’s not as easy as it sounds… or maybe it is. Once we found someone to housesit our … Read more