The reality of traveling with a toddler, is it worth it?

FlipFlopGlobetrotters.com - Blog: traveling with an infant - family on motorbikeTraveling with kids, some bloggers display it as heaven on earth, some bloggers say it’s absolutely undoable to visit faraway destinations with kids. As with everything I guess the truth is somewhere in the middle. Yes, you can visit those exotic destinations and no, heaven on earth is not how I would describe travel with kids. Don’t get me wrong, we love love love traveling with our son, but it’s definitely not all glitters and glory. Some days I’d even go so far to say ‘no pain no gain’ is a lot better description! So what’s it really like to travel with an infant or a toddler?

Read more

Review: Totseat – travel high chair

Totseat fabric kids chair for travel - travel accessory for kids

We traveled around South East Asia for 10 months with our infant son and one of the most used travel accessories during our trip was the Totseat foldable high chair. At 1,5 our son could easily sit on a chair by himself… if he chose to. But he was extremely active and didn’t like sitting still, so having the Totseat to keep him in his seat during lunch and dinner … Read more

Best kid friendly places for lunch in Haarlem

FlipFlopGlobetrotters.com - kid friendly restaurants in Haarlem - Meneer Paprika

We’re having a lot of fun rediscovering our hometown Haarlem. There’s so much to do and see! The second post in this series about fun things to do in Haarlem with kids is about kid-friendly cafes. Whether you are sightseeing in Haarlem for a day or staying here longer, it’s always good to know the best places to go for a coffee or lunch with your child. If you’re coming … Read more

7 budget travel tips for short-term travel

Long-term travel isn’t in the stars for us right now due to family circumstances, but we need to satisfy our wanderlust one way or another. Since short-term travel is relatively expensive I started thinking about ideas for affordable short-term travel. Here are the budget travel tips that I came up with so far. I’m not (yet) seeing how we can combine tropical, scuba destinations, short term and affordable travel and … Read more

Families on the move: Meeting the Marshalls

Since we can’t travel ourselves right now, one way to beat the travel blues is to meet other traveling families. Last week we had the pleasure of showing Jason, Michelle and James Marshall a bit of our hometown Haarlem. They’re originally from Atlanta, Georgia, USA and have sold everything they own to go travel with their 11-year-old son. Some people may think they are absolutely crazy, but let’s be honest. … Read more

Berlin: Mauerpark Flohmarkt / Flea market

Even though we didn’t expect too much of it, we were very pleasantly surprised by the Mauerpark Flohmarkt, the flea market at Mauerpark (Wall Park) on Sunday. If you’re going to visit Berlin, this is definitely something to put on your to do list. The park next to the market area was the big attraction for us. It had a festival vibe, with live performances, people sitting around with food … Read more

Things to do in Vienna Austria with kids

You will have absolutely no problem finding things to do in Vienna with kids. Vienna is a great city to visit with kids of all ages. There are a lot of parks, practically all of them with playgrounds, public transport is very accessible and there are a lot of fun kids museums. We spent about a week Vienna (if you’re traveling without kids I think you can probably see most … Read more

A fantastic time in Vienna

We’re on a short trip in Europe and spend the past few days visiting Vienna. It’s our first trip after spending 10 months in South-East Asia and it feels good to be on the road again. We’re actually on the train from Vienna to Prague while I’m writing this (gotta love free WiFi ;-)). And after a few days in Prague, we’ll end this trip in Berlin. Also read: Tips … Read more

Kids travel accessories – our top 5

When you search the internet you will find tons of kids travel accessories. From brightly colored suitcases and lightweight travel strollers to kids travel pillows and kids sunglasses. One even more expensive than the other. But we travel with a toddler who can’t carry his own luggage yet, got our stroller second hand, don’t need a travel pillow because he sleeps everywhere anyway and we’ve hardly used his sunglasses. So … Read more

New Year’s Eve in Bangkok… with a toddler

New Year’s Eve in Bangkok with our 2-year old is definitely one of our fondest travel memories. Would we, at any point before we left on this trip, have considered waking a 2-year old to roam the streets at midnight in search of fireworks? No way! But we did it anyway and had a marvelous time. Bangkok is one of our favorite cities in the world and it was very … Read more

Our first introduction to Sri Lanka

On October 11th we left Vietnam and flew from Hanoi to Kuala Lumpur and then to Colombo the next day. The disadvantage of booking flights in advance is that it’s hard to predict on beforehand where you’ll be at that time. Of course that doesn’t weigh up to the BIG advantage of getting the cheapest tickets. So we pre-booked our flight from Kuala Lumpur to Colombo, Sri Lanka and had … Read more

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 … Read more

Makassar, South Sulawesi to Amurang, North Sulawesi

We soon found out making a last minute booking at Bunaken in high season isn’t as easy as it sounds. So we kept looking and found a listing on Airbnb that sounded promising: Sendowan Baru near Amurang, about 1,5 hours west of Manado. Fortunately we received a really quick reply when we send a message to inquire about availability. We learned later that two of the Dutch owners were actually … 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