Time for Travel

DSC03891When hubby and I returned to Florida from Dublin after years of traveling and seeing the world, we agreed that we would continue traveling. Prior to our European Adventure, we really only traveled to visit friends and family. We never really saw new things or went to new places. We vowed to visit at least one new place each year.

Fast forward two years: we lied to ourselves.

We’ve been to visit my family twice, hubby’s family four times, to Orlando and Disney numerous times and a few times to see friends but the only “new” places we’ve been is Naples (which is less than 2 hours from our home) and Atlanta which we’d been to before but hadn’t done touristy stuff.

It’s very frustrating and disappointing to have all these memories of the things we saw, all the places we went and all things we did when the girls were small knowing that they don’t actually remember it at all. And now that they’re old enough to actually start remembering things we’re not really giving them anything worth remembering.

I often ponder what happened, what made it so easy to travel while living abroad versus getting ANYWHERE here and there are quite a few reasons:

Time. Hubby doesn’t get as much vacation time as he did in Dublin and he is much more restricted on when he is able to take time off. We have also been dealing with school schedules since we got back and last year were dealing with my work schedule as well. (While in Dublin, we took three week+ cruises in less than a year in addition to a week-long multi-stop trip and a few long weekends. Since moving back, we’ve only been away as a family longer than 3 works days once).

Distance. It is a 5 hour drive just to get out of Florida from where we are and flying isn’t much better. Obviously, the farther you go the longer it takes which effects how far we can go with our limited time available. (Atlanta is and hour and a half flight. From Dublin, in about the same amount of time, you can make it round trip to/from anywhere in the UK or to France, The Netherlands or Belgium and just a little longer gets you to five other countries!)

Cost. Even though we were living on an island and couldn’t just drive places, airfare to places around Europe from Dublin was stupidly cheap especially compared to the outrageous airfare here in the states. And while driving may be cheaper we’re again dealing with a 5 hour minimum drive to get somewhere new. (Here we can’t get anywhere as a family for less than $1,000 where as from Dublin three of us flew round trip to Brussels for €92 total!)

Hopefully now that we’re homeschooling we will actually be able to continue our traveling adventures since we can go whenever hubby can get off work and can travel when the deals are the best rather than when everyone else is trying to get away too! I’m definitely ready to get back out there and teach my children about the world…