Thoughts and observations at the halfway mark

We've just passed the halfway mark of our five-month round-the-world trip, so I thought I'd share a few thoughts and observations with those of you who are still following along. Feel free to ask any other burning questions in the comments... I'd happily do a Q&A post if there were enough!

Pace

Somewhere around the one-month mark, we subconsciously started shifting away from a short-term "cram it all in" holidaying style and towards a more sustainable, long-term "ebb and flow" holidaying style. Gone are the consecutive multi-blog-entry days necessitated by sheer volume of sightseeing. It's simply not possible to keep that up for 151 days.

We're thankful for the rules we set ourselves pre-trip, such as staying at least three nights in most places and not driving more than three hours per day. We haven't always stuck to those rules (eg. we did two-night stays for ten days straight in France, and we've had a couple of 4-5 hour driving days), but it was helpful to have those guidelines so we didn't give in to the temptation, while booking the trip, to push ourselves too hard in order to get to more places.

Currently, ten weeks into the trip (and while we're doing our longest road-tripping segment), our days are a mix of driving days and sightseeing days — it's usually one or the other, not both — and on the latter we often don't get going until late morning or early afternoon. The blogging, washing, life admin, remaining trip arrangements and my work hours have to get done sometime!

Several times we've even "wasted" an entire day (usually after we've had a few busy days in a row, or one of us isn't feeling well, or we have extra work or blogging to do). We haven't quite mastered not feeling guilty about that, though! 😅

Budget

Just before we left home, we decided to record — and categorise — our daily expenditures for the entire trip. (We were already tracking our accommodation and pre-booked transport costs.) This has been very enlightening! It's hard to know what a trip like this will cost per day until you actually do it.

Some of the things we've learnt so far are:
(1) we spend money more times per day than we would have thought;
(2) we have to record expenses within a day or two, or we'll forget what they were; and
(3) grocery shopping instead of restaurant dining is the easiest way to reduce expenditure without detracting from our enjoyment of the trip.

I'm looking forward to analysing the data at the end of the trip. It'll be interesting to see which countries cost most or least, how much we spent on parking or public transport or souvenirs, whether we spent more on grocery shopping than on restaurants, etc. Plus it'll be handy when planning future travels to know how much it really costs per person per day/week/month! 📈

School

Without fail, in every country we are asked HOW we can take our kids out of school for so long. We've been asked this by most of the friends we've visited, a random taxi driver in Estonia, an accommodation host in Germany, etc. They want to know what's happening with the boys' schooling or whether we're homeschooling them.

In various countries, people with kids have told us that if they tried to do what we're doing, the school wouldn't allow it/ they would be heavily fined/ the police would come knocking. They're gobsmacked when we tell them our school didn't set the boys any schoolwork but simply gave us four pages of forms to fill out and told us to have a great time!

The thing is, if we were trying to do schoolwork or formally homeschool them, I don't know how we'd fit it in! The kids need some downtime around all the travelling, sightseeing and socialising too. But we're pretty confident they're learning a bunch of great stuff... plus we've taken to drilling them on times tables while we drive. 😆

Socialising

Like we've always found to be the case, time spent with other people is the highlight of any trip. It's been utterly wonderful to see so many old friends again, and hard to say goodbye to every family we've stayed with. We feel so much a part of people's lives for a few days, then have to leave knowing it'll likely be years before we see each other again!

It has been especially delightful to see the boys meet our friends, and befriend our friends' kids, and find they have things in common with kids of different ages who live in different countries. I'm constantly loving the fact that they've been getting on so well with literally all the kids we've met... it must be something to do with the fact that said kids are the offspring of people WE get on so well with! ❤️

And finally...

A big thankyou to those of you who've been leaving comments and/or who've let us know some other way that you're following along. I love waking up in the morning and finding a flurry of comment notification emails! Although in the long term the blog is for us, in the short term, while we're writing it, we're thinking mainly of all of you being our audience. So it's nice to know you're still out there and enjoying our ramblings. Thanks for making it feel worthwhile to stick at it!