Ever wonder how we spend our down time??
First thing I need to do is get the record straight . . . we have virtually no free time! On a macro level, this entire year is "down time" (no jobs, no daily responsibilities like back in NYC, etc), but when you drill down to the micro, day-to-day level, we have very little free/down time. I'm not complaining one bit. I just want to capture the reality of how our free/down time gets gobbled up.
There are four main buckets that consume our free/down time during our travels:
P&S School: Any chunks of free time we have immediately go (first & foremost) to school with the girls. Keeping them on track on the educational front is top priority. Depending on how much we tackle in any given school session, that typically takes a few hours of focused instructional time. Then there’s daily reading, journal writing, etc.
Blogging: We are committed to keeping this blog going (thanks for reading!). It’s a lifeline for the girls to this trip in the future. We want to record for them (and for us) all the little things (experiences, people, thoughts, tastes) and big things (bigger picture thoughts/feelings) while they're fresh on our minds. The blog is also a great way to keep our family & friends tapped into our day-to-day activities and insights in "real" time. We’re very appreciative of anyone that takes the time to tune in! Neither Doug nor I have ever kept a blog. For years when I was younger (high school, college & post-college) I kept a fastidious journal. It takes alot of time and intention to write a blog. Not so much the actual writing part; that's relatively easy, especially since we divide & conquer on posts. Rather, the time suck part is combing through all (so many!) our photos & videos to select the ones we want to include within the post, uploading them onto the site, etc. That part is incredibly (mind-numbing) time consuming. At this precise point in time we are pretty current on our posts; not real time, but within a few days of real time. We still have gaping holes from the early European leg of our trip (Venice, I’m talking about you!). We’ll get to those eventually, but recreating those stints in our memory always gets deprioritized vs. staying in the current day. We hadn’t realized early on how easy it would be to fall behind on the blog. Hence the many missing bits & pieces of the Summer 2019 months. But we’re determined to make this blog “whole” and will get there eventually! Our blog is not going to win any literary awards anytime soon, but we’re proud of ourselves for continuing to stay the course and record this amazing family journey.
Trip Planning, Research & Booking: Our travels don’t plan & book themselves!! This bucket of time ebbs & flows throughout the weeks and months of our travel. We often start our research for a given destination a few months prior, so that we’re booked and ready to go (car rentals, accommodation, flight/ferry/train/etc. transport logistics) within a few weeks before our arrival. Some destinations require more heavy lifting and pre-planning/booking than others; it depends on the time of year we visit, how on/off the beaten path it is, the kind of lodging experience we want (lock in nicer places, more flex on mid-range places), etc. Right now (end January 2020) we've locked in 95% of lodging & big logistics for our time through Australia (Feb 2020), New Zealand (Mar 2020) and Tahiti (end March 2020). Which means we now need to hunker down and sort out our 3-4 weeks through Japan (April 2020). This trip stuff is time consuming, but equally fun and rewarding. It means we can curate the type of trip and experiences that we want along the way.
Instagram: We’re also committed to posting to our Instagram account. Prior to this trip neither Doug nor I had ever posted a single thing to Instagram. We quickly figured out how to post pictures & videos, but intentionally chose not to post in the Stories part of the platform. IG Stories is great - and it would certain facilitate some of our storytelling on IG - but we drew a line in the sand. We don’t want to spend time fussing to add the incremental things required to bring pics/videos to life properly in Stories. I’m sure it becomes second nature within a few posts, but we’ve decided we’d rather spend our extra time & effort in the blog. Instagram serves a slightly different purpose (vs. blog) because it allows us to share our travels & insights with friends & family in a very bite-size, manageable and visual way. We rarely post real-time, but we’re getting better! Especially because if we post real time we have a chance to get location-specific recos from people that we can act on!
So that's where our elusive "free time" goes!
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