What’s it been like traveling for three months? Many of the things I wrote in my ‘One Month’ post still apply.
Food
On the food front, the girls aren’t as adventurous as we’d hope, so sometimes we relent and let them have chicken nuggets/fried chicken/roast chicken again. When we do cook dinner, it’s usually pasta. Dairy has also been hard to get, both because it’s perishable and because the girls haven’t liked the taste of milk/cheese/yogurt in other countries, even New Zealand. I have to agree with them…Canadian & American milk is the best 🐄. In Malaysia we’re stocking up on Babybels & Yakults to get their calcium in.
Hannah & Amy have discovered donuts on this trip, particularly Dunkin Donuts (we don’t have a Tim Horton’s or Dunkin Donuts on every corner in Cupertino). We’ve had a few meltdowns from Amy over donuts 😉 They also discovered Tim Tams in Australia.
Health
On the health front, we’ve been very lucky so far and have stayed quite healthy. We finally found a way to get Hannah to swallow her medicine (instead of crushing the pills). The secret is to put it in some Nutella, which I learned at airport security is considered a liquid. Travel tip: anything you can spread is a liquid, so if it’s more than 100ml, put it in your checked luggage.
Education
On the education front, my plan of using the RAZ-Kids app for their reading isn’t working out so well, as we don’t always have wi-fi and sometimes the connection is too slow, even with a personal hotspot.
We still have the Kindles, and I sent a resupply of magazines to Australia, but the girls tore through them right away. They like the Highlights magazine the most. We still do math and journal writing, though not always as often as I would like.
The girls, however, are definitely picking up a lot about continents – like the fact that New Zealand is on a new continent (mostly submerged), called Zealandia – animals, habitats, landforms, etc.
Planning
In terms of planning and organizing on the road, it is definitely difficult to do because you’re either traveling, exploring or too tired to do it. We wanted to travel by train in Thailand, but you can only book the tickets 30-60 days in advance. By the time we finally got around to it (in Malaysia), it was too late and all the tickets were sold out. We are now flying instead.
Accommodations
On the accommodation front, I definitely recommend staying close to the city center where possible. We are on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur (or ‘deep in’ as one cab driver put it), and although it is quieter, closer to nature, and has monkeys, it is harder to just quickly get food (either at a grocery store or restaurant), and takes more time and money to get to where you want to go. Also, in the big cities, we have to plan around rush hour, so in Kuala Lumpur, that means leaving the city center well before 5, or returning after 8pm.
Final thoughts
It’s also difficult to strike a balance between just having a down day, and trying to see what you can while you can. The feeling of not missing out on something is definitely strong, but you just have to be okay with not seeing everything.
As for how the girls are reacting to different people and places, they’re just rolling with it. I think it’s just normal to them that some people look and dress differently than we do, though they did ask Anthony why some women are dressed like robbers and ninjas! Only from the mouths of babes…. It has been quite a experience going from beaches in Rio, where wearing a tankini is overdressing, to pools in Kuala Lumpur, where women have barely anything showing.
All in all things are going pretty smoothly on the trip and everyone is adapting well. We can’t wait to see what the next 3 months have in store for us!
