Monday 23/10
Today, it’s the 100th day of our world tour! A quarter of our adventure.
Time for a first brief “assessment”. We’ve seen so many things, so different; we’ve had so many different experiences; we’ve learnt so many things, we’ve experienced different cultures, climates, transportation means, lodging types… We are living together 24/7, which is also a (totally) new adventure in itself… (so far so good).
We do probably too much due to our willingness to enjoy as much as possible the places where we are. We thus have too little time to “digest” what we’ve seen. But each time we look back, there’s nearly nothing we regret having done… So we don’t really know what to change. ‘Too much’, yes (and that’s how we are) but not ‘too fast’ (according to us) since we try to stay from time to time 1 to 2 week(s) at the same place, as we did in Moscow, Ulaanbaatar, Beijing, Shanghai and Kyoto (and soon in Tokyo). One of our friends (Serge) once called us ‘the Stakhanovists of the travel’. He’s surely right but we are enjoying every single day of this trip and we are happy to do and discover so many different things.
We read about the FOMO (Fear of missing out) phenomenon, which might apply to us. I understand FOMO as the fear of having made the wrong decision on how to spend time or, in our case, of having not seen all what could be seen. It is also further exacerbates by my willingness to find cool concepts that could be bring back in Belgium (to start a new business).
We often read that, no matter the amount of planning, you’ll often find that the favorite parts of your journey are the things you totally didn’t expect. It might be true but I’m skeptical about this. Contrary to what we often read, I’m more of the opinion that there’s no such thing as too much planning (especially when doing a family trip). It’s always better to know where to go, how to go and when to go. There’s nothing more frustrating than arriving at a museum / restaurant / church that is closed or in a place where the festival took place a few days ago. We find also more rewarding to have read about the places we visit beforehand, not only to share interesting facts with the children but also to understand the places better. It’s also better to have more things on your list (you can then easily find a plan B when your plan A doesn’t happen as foreseen).
A last observation: traveling as a family, we might not meet people as easily as when traveling alone (we’re probably too often too “busy”).
Let’s see what we’ll think of these observations when we reach the 200th day…