"You won't be able to do that once you have a kid," people often warned me in my pre-parent state, usually in reference to moving or traveling. My husband Geoff and I had visited a dozen countries - Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Tunisia, to name a few, in addition to the typical European holidays in France, England, Spain and Switzerland. Not to mention, we developed a habit of picking up all our belongings and moving to a new place - sometimes for a few months, other times for a few years. We lived in Boston, New York and Paris in a span of literally three years at one point. There's definitely the assumption that if marriage didn't get you to "settle down" then surely having children will. Perhaps that's why when our daughter Mirabelle was two months old, we packed up all our stuff and moved to London for a summer. In part we wanted to prove to all the naysayers that we could travel with child, but mostly we wanted to prove it to ourselves. And perhaps that's why as our daughter Mirabelle approaches her second birthday, she will have lived in seven apartments in three cities across two countries. And despite the fact that I am unequivocally certain that we will move again since our current apartment is both too loud and too small, I have decided I'd like to stop moving so much. I've discovered it might be nice to have a place that we could keep our furniture (other than our storage space) and have as our consistent home base. As for traveling, I hope nothing will stop me from more of that.
In the year or so since London, we've taken numerous trips -- Ohio, New Hampshire, Vermont, and New York -- but none abroad. We also spent what I may always refer to as 'the best summer ever' last summer in Newport, Rhode Island. Mostly relaxing, rarely frightening, and always energizing, our trips have been a treat. But now we're ready for just a bit more adventure.
Feeling brave, we recently decided to book our next major international trip to Taiwan. A good friend of ours married a woman from Taiwan and moved there about a year ago. It's hard to resist visiting a foreign place when you have friends who can speak the language and show you around. In exploring our travel options, we knew we couldn't handle flying straight there for several reason - there is no Boston to Taipei flight which meant we had to transfer regardless; the time difference is 13 hours which is a bit hard to take; and the flight time (including a transfer to New York) would take nearly 20 hours. So we looked at the globe to find a halfway point, and settled on Hawaii.
So, now here we are, a bit more than a week before our trip - researching, planning, and organizing.
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