Some Days Are Better Than Others

I know the sound of throwing away a high paying corporate career, selling everything you own, packing your life into 4 suitcases, visiting exotic lands, eating strange foods, and spending every waking (and sleeping) moment with your family sounds wonderful, but let me tell you some days are better than others.

Some Days Are Better Than Others

Traveling can be hard work, in fact, dragging a couple of kids, a wife, 4 suitcases, and 3 backpacks through Latin America is very hard work. One of the reasons we travel slow is because it is easier than traveling fast. Besides getting to know a place better and saving money in the process, we avoid getting up early to catch a bus or running through a terminal to catch our connection flight. We are not confronted with crowd’s everyday or if we find a line we can choose to avoid it and come back another day.

Very rarely (hint…it has not happened to us yet) everything comes together and you find the perfect apartment with the perfect beds with the perfect pillows with the perfect room temperature with the perfect water pressure and the perfect water temperature with a toilet that flushes with internet that works in the perfect town with the perfect food with the perfect drinks…whew – but this never happens.

Very little about traveling is the same as it is at home. That is the point, isn’t it?

There are life lessons in these “hardships”, both for Gina and I as well as the kids. I have written before that one of the reasons for the trip was to show the kids that not everyone lives in a suburban neighborhood and enjoys the same luxuries as they do (did). The reality is that most of the world lives very differently and are faced with hardship every day, real hardship, not the “my bed is too hard” type of hardships.

Our family is blessed! We are healthy, we have the opportunity to spend time traveling as a family, we were born in the most prosperous country the world has ever known yet we will bitch and complain when the Internet goes out in the hotel or when there are not any eggs to eat for breakfast.

I read a funny post Suck It Up from our new friends Marc and Danielle at 4suitcases.com. They are traveling with their 2 daughters around the world and Suck It Up is their family motto – I think that says it all.

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