The Journey of a Travel Blog – From Backpacks to Wet Wipes

The Journey of a Travel Blog

This month’s travel link up hosted by the amazing Follow Your SunshineAdventures of a London Kiwi SilverSpoon London and Eppie is “Journeys”. These journeys can be figurative, literal or metaphysical.

Actual Journeys I’ve Taken

I have to admit I was a bit stumped to start with. I thought about it for a while after the girls let us know the topic. I’ve taken lots of journeys of all kinds in my life. Some have been more memorable than others I guess!Baby travels

When I was 3 months old my parents took me to the US to start a new life. I guess you could say that was the start of my travel addiction journey haha.

Life changing experience

At aged 10 my mum took my brother and I to live in Australia for a year. That was a pivotal moment for me for so many reasons:

  • Watching my mother, a single parent, decide to take 2 young kids to the other side of the world for a year continues to inspire me to take risks and challenges
  • Living in a different culture for the first time that I really remembered and appreciated opened my eyes to the world. It gave me a deeper understanding about how other people live, about how we all have different backgrounds and experiences. And how it makes the world a better place to have such diversity.

Coming of Age

When I was 18 I took myself off on a gap year. Feeling quite the grown up (even though I know now that I absolutely was not!), I went to teach English in Quito, Ecuador. I lived with a local family who couldn’t have made me feel more welcome if they had adopted me! I hung out with local friends and quickly became fluent in Spanish (which I had just got a D in my A Levels for). After my 6 month placement I went travelling in Chile and Bolivia with a friend for 6 weeks and then to the US for a month.

To say that this experience was life-changing would be the Understatement Of The Century:

  • To this day I am still in touch with the people who made me one of their own
  • I changed my degree (major) from the very dry European Studies to the more interesting (to me) Iberian and Latin American Studies and loved it
  • I took my sandwich year at university and went straight back to Ecuador to have another incredible 9 month experience
  • My first job out of uni was a direct result of my company being a business partner of the company who arranged my gap year
  • After less than a year of working there, one of my peers invited me to his leaving party… where I met Mr Wanderlust!

Mr and Mrs Wanderlust

Mr Wanderlust and I have had a number of memorable journeys together. From backpacking holidays around Indonesia, India, Malaysia and Borneo… To more conventional holidays in Egypt and Sardinia…To our honeymoon in South Africa and Mozambique…. It quickly became evident that our love for travel would unite us.

Just months after our wedding, we moved to Houston where we would stay for 3 years. I had had the flu for weeks and had been working like a dog to finish up at my job. I couldn’t even enjoy the business class ticket that I had been bought. My grandmother was less than impressed at our decision to move away and famously called Mr W a horror – something I repeated back at him pretty much every time we returned to Houston from a trip home!

Another journey 3 years later took us home with a dog and a new baby. 2 years later we were back on a plane, still with the dog and this time 2 kids in tow moving to the Middle East. That was probably our most traumatic journey yet – leaving family and friends who we had only just got used to having around again and nearly having to leave doggy Wanderlust behind… it wasn’t ideal but here we are and I am so glad we came.

Backpacks to Wet Wipes – The Journey of a Travel Blog

All of those journeys were so so interesting and have made me who I am but they are all very literal. After giving it some thought, I decided (741 words later lol) that I would rather write about the reason why I started this blog.

We’ve Got This!

As such avid travellers before and after meeting, it would be hard to imagine our life as a family not involving travel. Rather rashly, we completed a whistle-stop trip back to Europe with Thing 1 when he was just 9 weeks old. 3 days in London and 4 days in Malta for a wedding before a mammoth trip back to Houston. Everything went without a hitch. Thing 1 was the model baby. He slept at appropriate times. He smiled and gurgled at the appropriate people and was passed around from friend to aunt to grandparent without complaint. My milk supply was abundant to put it mildly (Mr Wanderlust used to call me Daisy) and I already had pumping down to a fine art. (My pump didn’t work which wasn’t ideal to find out about at midnight but thats another story).

We took several more trips that year to Calgary and the Rocky Mountains.

We went to San Francisco, Chicago, Miami, London (again) and Boston.

Fun in Miami
Fun in Miami

We finished the year with Christmas in Breckenridge and were left feeling quite smug about travelling with a Thing.

On the days I skied I had to meet people with Thing 1 to feed him!
On the days I skied I had to meet people with Thing 1 to feed him!

Pride Comes Before…

It went downhill from there. A trip to Turkey involved Mr Wanderlust sitting in the bath and I on the toilet while we waited for Thing 1 to fall asleep. Once asleep we crept back into the room to rink a glass of wine and eat some baclava in almost complete silence and darkness. Its ok, you can laugh. I know we’ve all been there lol. The trip continued to the coast where we had tantrums about baths (there were none) and we changed rooms several times.

A wedding in Croatia involved him eating almost nothing but Ella’s pouches for 5 days and me stressing about his naps. (The wedding was totally worth it though haha). A trip to Tuscany had us at the hospital after a fever for 3 days wouldn’t go away even with medication. Our day trips with carefully planned driving at nap-time backfired when he would take 45 minutes to fall asleep!

Tuscany with a sick kid was hard
Tuscany with a sick kid was hard

Travelling With 2 Things

Thing 2’s arrival did nothing to help things (no pun intended). Our holiday in Gran Canaria had meal times in the middle of nap times and after bedtime. We had a glorious trip to Portugal where it seemed like we might have got the hang of it and it gave me a glimmer of hope….

Happy kids
Happy kids
Happy mummy!
Happy mummy!

Expat Travel

Our first trip after being expats was to the Maldives. It was well needed after the crazy few months we had had – packing up and moving at short notice, starting a new job, meeting new people, handling sick kids… It had all mounted up and we needed A REST. Even so, after 6 days of doing almost nothing and staying in the same place, Mr Wanderlust and I were feeling pretty bored and under stimulated!

30 minutes in a kayak was about as active as we got in the Maldives
30 minutes in a kayak was about as active as we got in the Maldives

So we decided the next trip should be to India where we bit off way more than we could chew and I ended up asking him to look into getting us home asap after 7 days. We completed the trip but we were both pretty scarred by the whole experience.

Kerala was such a stressful holiday
Kerala was such a stressful holiday

Subsequent holidays in Thailand, Greece and Salalah left us similarly frustrated. In Thailand I constantly felt conflicted – I didn’t think we were exploring enough but when we did it was too hot, we hadn’t planned adequately or the Things were tired and hungry.

Beautiful sunsets from beautiful beaches
Beautiful sunsets from beautiful beaches

Greece was a villa holiday with family and so good for hanging out with our favourite people. We were very relaxed but barely left the villa and did very little exploring. I think you need holidays like that but they only work if you are with other people. I couldn’t do a villa holiday for the 4 of us without us all losing the plot!

A villa with a pool and some family was a winner
A villa with a pool and some family was a winner

Athens gave us a glimmer of what could be but still involved the back breaking carrying of Things up the the Pantheon and around the City.

How can you beat the Acropolis?!
How can you beat the Acropolis?!

The Epiphany

When we moved here, we agreed that I wouldn’t work to start with and that I would start thinking about what I really wanted to do when I grew up. I thought 6 months was a good amount of time for me to think about things and then start taking action. 18 months later I still had NO IDEAS and was feeling frustrated.

Now that I think about it, me writing a travel blog is the obvious thing for me to do. A self confessed travel addict married to another travel addict? Some EPIC holidays under my belt and a bucket list that only gets longer despite us travelling and travelling and travelling? Why would I not have thought of this before? Probably because I was so discouraged by the holidays we had been having. I had resigned myself to staying in a villa or a resort for the entire duration of our trips and never seeing the reality of the places we were visiting.

The Journey of a Travel Blog

And then came Bali. Bali was the turning point. We weren’t seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, we were actually in it! Bali was where we found the balance and where I realised that we could have holidays that worked for all of us. The trip became the inspiration for the blog and balance became the blue print that we would use for all future holidays.

Happy days in Bali
Happy days in Bali

I’m not saying we have it all down. But ever since then we have a much better idea about what works for us and what doesn’t. Holidays are fun for the Things and for us again.

And that’s a good place to be.

Emma Morrell
Emma Morrell

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25 Comments

  1. 4 November 2017 / 11:30

    So awesome that you still travel so much with your ‘things’ – it’s such an awesome experience to share with them!

    • admin
      6 November 2017 / 08:42

      I’m so lucky to be able to do it!

  2. Max and Kai
    4 November 2017 / 12:05

    Wow you’ve had so many adventures abroad with the kids. So far we’ve only been Disneyland Paris with the 2 boys which had it’s own set of challenges. We’re off to zante next year for a 2 week family holiday the plane ride should be an experience.

    • admin
      6 November 2017 / 08:55

      Wow that sounds super fun! And Disneyland is definitely an experience all of its own lol

  3. 4 November 2017 / 12:33

    Wow you are so well travelled and to some incredible places too! I’ve heard so much about Bali over the years. I hope to get there too one day. Great post x

    • admin
      6 November 2017 / 08:54

      Thank you so much! I’m definitely a self confessed travel addict!

  4. 4 November 2017 / 13:07

    Wow, Emma – you have certainly seen the world! Great to hear about your experiences. Impressed how you’re now going about showing the world to your little ones!

    • admin
      6 November 2017 / 08:53

      Thank you! We keep on trying – it’s not always easy but that’s kids and life for you!

  5. 4 November 2017 / 13:56

    My gosh, what amazing adventures!! My family is from South America 🙂 I’ve not travelled nearly as much as you, but I’ve got a list of places to go!!

    • admin
      6 November 2017 / 08:53

      Where in South America? I’m obsessed with that continent and devastated that I’ve not been there for nearly 20 years now.

      • 7 November 2017 / 03:12

        Chile 🙂 have been to Uruguay and Argentina, as well.

        • admin
          7 November 2017 / 13:06

          I LOVED Chile! Such an awesome country. Although when I first got there from Ecuador brimming with confidence in Spanish after 6 months of no English I had a shock when i couldn’t understand anything anyone said haha.

          • 7 November 2017 / 13:34

            Hahaha yeah they each have their own way of speaking the language! Takes a while to get used to 😉

  6. 4 November 2017 / 14:05

    Your life sounds like one big adventure! So it’s just interesting and eyeopening that you found it a struggle holidaying with the things . Great that you and Mr Wonderlust found a balance for holiday! Really sad to hear that you had to leave your dog behind though! xxx

    • admin
      6 November 2017 / 08:52

      We got the dog to come in the end – it was a close call but he made it! It’s funny – my life is just normal to me – still doing school runs and breaking up arguments! But I do get to see camels sometimes lol #sames***differentcountry

  7. 4 November 2017 / 14:30

    I have the wanderlust but I turn into a chicken when it comes to booking and go for the safe option often. My husband is wanderlust filled and follows through with the crazy ideas. He’s been to Malawi and Kenya in the last two years (twice for Malawi). I’ve been to Wales haha!

    • admin
      6 November 2017 / 08:50

      Haha – baby steps for you then! Why not try France to start with or a new city in the UK?

  8. 4 November 2017 / 14:55

    Love reading your story and where your passion comes from. I love travelling with my kids too!

    • admin
      6 November 2017 / 08:49

      Thanks lady! It’s funny I started writing thinking everyone knew my story but turns out there’s a lot more to tell haha

    • admin
      6 November 2017 / 08:45

      Thank you! I’m super lucky – I love exploring the world and so does the rest of my family!

  9. 5 November 2017 / 01:44

    Wow I think we’re at opposite ends of the travel spectrum! I haven’t been out of the UK since I was 6 years old. :O What amazing experiences and memories for you all to have. 🙂

    • admin
      6 November 2017 / 08:44

      You don’t need to leave the UK to travel! There’s so much to do in your own country 🙂 But yes… I am a nomad lol

  10. 5 January 2019 / 12:31

    Love this post Emma. I think our love of travelling comes from the fact we didn’t do it much in our teens or 20’s so we’re making up for lost time but with our son in tow x

    • 3 February 2019 / 13:07

      Ah thank you Cath! Your son is DEFINITELY going to have the travel bug!!!