Our style of family travel has evolved and changed drastically over the years. Prior to our move to Dublin (even before having kids) our travel most involved obligatory type things: visiting family for the holidays, attending friends’ weddings, etc. Once we moved to Dublin, however, and we knew we had a limited amount of time there, we jumped into travelling full-force. Our goal was to see as much of Europe as possible before we relocated back to the States.
We started with a trip to Paris when Honeybun was 22 months old and Sugarplum was still in my belly. We then hit Belgium and London before returning to Florida for Sugarplum’s arrival. At 6 weeks old we were back in Dublin and 2 weeks later we took a ferry to Liverpool. We continued Sugarplum’s first year with visits to Germany, Norway, Amsterdam, Athens, Poland, The Czech Republic, 2 visits to Spain and our first cruise which stopped in Denmark, Sweden, Russia, Estonia and culminated in 10 days in Finland meeting hubby’s extended family.
The second year was no less exciting with 2 more cruises stopping in Turkey, Greece, Israel, Spain, Monte Carlo, Tunisia and multiple places in Italy. We also hit Scotland, Lithuania, Austria, and Hungary along with various road trips around Ireland. All in all at 23 months old we moved Sugarplum back to Florida and she had seen 25 countries of the world (Honeybun tops her by 2 for a total of 27).
We vowed when we moved back that we would not stop travelling for fun and to see new things. Reality has not lived up to our dreams and we have yet to take a trip to someplace new and unfortunately, I don’t expect it to happen any time soon with baby on the way.
What we have managed to do, though, is Disney. Only a 3 hour drive from home we decided to get the annual passes and we’ve now been up 4 different weekends since October and it has truly been magical for our girls. I’ll never get enough of seeing their faces light up when they see a favorite character or experience something new.
While it may not be as exciting as wandering through a thousand year old souk or exploring palaces of medieval kings and queens, we’re still making irreplaceable family memories and will, hopefully, someday return to our travelling ways and start seeing the rest of the world we’ve yet to explore. (And no, we never did go to Euro Disney).
