Plans!

What next?  Glad you asked. Well, we have finally figured it out.

We are going to  leave our beloved truck in the capable hands of friends. Our Spanish dog with the Czech microchip floating around in his neck will stay in Europe with other friends. Good to have friends huh. We will jump on a plane and fly around the world. Easy huh. Dang, why didn’t we do this sooner. We have been talking about this for years and are finally doing it. We found some amazing tickets.  We have friends and family to see in places that it is cost-prohibitive to bring the truck to. We need to re-establish our foundations before we continue on in our truck. We do belong somewhere in the world. We just haven’t seen those places in a very long time. Our kids need to touch homebase. We need to touch homebase before we continue on. We think the next stage with the truck will be especially difficult so we need to get things together a bit more before we continue on.

So, here is the plan.

We are going to fly into NYC on the 19^th of September and make our way around the states for the next 3 months to be with family and friends. Paying special attention to seeing our oldest 2 children in Texas and my parents and sisters in Oregon. We will be in Oregon for Christmas. This is very important to my mum. She has no less than 10 big boxes of Christmas decorations she brings out every Christmas. 

On the 12^th of January we will fly to New Zealand. Hopefully, with all 5 kids. Only my two oldest kids have been there when they were babies. Our kids hold New Zealand passports and don’t know it at all.

On the 2^nd of April we will fly to Sydney, Australia. On the 5^th of April we fly to Perth, Australia. In Perth we have Andrew’s family. The kids are frequently bringing it to my attention that they have cousins that they have never met there.

On the 6^th of May we fly to Hong Kong and then train across to Beijing. China is very difficult, if not impossible to bring the truck into so this is the Asia stop we chose to experience China and possibly to open doors for a return trip in our truck.

On the 23^rd of May we fly back through London to Germany to our dear truck and join a convoy around Germany and then on through Turkey to Asia and North Africa.

How is that for an itinerary?  A great challenge will be to keep the costs down as we will be more vulnerable without our big truck.  We plan to travel with a small, portable kitchen, sleeping bags, pads and some small tents.  Some friends in the U.S. are trying to get us an RV to travel around in. 

All very exciting and scary. The kids have already begun to pack. To be perfectly honest, I have begun to pack. I am concerned on finishing some things on the truck because we plan on hitting the ground running when we come back to her. We still need to finish our kitchen counter, install our woodstove and build a better platform on the back of the truck so we can take our motorbike out of the kitchen. It makes a great place to sit but kinda gets in the way sometimes.