Turknoy Travels 100 is a Lifestyle

Jumping out of the bed with excitement every day?  That is a great way to wake up every morning. Important question then is.. What could make us jump out of bed with excitement?

The answers won’t be that simple. That really varies for every individual.

For our family, mostly, it’s knowing that we had activities together all planned out for the day. It is not particularly important, where and what those activities are. As long as we are all together as a unit, as family. That is one great blessing we will always be grateful for.

The kids are growing way too fast for comfort and the parents are not growing any younger. To perform several activities require a lot of planning. Otherwise, everything will become monotonous and spending time together will eventually become Boring (with the capital B). The spark of our family wanting to be with each other all the time is too precious to not enjoy that as long as we can.

Hence, the travel goals.

We strongly believe that setting goals make things happen. Of course, goals need to me SMART. Both in business setting and in real life, no matter how personal it gets.

Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time-bound.

The huge difference of setting goals in business setting versus personal life is the end game – what do we want to get out of  these goals, the ultimate end. Business goals end game is usually compensation, personal goals end game is more often than not, quality of living and personal happiness.

Turknoy Travels 100 is not only focused on travelling together to 100 countries by 2023, before the kids turn 18.

Well, it is really that and more.Travel and education are the two main focus of our family lifestyle.

As we already defined our travel strategy and it is an unpopular one, we intend to mix-and-match this normal-life-with-real-job-travel-when-we-can-with-kids with every day-is-a-travel-adventure lifestyle.

Really awesome and cool family world-school, they travel around the world continually for very long periods of time, supporting themselves and educating their children at the same time. Turknoys may not (honestly, just really can’t) afford that worldschooling lifestyle for now. It gets too tiring for us to travel and explore after more than three weeks.

That’s when we realize, we are more like short time adventurers, sometimes fancy, most of the time cheapo family travelers.

We look forward to living our residence country for month-long holiday and we also look forward to coming back to homebase.

We look forward to visiting our home countries, Turkey and Philippines, but we also look forward to coming back to expat life.

Best of all worlds, we want to believe that.

The heat of 55degC may bother a lot of people during Doha summer time, but we sometimes look forward to less traffic and quiet times in the region. The below zero temperature and enormous snow in the Arctic region may well be a great home but we are very satisfied experiencing the Northern Lights for three consecutive nights, no shoveling required, snow mobile fun for limited period and leave these all for the months of starless nights in the desert.

We appreciate the different culture, but for now, we are particularly fond of our own comfort zone. Someday, sooner or later, things will change; perspectives may blur and other ideals will become clear, but for now the following specific travel goals have been set, consistent with #turknoytravels100

1.   To travel 100 countries by 2023 with the following criteria:

• All members of the family visited and explored the country at the same time. Home education trips without the five family members won’t be counted, although these adventures will be included in our blog.
• Visited two cities of the country. We don’t just visit a country for touristic purposes. We aim to be travelers, not tourists.
• Spent more than two days in the country. Although it’s not the number days but the quality of time spent traveling, it does help to stay more than two days in a certain country.To travel 100 countries by 2023 with the following criteria:
  100 countries distributed across seven continents, including Antartica. Chronologically, we wish to visit Asia (home sweet home), Europe (partly done), Africa (next!), South America, Antartica, Australia, North America
• Home based adventures include Philippines, Turkey and Qatar. Not included in 100 countries.

2.   To explore 100 islands in the Philippines.

3.    To visit 100 attractions in Turkey.

4.    To enjoy every moment in Qatar by finding 100 favourite spots as part of home education

Like any other SMART goal, these goals need to get SMARTER..

Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time-bound. Evaluated. Revised.

Life happens. Life will happen. God-willing, we will be able to realise these goals. For whatever circumstances and these will not be realised, we will re-set and revise goals as the need arises.

No worries. Only excitement to wake up and jump out of the bed every beautiful morning!