A family travel blog meant to track our family goals and to inspire the world that anyone with vision backed with SMART goals are meant to have their dreams come to a reality!
“He not busy being born is busy dying.” –Sings Bob Dylan
Every time we visit a new country or a new place or do new activity together as family, we always have that feeling of vigor, of expanding our horizon, of being reborn (in a non-radical-religious-kinda-way!)
The feeling of excitement when we stepped out of the plane and enjoy the first breath of fresh air of the country! Lots of possibilities, places to see, lots of milestones to share with kids!
The feeling of accomplishment when we perform new activity together, no matter now trivial, the exhilaration of fresh ideas coming to mind, fresh feelings of tons of possibilities shared with kids!
It makes all of us come alive.
When we arrived at Gangehi, Maldives from the seaplane to the boat going to the island, we can still vividly hear the gasps of WOW from all the passengers, it’s like we were almost in the paradise island! Well, the island is a paradise. Gangehi is one small island in the middle of the Indian Ocean isolated surrounded with nothing but water and white, fine sand. The parents were so busy admiring the islands that the kids almost fell off the ocean from the plane! (True story – but kids are good swimmers, no harm done!) Out of breath with the view, panting with excitement, every now and then pinching ourselves to make sure that it’s real, all nerves yearning to catch up with the logic of what is happening. Euphoria – that’s a nice busy feeling.
Setting foot on Gangehi Islands in Indian Ocean for the first time with kids!Exactly the same feeling our family felt when we stepped out of the airplane from Stockholm to Kiruna, in the Artic part of the world. It was almost midnight, the snow everywhere, the freezing temperature, looking up at the bright sky hoping to see the Northern Lights. Again, the parents were so busy admiring the snow-covered airport runway that we didn’t notice the kids sinking their feet to the depth of the snow. (Again, true story! They did however, find this funny and kept running mindlessly around like their parents, despite being undressed in a very cold weather!) The faces of the kids, giddy moments together, definitely a treasure to remember for the rest of our living moments.
The morning after arrival at Kiruna – awesome moments with family!
Again, exactly the same feeling we had when we experienced our first family cart-carabao ride around the village in Indang we call home in the Philippines. Kids and parents shouting with joy and excitement looking at familiar green environment and feeling euphoric seeing goats, chickens and banana shrubs! The adrenaline rush, the blissful moment of being occupied with activity so routine and trivial for some, yet so special and memorable for our family.
Carabao Ride in Indang! Home Sweet Home Adventures!
That exact same feeling, although a bit challenging to replicate in our day-to-day life as expat family in the desert, we always try our best to feel alive, to be exhausted with happiness and not boredom. We find bliss in sand dunes, so we always seek the thrill of admiring the desert with kids especially at high temperature and humidity! In the desert, we feel busy dreaming, busy feeling the euphoria of experiencing life surrounded by sand and dust yet with so much comfort magnified by love and blessings of the country we live in.
Brown is our Green when in Qatar! Exploring is always blissfulEvery day we open our eyes are God’s gift. Each day we don’t do things that make us come alive is an injustice to this gift.
Every day is too precious not to be busy living. Such a waste to be busy dying!
Let’s Be Busy Growing Everday. It takes full commitment to growth!
“Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.”– Paul Theroux
Rain in Paris, Rain in Nice – Highlight of our France Experience !
The memories of France for our family is not The Eiffel Tower. There is much to this country than what the Turknoy parents grew up daydreaming about.
We stayed in France for a total of 16 days and nights! That is more than half-month as a tourist! Yes, newbie tourist family for few weeks, it’s like few weeks of being in first year high school. We didn’t know any better.
We spent 8 days in Paris, devoted tourists as we are, very good tourists, enjoying all the famous touristic attractions in the city.
Lots of photos with the Eiffel Tower, explored the peak view of the Eiffel Tower, after spending lots of time queuing, waiting for our turn to climb the peak, went to Louvre Museum and checked out Mona Lisa (twice!), enjoyed the River Seine Tour on a cold, windy day, Open Bus Tour for several days, spent a considerable amount of time at the Arc De Triomphe, climb the stairs of Sacre Coeur Church and enjoyed its religious rituals and magnificent views and was awed with admiration exploring the Palace of Versailles.
Phew, it sounded as jampacked as it is written.
Going out of the City of Love, we enjoyed Nice and the French Riveria, again on cold, rainy days. The feel of elegance and posh French Mediterrean is simply too gorgeous for our cheap travel mode. We enjoyed the very classy places in Cote d’Azur, Paul de Vence, Gourdon, Eze, Antibes and Cannes!
Snow and Eiffel Tower fun!
It was all very fantastic and dreamlike, and not to be outshined was our three nights stay in Paris Disneyland Hotel. That meant three days of enjoying Disneyland Paris, including breakfasts and lunches with the Disney princesses and other Disney characters, of course, Mickey Mouse included. That also meant lots of Disney parades, Disney rides and Disney fireworks!
Paris Disneyland Highlights
It was indeed a magical holiday with family.
But, there is a big BUT, following that magical holiday statement. It was magical BUT there is a LOT more.
This is our first foreign country to explore together as family and there are a lot of “HOOPS!”, “Ohhh Myyy Godddd” moments.
Our top experiences may not be about France even, but hey… traveling is most of the time, not about the destination. We all know how the cliché goes – it’s about the journey, the memories, the mishaps, the memories!
I believe, when we are old, grumpy and grey and someone mentioned France to us, there will be lots of laughter in our head. It will not be because we walked the red carpet of Cannes with kids, it’ll probably because of our boohoo moments in the country. Survived with rice cooker and lots of tuna. The first two days of Paris means lots of French bread and authentic French food like escargot (yuumm!) Then our Asian side won over our desire to explore new dishes, the rice cooker and tuna cans to rescue! The smell of tuna in our hotel room every meal, every day will make us vomit to this day. It was a lot cheaper, too. The image of my kids eating tuna straight to tuna cans or straight from the rice cooker while happily chatting away the days activities are simply too good an image to forget. Of course, we highly recommend to bring rice cooker and tuna cans when traveling with kids!
For sure, our Asian readers will understand.
Lost. Everywhere. Missed metro stop. Missed bus stop. Missed boat stop. Missed street sign. Even got lost inside the Louvre museum. A lot of times. We swear, that Mona Lisa painting moved, when we tried to find the painting for the second time. We never ended up where we wanted to be, but most of the time, we ended up having fun. With new eyes and new places, everything is just amazing.
For what it is worth, France is really is one of the most beautiful city in the world. Got Laid with Audience. Yes, that type of laid. We can’t really pass the chance of staying in France and not sneaking in “romantic” moments. Did you know that hotel rooms in France (and Europe in general) are really small and it’s hard to keep anything a secret when you share with three kids? Oh well, kids will figure out anyways. Better sooner than later. Example. Set an example.
Durex means I Love You and The Kids Enough Not to Want to Have More Kids
Enjoyed Rain and Snow A Lot. The kids enjoyed their first snow moments in France. Slip, fall, tumble, run, one snowball, colds and cough, happiness in snow.
Ahh, the rain! It almost didn’t stop raining when we were in Nice. The park, the beach, the no crowd day. Just us, the crazy Turknoy family with wet feet and warm hearts.
Noisy Kids Reported. We were almost thrown our of our first hotel. Two old European couple complained about the kids being noisy. Uuuggh! Who does that? And we found out the answer, two retired grumpy couple! We were given a warning, luckily, we were supposed to check out day after. We just stayed out of the couple’s way. The kids will always remember how we defended them, and how diplomatic we were (promise, we were, just a little bit sarcastic.)
France is glamorous. Our first family travel in France, glamorous as we wanted it to be, was definitely not.
Fond first memories together for all family members @ ages 37,35,7,4,1.
I believe that everybody dreams of going to Paris, France and seeing the Eiffel Tower.
There are enough movies, soap operas, news, marketing publicities about France being the most romantic country in the world to make everyone wants to go there.
Including me. And to think that I came from a very (very) remote town of an archipelago country. I wanted to see the Eiffel Tower ever since I saw the movie French Kiss. I was almost 17. (I did tell you I am a remote country girl, right?)
To see the Eiffel Tower for me was one of those goals that you have to have in the list but totally okay not to achieve; right there in the group of “to marry my prince charming” list. These goals I thought would never actually happen.
Eventually, I did marry my prince charming and we did live happily ever after. Then it hit me – dreams could come true. Why not go to Paris?
But part of living happily ever after is having kids. We had three. Yes – prince charming can’t keep his hands off his princess.
Later on, my prince charming and I realized, that since we have kids, it would be almost impossible to travel. So they told us.
According to our happily-ever experts, there are a lot of reasons why we can’t travel. Period. Much more travel to France. The most popular one is that kids will not appreciate France and the baby won’t even remember. Bottom line, almost everyone around us thinks that it is not just worth it.
That same reason why we can’t travel to France just yet, fueled my desire to go to France more . We went to France March 2013. This is my happy-ever-after. This is not my kids’ dream. This is MY DREAM. I want to explore France. I want to travel with my family. I don’t want to wait until they are “older” to appreciate the place same as I would. I definitely don’t want to wait until we are retired and kids are all grown up.
My happy-ever -after is now.
For seven beautiful days we explored Paris, France. On top of that, we stayed in Disneyland, Paris for three awesome nights. We explored further and went to South of France: Nice and Provence France for additional week.
I am dreaming of France no more! I am happy; ready to move on to other dreams.
If the kids want to come back later on, it will be their dream to be conquered. I have achieved my life-long dream, they should follow their mother’s lead.
Have you been to France? Do you want to visit the country sometime? What’s keeping you?
Turknoy Travels 100! 