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!
I fly because it releases my mind from the tyranny of petty things … – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Set goals! There are no petty things when you know how to make your family happy! 🤗Do you set goals for your family? As in serious goals written somewhere and not just a hashtag #familygoals or #travelgoals ? Can you state your goals in a sentence or two?
In any business organization, profit or non-profit, the importance of setting the vision and goals are very important. Companies spend thousands of dollars making sure that their vision, mission, goals and objectives are updated and relevant. Turknoy Mum knows this, she spent more than a decade of her career in ensuring an effective system is in place to set the direction of the organization.
A person without goal is a like a kite without string, going to wherever the winds blows, until the kite gets destroyed in God-knows how, where and when.
As much as our family believes in destiny and meant-to-be-happy-ever-after, we believe in setting goals. It keeps the hearts and minds waking up with tons of excitement, not to mention, keeps the hearts and minds focused on what we really want to get out of this life.
The day-to-day living together becomes an agony if we keep doing the same thing over and over only guided with society’ directions one of which is that is that ” Someday, kids will finish school and “become successful.”
Successful means achieving goals, can’t really be a success without goals to rate it against, right?
Growing up, both Turknoy parents wanted to be rich. We earned our first thousand dollars successfully before we turned 30, got married, had kids, and kept our management jobs…. And then……… day in, day out.. wait for kids to grow up, keep the day jobs, wait for kids to grow up… And then…. Boredom. In other lives, it could mean drama here and there. How people without goals would welcome drama in their lives if there is nothing to look forward to! Oh, that happens!
Human psychology supports this. When the mind is not looking forward to something, it deviates from what is right or appropriate. Fights, affairs, murder, suicide. Okay, a bit exaggerated to get our point across, but that’s how it happens in real life.
Settling down with family is not an end point. It is a status. Same as being in a relationship. Or staying “forever” with your one true love.
The sad and pathetic thing is when we consider “settling down with our family” and living our forever with the one we love” our one exclusive goal in life. There is really more to life.
Romantic as it sounds, it really is boring. Setting goals is an ongoing process. There is an end point to goals to determine whether we achieved it or not, but the process needs to be habitual aka “forever.”
Our family’s goal is to travel. It is our family’s passion. It gives us adrenaline to deal with our day-to-day expat realities of petty and trivial things. It refreshes our mind seeing new things, giving happy sensations whenever we experience new places and meet new people.
Traveling is not the only goal for a family. However, the importance of setting goals should not be underestimated.
Family and setting goals is like life and oxygen.
So, do you have goals for your family? Let us know, in one sentence or two?
Understanding the principles of aerodynamics has nothing to do with the experience of flying. – Northrop Frye
Our Turknoy youngest was almost one-year old when we started flying together as family. We can all vividly and fondly remember the trouble of flying with stroller, baby bags with milk and bottles, changing nappies in the crampy airplane toilet and most loved of all, the crying and loud baby in the mid-flight when all passengers sleeping! Oh gracious!
We can hear what some of our fellow travelers and even family members think when we started traveling three years ago. It goes like – “These parents are insane, why do they subject these kids and their fellow travelers the agonies of carrying the kids to places to explore (traveling!). The kids won’t even remember these places they painstakingly took them to. Such trouble.”
Traveling with our little ones is one milestone we will definitely not regret or forget!
Oh, when we look at our now four-year old now! How at home she is at airplane and how she is very insistent to watch the safety flight video and stay at the window seat to look down below when the plane lands or takes off. The extreme joy of watching the clouds when we are 36,000-ft. like all the life’s secret will be revealed to her alone is just too priceless to watch. During long flights, she sleeps like a grownup scrunched in the seat with a smile on her face. Most of time.
Our six-year old son never fails to shriek with so much delight during landing and takeoff. Such loud moments when we take off… “And off we go….. “ he always shout and claps loud whenever we land.
On the other hand, the parents are scared-shit of all the things that could go wrong when we land or take off. Adults know that the most dangerous part of flying are the landing and takeoff. There we are sitting so uptight while our kids are having the momentous joys of their life!
Kids enjoy flights better than adults. They say ignorance is bliss, but we don’t think it’s the ignorance. It’s the enthusiasm to experience and explore something for all the senses, not mainly for the brain and intellect.
That carefree feeling, the abandonment of what should be but what is. Not the moments what kids can remember.
Exploring new places, experiencing new adventures – those are not for the intellect. It is definitely way much more than that. It’s the foundation of our being, the things we will build our future memories on.
Foundations are built to last, built to be strong.
Foundations can also be built while having fun and being happy.
Kids should learn to explore freely. Kids can fly and travel better.
look at our little traveller being silly during a six-hour waiting time at the airport, time flies!
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.
The photo that started it all. The time when we realized how happy and satisfying family travel is. Our youngest is yet to be conceived in this time and we set goals after she was born. Exploring Pamukkale in one of our home countries #Turkey is very memorable to us as a couple, joined by love, commitment; heart, brain and feet! With a help of a little goal setting, #turknoytravels100 was set three years after – 2013. Yes, taking our sweet time.. It’s okay for us, traveling is something to savor; a lifestyle to enjoy, not just something to tick off the list!3. To visit 100 attractions in Turkey.
It’s not going to be fair to the Turkish side of the family (mainly #turknoysdad ) if #familytravel will not include the islands of Philippines! The dad loves the gorgeous islands of Philippines. We intend to explore at least 100 islands, an easy goal compared to 7107 islands total, by 2023 as well! Home sweet home adventures is just pure awesome love!4. To enjoy every moment in Qatar by finding 100 favourite spots as part of home education
he Singing Sand Dunes of Qatar! Our favorite family fun spot in Qatar! Definitely number one spot for us while exploring the country where we currently resides as #expatfamily 🦄😍 We also aim to explore places and areas in this country to appreciate day to day living when we are not visiting our countries! Because exploring is a lifestyle! And great lifestyle is great life!
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!
At Sacre Coeur Paris, France where we definitely enjoyed the rain, stairs with stroller, church and awesome city views. Priceless moments our youngest would not remember (and even our toddler then!) but the parents definitely would!
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?
We have our reasons. When all expats from the Middle East are planning their escape from the desert heat, our family is rolling out our home activities and travel around GCC! We simply love this part of the world in the summer.
Yes, the summer at more than fifty degrees Celsius! What could be more exciting? Or boring depends on what perspective you are coming from. Imagine a day raising a gifted 7-year old, a rambunctious almost 4-year old and an equally active 1-year old and having the only the option of either indoor activities or heat stress. Life is simply glorious.
Last year, we finally kicked off our travel and off we went to Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Might as well explore the neighboring countries. The summer discount is huge. Normally, we couldn’t afford our stay in The Palm Atlantis – in the summer, we can! We stayed in the fabulous hotel for three days and two nights and we were ecstatic!
enjoying summer at The Palm AtlantisThere are loads to do in the Palm that we planned to just explore the place. We were very fortunate to have a friend in the area who were very willing to guide us around Dubai. Highlight of the tour outside Atlantis are exploring the tallest building in the world – The Burj Khalifa, and skiing in the desert during summer – how cool is that? It was way TOO cool for us! It really does help to know someone in the area, reuniting with an old friend and free local guide! Perfect!
The tallest tower in the world
On top of the world – Burj Khalifa
The parents had a blast and the kids loved every minute of the trip. This trip actually inspired us to explore more! We intend to go back to United Arab Emirates to visit other cities. There is way too much to see.
Turknoy Travels 100! 