Trying to plan your trip’s daily activities is stressful for most people. Planning for a family of 5 with young kids, and finding activities that everyone will enjoy, and on an extreme budget can seem impossible. Add in a language barrier and you’ll likely want to start tearing your hair out. Now imagine doing all that for 18 months straight.
While it is a very privileged and extraordinarily lucky position to have been in, I imagine most people can sympathize with the stresses of managing a family. Luckily, eventually everyone learns how to plan appropriately. Adapting and preparing for everyone’s nit-picks starts to become second nature. In our travels, throughout the craziness, over time we started to establish routines.
Museums were a go-to activity for us in any location. Most museums usually had English speaking audio tours or placards. Museums offered an opportunity to learn more about where we were visiting and also forced us kids to be quiet. As kids we didn’t always care as much about the details of an exhibit but rather enjoyed looking at the artistic displays and exhibitions. In order to get us to learn, our parents would inform us of a “pop-quiz” at the end of the museum. They would offer the winner a small prize to whoever correctly answered the most questions about the museum. This usually consisted of something sweet, a window seat in the next car or plane, or pick a T.V. show if we were lucky enough to have one.
When touring museums was not an option my parents tried to balance doing things they’d want to do with things us kids would want to do. So after exploring a town for a few hours we might stop at a park or beach we had discovered along the way to a different activity. These were almost always free and provided our parents the opportunity to let us kids get out any excess energy before returning to our shared hotel room.
Our family’s favourite activity were interactive tours. Usually offered in English, these tours were where both us kids and our parents wanted to learn more. One that sticks out in memory are the shepherds and shearers in New Zealand which used masterfully trained dogs to tend to their flocks of sheep and a demonstration of their commands. This was followed by a demonstration of sheep shearing and an explanation of differences in the many types of wool there are. The mixture of learning, the outdoors, and animals was a perfect combination of interests for children and adults alike.