The Terrific3 travel blog

Last day is always hectic

I started off the day at 445pm….ah insomnia. Already feeling jet lagged.

I let the kids stay home from their official last day of school today (it was a snow day and added after we bought our airline tickets). This was needed as we spent a lot of time downloading the requisite stuff on their kindles, Cynthia our lovely nanny helped them clean their rooms, and I got them to pack their carryons and snacks.

Photo above of Z avoiding light for the first few hours of the day. We are trying to follow the Timeshifter app as much as possible for a mom and kids, and it asked us to stay in darkness until noon. We managed until about 10 am, and the kids loved hanging out in their dark rooms and having me bring them breakfast there. The app is supposed to help with decreasing jet lag.

I spent almost an hour with each kid loading up their kindles—Disney and prime downloads and books from kindle unlimited. If you don’t know about kindle unlimited, it’s a program that allows the family to “borrow” up to 20 books at a time from their titles, with no return date. Not everything is on there, but all of us found several things we liked, and it was $ 0.99 for the first 1 or 2 months, which covers our travels, and then less than $10 a month after that.

I’ve discovered that no matter how much time you’ve spent packing your bags, the last minute stuff, especially with kids, is always hectic and feels chaotic. Charging everyone’s devices, finding everyone’s chargers, getting shoes, toothbrushes, etc together. And once we did that, I discovered that our large suitcase was over 50 lbs even though it had space. Mostly because it had all the toiletries, medications, sunblock, mosquito stuff etc etc. We hope to shed some of that in Asia. That caused some reshuffling into one of the 2 smaller carryons, which ended up being too full, so I upsized that to a medium suitcase to allow us space to bring things back. Though I would’ve loved to travel with 3 carry ons and 3 bagpacks, we are not that family, and 2 months is a long time. We ended up with one large, one medium, one small suitcase to check and for carry on—one duffel bag, and 3 bagpacks plus my purse. I made S practice rolling the medium suitcase around just in case we need that, though my intention is to pay whoever we need to to help scuttle our stuff around when we reach Bangkok and have to walk to the in terminal airport. It’ll be 11pm there, we’ll be 36 hours into a journey, and it’s unclear how much sleep anyone will have had. Wish me luck!!!!

I had to squeeze a run in today, especially since we won’t be terribly active for 2 days.