The Terrific3 travel blog

This year, we spent 11 weeks out of the 52, approximately 21% of our year abroad. For me, it’s been a dream come true. I’ve always been an avid traveler. Becoming single mom to 2 littles shut down any big international travel for a while and then once we got our global entry passes and did our first international trip to Mexico in 2020 to dip our toes in the water, COVID hit the world and shut down travel.

I absolutely LOVE traveling internationally and have been bit by the bug again. I especially love meeting locals, hearing about their stories and lives, learning about history, admiring ancient architecture, and consuming delicious flavorful food. In fact, I’ve been known to choose the country I’ll travel to based upon if I think I’ll enjoy the food (must be vegetarian friendly so no eastern Europe for us!). Traveling with kids—it’s a whole other thing. On one hand, it’s incredibly stressful managing 3 schedules and 3 sets of needs, and sharing space, and packing and unpacking and creating routines in new places. Having a neurodiverse kiddo amplifies that greatly, as he does not transition well, and melts down with each new place. There were certainly times where I cursed myself for doing this to myself.

But despite that, both my kiddo who loves travel and new things and new cuisine, and my kiddo who is so so about it, acquired life skills, perspective about the world, and appreciation that we are more than 3 people living in the whitest city in the USA, and a very privileged life at that.

And the best things we’ve created are the memories. We all have so many stories and memories and picture books, and I hope over time, they remember these fondly much as I remember my own childhood travel. That this is a family treasure for them. In the end, I would much rather travel than own an expensive car or expensive “stuff”—that is money I wasted in my opinion. Experiences are so much more valuable.

I also learned that when going to new countries and having limited time, the money spent on a tour agency is well worth it when you have kids. To pay someone to design an itinerary, drive you around, boy tickets, stand in line and deal with logistics removes 80% of the stress of being a single parent trying to do it all. I actually felt like our time in India was a real vacation, and if I had been planning and arranging day to day, I would’ve not enjoyed it as much, I’m thankful to our tour agency Trinetra tours. I highly recommend them and learned they do tours all over the world. We will definitely use them again.

I will leave you with a few favorite travel photos of 2023 and I’m hoping we’ll continue to have some fun in 2024.