Recommended soundtrack: I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles) – The Proclaimers
Job finished (a specific article will come on this subject), flat returned, here we are homeless on the road with our little car (405000 kilometers on the clock!), our baby in the car seat and our essentials (the boot is fully packed!) for two months of travel through France, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom!
Before flying to New Zealand (if the New Zealand authorities allow me to come back!), I really wanted to go for a journey and spend as much time as possible with my friends and family.
For several months, we have been planning all our drives and stays precisely, making sure to squeeze it all into two short months of travel... After many exchanges and adaptations of the program, we left almost three weeks ago!
All our luggage is made up of twelve items... We don't know how to travel light anymore between Michael's work, my immigration papers to do on the road and... Baby, whose luggage represents, in terms of space used, more than half!
Luggage list for a human being of about 80 cm and 8 kgs :
a bed;
a stroller
a baby carrier;
a diaper bag;
a bag of food;
a bag of clothes;
a care bag;
a bag of toys.
If the car breaks down before the end of the trip, I'm not sure how we're going to lug all our burdens! As if I didn't ask enough with my visa, dear readers, if you could cross your fingers for the survival of our dear car it would also be perfect!
Little extra challenge, we decided to make the trip with baby in re-usable diapers! We use them every day, with the washing machine at our disposal, easy, but on the road it's already more complicated! For the moment everything is fine, because our relatives let us requisition their own machines, and also thanks to an innovative creation, the car clothesline created from a shoelace (TADAAAAAAAM)! I hesitate to patent... 😊
We're on the road with a 10-month-old baby, whose reactions to such long journeys, frequent changes of environment and many new encounters were unpredictable. Well, so far so good! Baby is smiling and very sociable!
It must be said that we have adapted our rhythm in order to lighten the weight of the trip. Typically, our days don't start before noon so that Baby can have her morning nap (usually quite long) and eat her lunch. Afterwards, baby is quite tolerant of walks.
In the car, when baby starts to tell us that it's too much, we stop as soon as possible to take a real break, do a bit of crawling and cuddling before leaving.
At the restaurant, tip for baby jealous of the parents' plate: bread in all its forms! Baguette, sandwich loaf, pretzel... happiness is in the flour it seems!
We wander through town and country with baby on our back, and I must say that this long break just starting makes me very happy after years of only being able to take a few weeks of vacation in a row. The pace is slower, we enjoy it in a different way.
I can't wait to continue, especially since I've always really enjoyed road trips. Swallowing the kilometers through the countryside (mostly taking toll-free roads), discovering tiny villages I would never have known otherwise, stopping on a nice roadside, turning the car into a little house, singing a thousand songs from our teenage years (big up Backstreet Boys, our little favourites for now : EVERYBODYYYYYYAAAAAA YYYYEEEEEAAAAA).
And, of course, redesigning the world behind the wheel, imagining life in 5, 10, 30 or 50 years from now, listing all the places we'd like to live, all the jobs we'd like to do, building castles in the sky, trying to be realistic and then saying to ourselves that we don't care about being realistic because otherwise we wouldn't be living this adventure.
See you on the road!