I’ve been on a bit of a blogging break, partly because I’ve been busy planning upcoming trips (including next years European adventure) and all the crazy-busyness that the end of the year brings……….  I’ve been reminded though (pretty much daily), thanks to those Facebook memories, that it’s just gone 5 years since our first European adventure with a 1-year-old Astrid.

While we’d travelled within Australia with a baby Astrid, and we’d had plenty of international adventures pre-kids, it was our first foray into travel with kids (or at least ‘kid’ at the time).  It was also part of the reason I started this blog. I figured that a place to share our travel stories and some of the thousands of photos I was going to take was a good idea. Little did I know how many millions of words, and thousands of images I was going to share……… and that I’d still be sharing our travel stories all these years later.  I also didn’t predict how many countries we’d get to in a few short years (now 21 and counting in 5 years)!

Back in 2012 our plan to base ourselves in Paris for a couple of months, and wander off to various other countries and cities, seemed like a great one. It was also a great first trip with a baby. Our overseas holidays have gotten significantly more complicated and ambitious since that trip!

I still have so many amazing memories (and photos) from that big 2012 trip.  Even though we based ourselves in Paris, we also got to other areas of France and also visited Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Sweden and Switzerland.  Astrid went from a baby to a toddler in the space of those couple of months and she become a super-star traveller.

Even all these years later she still fondly looks at the photo books from those trips and even remembers a few bits and pieces, proving that it’s never too early to take your kids on awesome holidays, they do often remember!  Astrid has definitely grown up loving travel and is now at 74 flights and 21 countries (I’ve totally lost count of the number of long-distance trains, but she probably has the tickets shoved somewhere as she loves to collect them)!

These days she helps us plan trips and has a Paris guidebook sitting on her bedside table for nightly reading and planning……..

That trip certainly taught us that travelling with little people is a lot of hard work but a big adventure. You get less sleep, have to pack more stuff, it’s not all that relaxing, you have less time to see stuff, visit parks rather than museums, and there needs to be a constant supply of snacks and baby wipes!  We’ve gotten much better at this travelling with kids thing and don’t think twice about flying to the other side of the world, going hiking in sub-zero temperatures or riding 70km in a day ….. all with kids in tow.

Dinner time conversations in our house are often amusing with the kids intricately planning our future travel!  They are currently obsessed with planning our next Paris visit (with discussions of their ‘favourite patisseries and parks) and our plans to camper-van around Iceland…..

Just when we got to the point where we’d passed 5 years since the return from that 2012 trip, I thought I would stop seeing daily memories of all that European goodness. Of course we did another big trip this time 2 years ago (this time with Soren in tow) and now there is daily memories of hot chocolates, Christmas markets and playing in the snow……..

Oh my goodness the kids have grown since then! It does make we want to go back for another cold Christmas while the kids are little, it was pretty awesome! Christmas in Berlin, then New Years in Prague and Vienna and waking up to snow on New Years Day in Vienna, followed by so much snow for all of January in Austria and Switzerland. Don’t even get me started on that awesome food (think I’ve almost worked it all off). It also helps that it’s been almost 35 degrees here every day this week, so snow seems very appealing!

In the meantime I’ll get on with planning next years adventure and maybe eventually catch up on the photo books from the last 2 Europe trips (and a few other overseas adventures in between).  Blogs I’m finally up to date on, photo books not so much!

All these memories do remind me that the hundreds of hours of planning, organising and booking for our travel really pays off.  If only we had unlimited money and the process would be much easier.  Meanwhile I’ll get back to the planning for the upcoming trips. More travel spam will be coming your way in 2018, first Bali and then Europe……..