Travel Ideas and Advice

For a while, I considered tallying up the number of hours we had spent traveling throughout the previous year, but I soon changed my mind.

Between our recent family road trip in South Africa and our stopover break in Turkey last June, we put in over sixty hours of driving—and that doesn’t even include the travel from our recent three-and-a-half-month home assignment, planes, or driving time. Time for some emojis, huh?

When I am feeling cheerful, all the travel is one of the great gifts of living and working overseas. How else could we traverse around England in a campervan on an extended layover? Or take a stroller filled with toddlers through Notre Dame because we had a few spare hours? Or extend a trip to a home assignment to include an epic road trip around Turkey, where my husband spent his formative years?

But when life looks less rosy, travel is part of what can trigger feelings of being unsettled and rootless. Must we leave our home and life and routine for four months at a time? Who else does that? Part of the reason we’ve been able to travel to see beautiful parts of the world is because we don’t have family to visit on this side of the Atlantic. It’s a bittersweet trade-off. Some days, I would give anything for the familiar Midwest drive along Lake Michigan to my hometown.

For the most part, we have made the best of it, as we cross-cultural workers are known to do. We are resilient, we are flexible. We choose to see the bright side. But we know that joy and grief go hand in hand. That for every epic family adventure, there’s a missed Christmas. We hold space for both—the joy of new experiences, of seeing things many will never have the opportunity to see, of history coming alive with travel. And the grief of many missed holidays, of rarely having cousins or grandparents around for birthdays, of missed family reunions and trips. There truly is space for both.

I find that I am healthiest when I can pray, God, this is such a beautiful and amazing adventure, and also, God, I’m so heartbroken over missing my family. The cross-cultural emotional experience can be isolating and lonely, with onlookers often only seeing and understanding small parts of the complex experience we live. But we know and hold fast that Jesus understands our experience more than anyone else, having come himself to an earth that was not his home. What a friend we have in him!

Having shared my heart, I am happy to shift and share the more practical side of all that traveling. We have four daughters, ages six to eleven. Here are some travel tips that are saving my life at this stage.

• Epic snack bags: This burst of inspiration came to me as I was packing for a transatlantic, intercontinental flight solo with our children. My husband was to follow several weeks later. Maybe it’s just my children, but the idea of having special snacks they could choose to eat whenever they want? This was game-changing. I filled the bags with non-messy, pre-packaged snacks (which we don’t usually do a lot), and included a pack of gum in each. Throughout our thirty-hour trip, each child could grab a snack when she felt hungry, hangry, or even bored. I did not manage the snacks. When they were gone, they were gone!
• Favorite audiobooks: Long road trips and flights are times when I don’t hesitate much on audiobook requests. I find a way to download the favorites (using Libby, Hoopla, or, when those fail, Audible). We have an iPad and an old phone that the girls share, using a multi-headphone splitter. PSA: Don’t forget the headphone splitter (like we did on our last road trip). We also are at a stage where we love to find a family audiobook to listen to together for road trips—so fun.
• Essential oils: I have a motion sickness roller which I made a few years back. It may be the placebo effect, but when someone is feeling queasy, I reach first for this, and it usually helps. (Though not on our last flight when at least half of us got very sick from a very turbulent flight. No more details on that.) Also, I love to pack cotton rounds with a drop or two of lavender oil on each for when the airplane cabin aroma (or car stench) becomes too much.
• Playlists for various moods: I love having a slew of playlists downloaded (who knows if we’ll have a signal). Playlists for the early morning hours on a road trip, for the anxious stretches of flights, for the children to sing along to, for chill vibes. Music, like little else, can help set a mood when we need it.
• Travel allowance: We first tried this on our last road trip, and what a hit! We don’t give a normal allowance to our children, but for the trip, we gave each child the equivalent of $10 to spend however they chose. Some deliberated over the right souvenir, others spent a little at each gas station to keep the road trip interesting. We found that they were learning the value of money and enjoying the freedom and independence to use their money as they chose.

Here’s to that next flight or road trip, to those epic adventures, missed holidays, and knowing Jesus is with us through it all.