One Of Our Favourite Beaches, Re-Visited

After we bid farewell to family and friends in Vancouver and left the North American winter behind, we had a busy 4 days of travel ahead of us.  We first flew to Hong Kong, where we spent a night (we literally arrived at the hotel at 10pm and headed off to the airport at 6am the next morning), then flew on to Bangkok, where we spent another night.  In Bangkok, we also said good bye to our 2 main backpacks for the next couple of weeks and took only our new little roll-away case and our day bags with us for yet another 2 consecutive days of travel in order to get to our ‘final holiday destination’.

Our 5 Favourite Winter Activities For Families In Vancouver

Vancouver is a gorgeous city—it’s no surprise that it has consistently been dubbed the ‘Most Liveable City In The World’.  It’s got it all—the coastal location, with a mountainous backdrop, forests andparks a plenty, great food from all corners of the world, an arts andculture scene and friendly, environmentally and minority sensitive,ethnically-diverse inhabitants.

Watching a sea plane land in Coal Harbour, Vancouver, B.C.

 

A Great Canadian Day To End Our Year

Living in Australia really suits us as a family.  We love the sunny days and the fact that our house is less than 10min drive from a beautiful beach where we spend as much time as we can swimming in the clear southern ocean and playing on the sandy shore.  Our kids love the water and sand!  And much of our past 11 months was spent not only in tropical climates but also included lots of beach time too. Our kids have no experience with cold climate activities such as ice and snow!

Our Canadian Christmas

Can’t believe that it’s the end of December already.  We’ve been traveling in SEA and surrounds for over 11 months now but from the planning stages of this trip, it had been our wish to spend Christmas with our Canadian family in Vancouver.  While we were looking forward to seeing Aunts, Uncles and cousins again, some of whom we had not seen for over 2.5yrs, and to experience a ‘Canadian Christmas’ we were a bit wary about this leg of our trip too.

Hong Kong-- Bright Lights, BIG City

In the scheme of things, the 6 nights/5 days that we spent in Hong Kong was a decent amount of time to spend in a city, especially with 2 kids in tow.  But for precisely that reason, we wish we had another 3x that amount in order to have really explored the city.  There is just so much to see and do there, that you don’t even know where to start.

Stuck On Koh Phangan

We don’t know of many travelling families who have been moving as continually as we have in the 10+ months that we’ve been on the road.  We’ve never stayed in any one place for longer than 12 nights or so.  But especially after our travels through India, we are a tad bit tired.  Yet still surprisingly (to us anyway) we ended up staying on Koh Phangan for 26 days, and loved every minute of it! 

So what did we do there?

Dear Santa, For This Christmas We Wish...

Christmas is a time of mixed feelings for us. When we were kids, Jim and I remembered it being an exciting and magical holiday, mostly likely due to the gifts from Santa and from our parents. But giving was fun too, and as kids that usually meant making something for our parents at school. As adults, it became a time to buy that special gift to show our loved ones how much they mean to us. But above all, Christmas meant visiting with family and friends.

But maybe it’s the times we live in, or simply ‘getting older’ but somewhere along the line, it seems that the magic has given way to pure and frenzied consumerism, especially in Western Christian societies. It now seems only about ‘what to get whom’, and how much we are going to spend on gifts and the size of the present. Instead of ‘warm and fuzzy’ get togethers, social events are instead often tense and attended with feelings of obligation. As you can tell, we’ve become quite jaded by Christmas—some might even say ‘scrouge-like'!