About 15 years ago, before kids, Ray and I visited London for the first time on a 2-week tour of four European cities and decided “we could live here” if we ever had the opportunity. It was all the fun of being abroad and navigating a major city, without the language barriers and cultural roadblocks that can make a long-term stay more difficult. Fifteen years later, we’ve got two manageable middle-school-aged kids who go to year-round school. You can find the long version of what that entails here, but it basically means they get four breaks a year instead of one long summer vacation. Each break is roughly 3 weeks long, so this spring, we tacked on an extra week and took the full month away from mid-April to mid-May.
How? That’s a much longer story that Ray is more equipped to tell, as the financial and logistical mastermind of this adventure. But why? That’s easy. Because learning to live in a different country changes your perspective on the world. It can change your life. Why just one city? First of all, because back-packing through Europe is for spry young college kids, traveling alone or in tight little twosomes. Moving a family of four from place to place requires a lot of set up and take down, with multiple repetitions of directions and itineraries. Plus, travel days require a level of time and energy that takes precious hours away from simply being where you’re trying to go. So we opted to spend more time in one city and establish a home away from home, where we could dig in, find our favorite (and not so favorite) things, and see it as a real place, not just a tourist attraction. We did take a few vacations within the vacation—to Paris, Épernay, and Liverpool—but it was important to us to “see and be” in one spot long enough to get a real sense of it beyond the major sights. And why a city? Because cities are exciting and easier to move around in without a car. They’re not for everyone, forever and always. But we wanted to give our kids the experience of finding one’s way in a city. We hope it’s a gift that will keep on giving as they find their way in the world, less and less alongside us.
To be clear, this was an extended vacation, so we ate and drank very differently than we would have in our forever home. For instance, we only eat out once a week normally, but on this trip we ate at restaurants or food markets every single day. We also walked two to four times as much as we usually do. We didn’t join a gym or carve out time to go running, but we did walk up to 30,000 steps in 24-hour period. The boys have been into strength training recently, so they definitely made time for their crunches, planks, push-ups and resistance bands (usually about five minutes after we’d told them to go to bed), but their main forms of exercise were walking from one side of London to the other and kicking a ball or throwing a frisbee in various green spaces we encountered while exploring.
The other big difference from our real life was space. At home we have a bed for every body and a toilet for every ass. We have the supreme luxury of spreading out in a way that city dwellers usually have to sacrifice. In London, we had a two-bedroom, one-bathroom flat that could fit in our suburban North Carolina garage, but the whole city was just a Tube ride away. It’s quite the trade-off. We figured that’s another good life lesson for the boys, that you can get by with less—especially if it means getting to do more than many families ever get the chance to.
Speaking of which, we're well aware how special this opportunity was. If you're one of the many deserving adults who hasn't had a day's vacation in way too long, you’re probably as tired of hearing about London as my kids are of smiling for the pictures. If you're over it, I see you and I'm sorry... but I'm also not done talking about this trip. In fact, my next series of posts will be a deeper dive into things we did and learned, beyond the bullet-pointed highlights and fun photos on Facebook. It’s how just how I plan to process it all. Like they said repeatedly on the Tube in reference to suspicious activity: See it. Say it. Sorted. Well, I’ve seen stuff. I’ve said stuff about it. Now it’s time to get it all sorted into nice little bins: the fun, the funny, and the forever memories from this last crazy month.
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