Our secret plans are becoming public. We were living in a fantasy world for some time and now everything is becoming real. For us that was reality and the other world was living in its fantasy. In the real world there are a lot of people that we love and care about. They had no idea that we were planning for this. They never heard of anybody to do this. They say that this is everybody's dream, but nobody does it. They praise us and envy our children who might not know how lucky they are. They wonder if there would be anything left after that. How does somebody return to work and keeps going after they've accomplished their lifetime dream? They are scared for us and silently hope that we will come to our senses. They are excited for us and want to join us. And they are mad and hurt because we didn't share and kept this hidden for so long. They are worried about my job and the school. And on and on it goes, I love this range of answers to our disclosure. There will be more and more people to learn about this and hopefully more reactions to remember. We are working getting our story strait, some details need to be clarified. It might also help to have a script of how to start a discussion, how to break the news that we are leaving, how to say that we will go for 14 months.
For those who might start our blog here, let me make a short summary. We are a family of five Romanians from upstate New York and we are going around the world. We always wanted to travel, even thought about going around the world and we were waiting for the kids to grow and go, or for us to retire. After learning of some families who traveled extensively with their children we started to talk about it. In July 2009 we decided to do it. A few months later we realized that we have to do it. We can pull this through and we owe it to ourselves and to our children. Jokingly or not we can make it part of their homeschooling. We kept this hidden, just among the five of us, we waited to break the news face to face to our families in Romania. We did it in December 2010 during our winter vacation and they took it pretty well. After we came home we started to share the news with some of our friends and with the people I work for/with. We are counting the days and starting to wrap things up. We don't know yet when we would be leaving but we are clarifying our choices and moving forward.
As my daughter put it, we want to discover a "slice of the world", not just monuments and resorts, but people and cultures from four continents. For now the plan is to go west, we know the end, Maria's 18th birthday in Romania in December 2012. We will leave sometime this fall, before December 1st. We will have just the hand luggage and a limited budget and we will work our way through looking for shelter, food and fun, making arrangements and plans as we go. We are not talking about a long vacation, it is actually travel and it will not be easy, but we are ready for it.
