Travel brings me a true sense of freedom, an unfettered opportunity to explore, experience and observe the world. No daily grind or distraction clouding my thoughts so I am free to focus only on what’s around me, and where I’m at in any given moment. These adventures really help me to broaden my views of the world, and I’m forever grateful that we’ve been able to share these experiences with our kids.
I must admit, that on some level, I am disappointed that the kids are getting older, and our opportunities for epic family trips are quickly diminishing. That’s not the say I won’t be travelling, but the kids are quickly going to be moving on with their lives. That’s why we wanted to take this opportunity to check out some “bucket list” sites. We wanted it to be something that would be exciting, challenging, and memorable for all of us, and we spent a lot of time discussing different options. We ultimately decided to make this a multi-national adventure, and in all, we visited Britain, Malta, Turkey, Egypt and Greece, which allowed us the unique chance to set foot on the European, Asian and African Continents during our month long travels.
If you’ve followed my previous adventures, you’ll know that we plan and book our own travel. We researched the sites we wanted to visit in each of the countries, and we relied heavily on public transportation. We booked our accommodations at or near the areas we wanted to explore the most, in order to keep our plans as flexible as possible, but unlike other trips, we booked our flights ahead of time to ensure we had connectors to each of the countries we wanted to visit. As I blog about each of these countries I’ll be sure to include some of our experiences, and challenges, as self guided travellers.
In that regard, I read a very interesting book prior to our trip written by Elizabeth Becker called “Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism”. I found this exposé to be a very thought provoking examination of the tourism industry, and I couldn’t help but find myself reflecting on it at times during our trip. I also learned that the tourism industry likes to classify travellers into two groups: Fully Independent Travellers (FIT), and Group Inclusive Tours (GIT). Although the majority of our travels fall into the FIT definition, there are times we have been in the GIT category. Regardless of your traveling preference, I found myself pondering the impacts that we as travellers have on the places we visit, and I share this with you, because as I write my blogs for each of the places we visited I may at times reflect on those observations.
As you know from my previous posts I am a big supporter of UNESCO and their work to designate and preserve world heritage sites. During this trip, as in the past, we used the list as a reference guide to help plan for some of the sites we wanted to explore. In recent years a few notable countries have withdrawn their support from this branch of the United Nations for political reasons, and although those actions are disappointing, I think it serves to reinforce the importance of people continuing to visit heritage sites to support them, learn about our collective past, and help to preserve them for the future. I hope to showcase a few of those locations in my blog postings from this trip.
Ultimately, we managed to pack a lot of travelling into a relatively small amount of time, and I’m excited to share our adventures with you. It was an amazing trip, and one that I will remember forever; perhaps I can even inspire you to visit some of these places as well.