When the weather gets cold....

...sitting here in the warm, humid Brisbane 'burbs, trying to keep cool and avoid developing a full on 'fro from the damp air, having just a week ago departed from the chilly Northern hemisphere, i feel a million miles from the idea of 'when the weather gets cold', but this weeks BootsnAll 2012 Indie Travel Challenge prompt is all about winter travel. 


When the weather gets cold, do you prefer to head to sunnier locales or do you love the outdoor adventures or off-season prices of winter? Warm or cold, what’s your dream winter travel destination, and do you have any travel plans for the coming months? 

If we go on gut instincts I definitely lean towards the sunny side of the street, and I'm probably more of a fair weather traveller than a snow princess. Although we don't let it lead us entirely, our travel plans for the year have been influenced by trying not too spend too much time in winter climes, although we've also been trying to work a little bit of snow somewhere into the schedule too! 


Too long in the cool weather and I find myself craving a sunny beach, but travelling off-season definitely has it's advantages too. The littlest hobo, while pretty adaptable, like many young children doesn't cope too well when it's really hot, so avoiding those super hot times means we can usually get out and about and have a more enjoyable time on our travels.

All rugged up for a bike ride at Centre Parcs in France, December 2011

Travelling off season also has the advantage of beating the crowds and getting better prices, as we discovered on our recent stay at Centre Parcs. I don't know that it would have been anywhere near as pleasurable if it had been mobbed as it's supposed to be in the school holidays! It's great visiting places and actually getting time to enjoy them without having to share the experience with every man and his dog. On the flip-side, travelling on a full flight at a peak time can have it's advantages when you are lucky enough to get upgraded, like we were on our flight from Singapore to Sydney the other day! 


The heavy rain that has been falling outside our window for the last few hours is evidence enough that you can be subject to weather that scuppers your plans for the day at any time of year - lucky for us we are laying low in the hope that the littlest hobo, who has been sick since we left the UK, will start to feel a bit better, so the inhospitable outdoor setting just makes that easier to do, otherwise I'm sure it would be inducing cabin fever. 


Ultimately, for us, the main drive behind travel comes down to experiences, and too much time doing any one thing means it just becomes the norm - a change in seasons can be the key to doing different things - while warm weather begs for the outdoors to be explored, cold or wet days make museums and other indoor activities more appealing. There's something invigorating about stepping outside into cold air, wrapped up snug in your winter clothes, but right now I'm enjoying the wieghtlessness of my summer clothes on my back. Maybe that's the way that human instinct goes, and why the world turns the way it does - we need the change to keep it all appealing. For now, the beach is calling me, but give it a couple of months and I'm sure a roaring log fire on a cold wintry New Zealand day will be calling my name. 


Do you have a preference for summer/winter travel?


This post was inspired by and forms part of the BootsnAll 2012 Indie Travel Challenge - a prompt, question or challenge, every week for the year of 2012. I'm hoping that it will be a little more realistic for me to achieve than a photo a day proved to be in 2011!

You learn something new every day, just think what you can achieve in a year!

This week, the BootsnAll 2012 Indie Travel Challenge posed the question; What would you like to learn through travel in 2012.

There are the obvious ones - I'm doing my Photography Institute diploma at the moment and plan to finish that this year, and Mr Traveller is hanging out to do another cookery course or two. Of course we want to learn about the places that we're visiting, and the people that live their, and I'm sure we'll also learn quite a bit about how to, and how not to, travel with a toddler. After our dash half way across the globe a couple of days ago I think it's safe to say that we still need to learn how to pack a bit lighter; I really hope we can get that down pat by the end of this year. Seriously, do we really need to take our electric toothbrush around the world with us?!

Focussing on photography

But I think the most important thing for us to learn as a family this year is a bit about ourselves. We need to establish what we want to do next. When we set out on this journey, we knew we wanted to see a bit of the world, take more time to appreciate the things we never had time to stop and take in properly in the past, and spend more time together. But what we didn't know, and couldn't agree on, is what we wanted next. We've got to decide which country we will live in; Australia, the UK or somewhere else entirely. We know we're not perpetual full time travellers. While I fully appreciate the sentiment of it, home schooling isn't our thing, and having experienced a relatively large amount of moving around as a child, I'm not sure that that's what I want for the littlest hobo either. So we want to settle back down somewhere, but where? In that typical expat way, our family and friends are precariously positioned at intermittent points around the globe; how inconsiderate that they're not all just sitting in some sleepy little village waiting for us to come back and life to resume!. And surely it's somewhat inevitable that what we are doing now will have some influence on the lifestyle we choose then - chances are we're not going to want to live the 5 days a week office working big disposable income little time to spend it lifestyle that we previously enjoyed. I want chooks that lay eggs, I want a veggie patch and a herb garden that I manage to cultivate sometime beyond 2 weeks. I want time for my family, and time to take photographs and to relax. But I love the city too, I love the action, and the convenience and the people. So I need to spend some time thinking about that and work out what I really want, and which little corner of the great wide world can best offer that to us, and Mr T needs to do the same thing. Our learning for 2012 is all about delving deep inside our own minds and getting to know ourselves.

What are you hoping to learn in 2012?

This post was inspired by and forms part of the Boots n All 2012 Indie Travel Challenge - a prompt, question or challenge, every week for the year of 2012. I'm hoping that it will be a little more realistic for me to achieve than a photo a day proved to be in 2011!

Travelling the indie way

I don't own a backpack, I'm rather partial to a business class seat, and I've never stayed in a hostel. So when I saw that last weeks prompt for the BootsnAll 2012 Indie Travel Challenge was 'Are you an indie traveller? What makes someone an indie traveller?', my heart sunk a little and I had that same feeling you get when you're picked last for the rounders team. I didn't really know if I'd be justified in calling myself an indie traveller - don't you have to be a bit out there and grungy, have several oversized jumpers that look good over leggings and have a life long subscription to the Inspiral Carpets fan club to call yourself indie? Thankfully, Mr T set me straight on that one and a little googling later I can tell you that an indie traveller is one who is not being led by a tour guide.

Apart from a few forays as a teen and early twentysomething into the alcopop fuelled 18-30 package scene that are best filed in the most dusty depths of my memory for time immemorial, and the odd one or two Canarian weeks away as a kid, I have, by definition, always been an indie traveller. As a family, we don't do packages, I don't recall us ever following a tour, and it generally suits us best to move to the beat of our own drum. But I suspect there's a bit more to it than that, and such a simplified definition doesn't really do much justice to the whole mindset that lies behind the notion of an indie traveller.

A sense of adventure must surely be the first pre-requisite. A desire, almost a need, to explore and discover more, wherever you may be. They've got the wanderlust gene and they just can't help themselves from exercising it.

A longing to experience it. Reading about it isn't enough; in fact reading about it just makes it even more paramount that you go and see for yourself. You want to see, feel, taste, smell it for yourself. Whizzing through, seeing the sights from a bus just doesn't cut it for the indie traveller, you need to get right in there and be part of it.

Living like a local is important too. Sit quietly and watch, adnd you'll be amazed by what you discover. walk the back streets, and get off the beaten track. Chat to the locals and find out what they recommend, use their language, even if it's only a few words or key phrases and you will make connections and reap the rewards. The indie traveller wants more than just the top five sights to see in Lisbon, they want to discover the hidden gems too. And they generally want to spent more than 4 hours exploring a city. We regularly used to tack weekend trips onto the end of a business trip and we'd try to pack as much as we could into a weekend, but we learnt a while ago that when you're travelling with a toddler, moving to a different spot every day or visiting eight sights on 6 hours is no fun for anyone, and as a result we're having a much better travelling experience and discovering many more interesting moments.

Buying local produce on market day in Duras was a great way for us to see what the locals were up to and practice our French. 

Indie travellers take every opportunity to seize the moment and explore. Every day becomes a viable circumstance for a new experience. Some, like us, take an extended portion of time out from their everyday lives (or a long term lifestyle change) to allow the opportunity to fulfil their travel desires. Others take regular trips, and others still have a home base that they stick close to, but they're tourists in their own town, and know their locale intimately.

Change is exciting. Sure, it's a little bit scary for most people, but that adrenalin rush that it gives you is pretty addictive, if you're that way inclined, and you'll always be on the look out for your next new experience hit.

What's it's not about is money. Whether you stick to $11 a night hostels and sustain yourself solely on jam sandwiches and water or you stay five star and quaff Cristal on a weekly basis is irrelevant. Indie travel is all about the experience, and if you're that way inclined you make it happen no matter what.

Anyone for champers, what? 

You don't have to be a hippie to be an indie traveller. You are allowed to wash your clothes as often as you like, and wearing shoes isn't a problem. You don't even need to hitch-hike. You make your rules and do it your way; it's all about the experience.

In my mind, you can't WANT to be an indie traveller. If that's the way you feel then you already are one. You're on a spiritual journey and you've got that internal yearning that keeps you discovering and you can't hold yourself back. Don't fight it! It's something you were born with and no matter how you bash it down, it'll keep popping back up and making you search for your next experience - go out and make memories!


Experience is the word of the day for the indie traveller. I realise that I've used it A LOT in this post, and I spent a while thinking about alternatives but really nothing else sums indie travel up so well to me - it's all about the experience.

What does indie travel mean to you? Are you an indie traveller?

This post was inspired by and forms part of the Boots n All 2012 Indie Travel Challenge - a prompt, question or challenge, every week for the year of 2012. I'm hoping that it will be a little more realistic for me to achieve than a photo a day proved to be in 2011!

Travel resolutions for 2012

I've said it before, and I'm going to say it again: we're not big planners, at least not when it comes to our travel plans. We don't tend to spend too much time before the event imagining what the end product is going to look like. we are more fly by the seat of your plants kinda people, who have a rough idea of what they want to do, then we don't think about it that much until it's actually happening. This has it's advantages (no fretting, and who doesn't love a bit of spontaneity?) and disadvantages (nobody told me San Seb was the food capital of Spain.. surely somebody, somewhere should have told me this before... why didn't I know this til we got there??)

But all this doesn't meant that we don't have any goals in what we're doing over the next year. It's not every day that you pack up your comfortable life and set off on a journey to fulfil a few dreams, so, feeling more than a little bit inspired by Boots n All's 2012 Indie Travel Challenge, I spent some time mulling over what I want out of the next year.

We left Sydney with a couple of big goals, namely being with my mum while she went through radio therapy and working out what was going on with the littlest hobo's health. With both of these under our belts we're ready to move forward and embrace the year to come, and there are some important things to achieve on the way.

For me, some of it is about seeing places that were on our doorstep at times and we never seemed to make the time to explore properly. All the countries we are visiting this year are places we've lived in or visited before - we've had a taster, but feel we didn't get enough, so now we're going back for more. And I really hope that I will remember this in the future, and always live like a traveller at home in the future, embracing everything that my surroundings have to offer.

I want to develop myself. I spent a year and a half being the littlest hobo's mum, and nothing else. It was an incredibly rewarding and fulfilling job, and I would recommend it to anyone, and do the same again tomorrow, but often the achievements are disguised in every day life, and you don't get that same sense of having done something new and massive that I did from work in the past.This blog is one of those efforts - while it's proving a great means to keep friends and family up to date with what we're up to, it's also a fantastic creative outlet that's challenging parts of my brain which have been left dormant for perhaps a little too long. Last year I rekindled my previous interest in photography by participating in the 365 project. While I didn't keep up with the project for the whole year, it did ignite a passion in me for creating photographs, and late last year I signed up to study for a photography diploma. It's an online course with the Photography Institute and while I was hesitant about doing a diploma while we were travelling i figured there'd be plenty of time for the reading, and besides there's no time like the present. So this year I will endeavour to complete my course and improve my photography. 

I'm keen to experience travel in new ways. For the last few years we've been lucky enough to always stay in 4 and 5 star hotels or opulent apartments, travelled by taxi and flown business class for all but the shortest journeys. While we're not planning to rough it all the way, I'm really looking forward to experiencing a few different ways of travelling. Like the littlest hobo, I'm most excited about travelling in a campervan. So far we haven't met many other travellers on our trips, and I feel thats really important, for the experience, and for our sanity! Í'm hoping that staying on some camp sites might open up a few possibilities.

This one's for Mr T. But I'm in, I think. Sometimes you have to make the pendulum swing too far in the opposite direction before you can find your new momentum. We both feel that we've all been spending too much time staring at screens, and we want to spend a bit more time living in the moment, getting out and trying new things and really living in our experiences. So for a month at some point we plan to go technology free. We're still setting out the parameters, and I am bucking against it at every mention, but I'm softening every day and I can see a strong argument for doing it too. We'll be putting the computer, iPad and iPhones aside and doing things the old way - it remains to be seen whether there are actually enough phone boxes left on the planet for us to phone our folks now and again, but I love the idea of finding things out by talking to people and researching within our environment. I even bought a paper version of the Lonely Planet New Zealand book the other day in preparation (half price on Amazon - bargain), and I'm sure that some of my buddies might actually relish a bit of peace and quiet on facebook! Rest assured when the time comes you will get plenty of forewarning though!

But the most important thing of all is about spending some time immersed in being our family. Children grow so quickly, and while they're young their little brains are like sponges. I love the fact that in the last few months the littlest hobo has had both her parents as a massive influence on her life. She's exposing parts of her personality from spending all this time with her daddy which may have stayed hidden if we'd carried on with our previous way of life, simply because they're not personality traits I posses. They're both courageous and cheeky with a wicked sense of humour that I just don't have, and it's magical to see it all coming out. And me and Mr T, we have time for each other too, rather than a snatched hour when we are tired at the end of every day, where we recap all the things we achieved separately, we are building memories together, like we used to when we first met. We're all on a fantastic journey together, both physical and spiritual. I wonder how i will reflect at the end of the year. 

Where are you taking yourself in 2012? What do you hope to achieve?

This post was inspired by and forms part of the Boots n All 2012 Indie Travel Challenge - a prompt, question or challenge, every week for the year of 2012. I'm hoping that it will be a little more realistic for me to achieve than a photo a day proved to be in 2011!