After my divorce, I realized that my daughter and I were now “the family unit”. I wanted to reconnect with her before the dreaded teen years. Our relationship, previously strong, had been slowly unravelling over the last couple of years. I sat her down and explained I wanted to know what she wanted to do and told her some of my plans. It emerged that travel was a shared dream. Lucky for us, my ex-husband agreed that it would be a good adventure – he would even meet us in Thailand for a month and so we planned to break her out of school for grade 5 and take a 10 month trip.
10-Month Journey (2004-2005)
Australia was the first place on her list, and it seemed to me like a great place to begin as we spoke English and the western culture could make it easier to figure out how to travel together. Planning an adventure overseas is easy with 2 adults – my backup was a 10 year old and hers was just 1 adult. It dawned on me that this was a big elephant!
Bite one: amazing! Exciting! Booking the tickets was an action to make our plan a reality.
Bite two: excitement turns to fear… as we left the familiarity of our hometown in Jasper, Alberta and made our way to Vancouver to depart Canada. Doubts flooded in as we arrived at the airport. “Could I do this? Should I do this? What was I thinking! I was about to abandon all the comforts of home to trek with a kid around the world. We were going to be on our own, no safety nets. Two of us, that’s all. “ I was terrified.
Bite three: terror turns to peace and relaxation. We boarded the plane. The flight was wonderful and I never wanted it to end. People looked after us, catered to us, we watched movies and I could breathe. This allowed me a reprieve from the responsibility and enormity of the decision. However, all good things come to an end and far too soon, in my opinion, we landed in Sydney, Australia.
Bite four: fear and exhaustion. I couldn’t even register the beauty of the city as I was gripped. We spent the first night in the hostel where we fell into an exhausted sleep.
Bite five: exhaustion, exaltation and then just plain scared. A friend back home had mentioned there was a parkade in downtown Sydney where travellers sold their vehicles on. I’d meant just to go for a look-see the first day, but ended 
up negotiating a great deal on an old Toyota pop top van. We called her “Amelia”. I was too scared to drive her back to the hostel, so figured out a win-win. The Québécois who was selling her would drive her back, pick up his stuff and then drop Amelia at our hostel before flying home that night. My kid was asleep-on-her-feet, so we headed off to leave $1500 cash for the hostel owner to complete the exchange.
Bite six: doubt, avoidance and resignation. We spent three days “cleaning” the van until it “sparkled” as I avoided having the drive the thing! After three days I gave up the fight. It was time to woman up and take action. I bravely got in and began driving, trying to adjust to being on the “wrong” side of the road. This was a time before google maps so my daughter navigated from the passenger seat, a large paper map spread out across her lap.
We made mistakes. I puttered along slowly in the fast lane, as vehicles beeped impatiently and zoomed around me. It took me 4 hours to figure out the fast lane there is our slow lane! We drove constantly, moving to a new place every night.
Bite seven: I didn’t begin relax until we reached Cape Tribulation, approximately two months after leaving home. It took time to begin to enjoy the journey as I settled into my new reality.
I asked my now 22 year-old daughter for her thoughts and this is what she shared:
“I am not comfortable traveling. I love it, revel in it, however it is not a part of my comfort zone.
When I was 10 years old, my mom took me on a world tour and while every part of it was amazing, the places that I learnt the most and really fell in love with were the places in which I was not initially comfortable. Particularly traveling to countries that are very different to Canada. The places that challenged me to understand, what made them beautiful. The places where hardship is everywhere but happiness is perhaps more common.
We were in Phuket during 2004 tsunami. I remember walking down streets, cars were wrapped in power lines and some 3 stories up in buildings, buses were overturned, sand and debris was everywhere. It was a catastrophic event that was devastating. It would have been entirely understandable for people to just stop, so overwhelmed by what to do or how to help. This is not what happened.
The first day everything stopped. The next day people went out to help their neighbours, moving through the tragedy, slowly but determinedly as they cleaned out the streets where there was less damage. It is the most powerful thing to see people get up and just do what they can, because that’s what needs to be done. It was a lesson that while it is ok to stand still for a moment, it is easier to move through tragedy if you keep moving, even if it is not in leaps and bounds.”
By TK
I was grateful to have had several months of travelling under our belts before the tsunami hit. We were a solid unit at that time. The fears that had gripped me were no longer reality. Fear is all about perspective.
I had confidence, I knew we were fine in the world. The transformation happened one-step, moment, action, experience at a time… and still continues.
So how do you eat an elephant? … one bite at a time.
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