Why we’re traveling for 5 weeks

Traveling with kids can be challenging, scratch that…is challenging, but it’s also a very rewarding experience to be able to see things through their eyes and give them different experiences and show them the world. 

My husband’s company has a benefit that once you’ve been at the company for 5 years they gives their employees a 4 week sabbatical, they have to take all 4 weeks together and they can also add 2 weeks of vacation time on top of that. A lot of people don’t take it (they can take it at any time in the next 5 years) but I put my foot down and told my husband that he needed to take it and we should take an extended trip with the kids. They are still young enough that it’s fine to miss a couple of weeks of school and my job gives me the freedom to leave for a month. 

We travel a lot but most of the time when we do is to go back home, to Chile, to visit, which doesn’t feel like a vacation most of the time since we have so many people to visit and things to do that we’re way more exhausted than when we get there. All of our family is there except my little brother and my brother in law, so we like to take the kids to spend time with family. That also means we spend a lot of our traveling funds to go there, so most of our other trips are smaller/shorter. 

When we thought what we wanted to do on this trip we scratched Chile right off the bat, first of all winter is starting in May and we love summer and warm weather and we also wanted to do something different. We’ve always wanted to go to Israel together. We’ve both been before we met but haven’t had the chance to take a trip there together, so that was the first destination we thought of and then went from there. 

When we started looking for flights we looked at direct flights from San Francisco to Tel Aviv but the thought of being inside of an airplane for 14 hours with the kids had us running the other direction, so the best and cheapest flights from SF were through London, We’ve never been to London before and decided to stay for a few days before continuing our journey.

I’m really good at finding cheap tickets, for our whole trip each ticket is $1,100, that is from SF to London, London to Israel, Israel to Italy, Italy to London, London SF, including 2 checked bags for each flight. My favorite way to look and compare airline tickets is Google Flights, it’s easy to search and it gives you all the best prices for the different dates. This time we also looked at every city in Europe to see which one was cheaper to fly into, so the key to cheap flights is flexibility and time for researching. After I look at them there I go into an app called Hopper and search for the same flight, it tells you when the best time to buy the ticket is. 

My son’s birthday is happening while we’re in Israel and because in our house any celebration is important, especially birthdays, he had grand plans for it. That’s how my “parties on the go” series came to life. I already did one in London (you can read all about it here) and I’m planning to do at least 3 more while we’re here. 

Hope you follow along on Instagram stories or here on the blog.

Party on!

Myri