Time, Time, where art thou?

It has been a while since our last post. You probably think that the Johannsens are on this long vacation and so they should be able to do a lot of things that most sane routiners (I just coined that word, to describe people who lead normal lives) have difficulty finding time for.

Ha, ha, that's what we ignorant newbie nomads thought in the begining. Only to discover that vacationing is actually a lot of work, esp if you have two hyper-active boys! We have been back to Seattle for almost 10 days after our Canadian trip, and we haven't found time to upload all our photos and post a blog entry. So what to we do with our time. I think a lot of our time is spent on the basics - planning and researching where to go next; cooking, eating and cleaning, and keeping the kids engaged.

Planning the vacation is a lot of work - we can spend hours, days on the internet researching where and what we want to do - there are so many options. We also want this to be a meaningful vacation, not just sight-seeing one beautiful place after another. If any of our ideas come to fruition we will update you on a later post.

Chores like cooking, cleaning, laundry still need to be done - these cannot be avoided when one is on vacation. In fact, these things take up more time because, it is always an adventure trying to accomplish all these in a new place.

Kids, they take up a lot of the time too - educating and engaging them. We are trying to establish a study routine with them. Now that the school years have begun, there is more of a need to have a structure in their education. Thane is writing a journal of the things that he has experienced on this trip. This will help him with reading, writing and composing his thoughts. He also learnt to tell time, use compass, etc. Aidan is practicing his letters and learning phonetics. We are trying to come up with ways to make their learning fun and games. Tomasz makes tremendous effort in keeping the boys physically active too - biking, scootering, hiking, swimming, etc.

So, all this does not leave us much time to ourselves. Of course, we still need to exercise ourselves, sleep, etc. Sometimes, it seems that being in San Diego and going to work was simpler.

But we are not complaining. There are certainly many benefits to being vagabonds.

I hope our grand plans about expanding our horizons and reading more, etc, will materialize soon. For now we will be leaving for Yellowstone National Park soon.