Why I Love to Travel With My Kids

Ignorance is bliss   ...

 

Knowledge is power!

 

 

So the question is, what is the best way to obtain knowledge? Repetatively like a parrot? Or through exploration where you get to use all your senses, where you can smell it, see it, hear it, touch it, taste it, try it, feel it and then, even, understand it!

 

That's why I like to travel. I suffer from something you could call - insatiable curiosity - I always want to explore and learn more and while traveling I'm constantly learning something new about nature, about culture, about history, about communications, about human behaviour - and - about myself and my own country.

 
 When I was twelve I got an Atlas for Christmas and I don't think there's any book I've used as much. Not even the phone book. I have travelled the world back and forth in my mind determined to make it true when I'd grow up. I did travel a lot as a child, but it was mostly on my own and on my bicycle.

 When I was 18 I met a girl that fascinated me. She was a global citizen and had been brought up in as various places as Kuwait, Iceland and Germany. She had the mind of an explorer always willing to look beyond, dig a little deeper and experience something new. So that's what we did and now we are married and have five magnificent kids together - our five little elves!

 

We love to travel together as a family and think travelling with our children is one of the best things we can do with our children. Experiencing something new all together is the best quality time we can think of. We are all there, we eat the meals together, we learn together and we share how we experience what we see and what we do.  When we travel we try to mix up education and experience with fun and play. Yesterday we went to the Barcelona zoo to see the dolphin show. And we also saw primates mating as well as GIANT turtles. VERY educating for the children ... :-s

One of the best trips we've done was when we were studying in Denmark. We had a car our last year there and used the opportunity to go on a roadtrip to Eastern Europe. We mixed up city breaks in Prague, and Budapest with beaches at Balaton, Senj and Dubrovnik - and war torn areas of Croatia and Bosnia, including the Olympic Stadium in Sarajevo which is one of the most ... tragic places I've been to.

The Journey as a Destination
It's about the journey, much more than the destination. The destination is just a little part of it. Sometimes people tell me proudly "it only took me 4 hours to drive from A - B" and I think "that's a shame - you might have got 8 hours of enjoyment from that same route instead of four stressful hours". We are sometimes so stuck thinking about the destination that we forget to make the journey there a destination in itself.

It's just like life. We all know where we're heading, what the final destination is. But do we really just want to get there? Or do we want get as much out of the journey as we can? 'Cause you never know when you might get a fast pass to that final destination.

 

 - One life - live it!

 

Our dream is to travel as much together as we can and we are asking for your help.  We are currently 1st out of more than 10.000 in an online competitin where we can win 365 hotel nights that we can use at any Radisson Blu hotel in the world in the next 5 years.

 

All you have to do to help us and our 5 little elves make that dream come true is to vote for us. You can vote ONCE A DAY until July 24th 2010.

You can vote here: 5littleelves.com

And join our Facebook group here!

May the best elves win ;)

Hjörtur