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Globe Trotting
Gaining a Deeper Sense of Family Through Travel
By Jenn Director Knudsen
Booking hotels, activities, tickets and side trips via the Internet or while in the host country – instead of arranging everything via an agent in this country – would save lots of money. But doing so would require "a little more legwork and a little more leap of faith," she says.
Unlike the Sagers and Simons, Dodson says her family won't travel in more than month-long chunks any time soon "to avoid missing entire quarters at school." But, she says, "I would do it again in a heartbeat."
If for no other reason, for the family bonding.
Simon says he knows no better way to fortify a family than to globetrot to the remotest, poorest corners of the earth, together. As a "floating island," he says, the family is only and totally reliant on itself to get through the toughest times and enjoy the best ones. Being isolated as a family unit for so long "creates a reservoir of shared experiences, and it ends up drawing the family together more," Simon says.
"Does that mean we never have siblings fighting with one another?" he says. "No, of course not. We've so learned to savor the just-our-family piece, we do whatever we can to make that happen."
"Traveling as a family is appealing to me because it brings us closer as a family," says the youngest Simon, Ben, now a fifth-grader in public school and baseball player. "I don't want to travel solo because I would worry about all the things my parents have to worry about, which is a lot of things."
Photos courtesy of www.SimonFamily.org.
