I recently received an email announcing that You Won’t Remember This: Travel with Babies had been published! This book, edited by Sandy Bennett-Haber over in Scotland, has been a major work in progress. But that’s how these things roll when you’re working to accomplish a behemoth task with kids in tow (good on you, Sandy!).
The book includes twenty stories from writers around the world, including one I wrote about our first two days in New Zealand when we embarked on our 70-day journey through the South Pacific. I called the chapter “Finding Our Bearings on the Banks Peninsula” since it was based largely on a post I wrote here on this website back in 2014.
Here’s an excerpt!
The room is finally quiet. Cries have subsided and transitioned to the soft, rhythmic whistle of a baby soundly sleeping. I can’t tell if my husband, Paul, is asleep on the bottom bunk. Desperately tired, I lay awake coming to grips with the fact that we are concluding the fi rst day of a 70-day adventure through the South Pacific. My thoughts are interrupted as the New Zealand skies over this eastern coastline unleash a hailstorm, and ice pellets pound the roof of our cabin. Surely the little one will wake up. She doesn’t, and I breathe a sigh of relief.
Exhausted and weary, I stare up at corrugated tiles on the ceiling, counting them as I think through the trip ahead. We have travelled this way before, filling trips to the brim with ambitious goals and jam-packed schedules that were borderline insane. We are seasoned travellers, right? As a couple we have hopped islands in the Caribbean, trekked in the Himalaya, and skied in the Arctic. Solo trips have taken us to adventure-filled destinations like Ethiopia, Vanuatu and Costa Rica.
As experienced travellers, our itinerary seemed full, but feasible: four countries, seventeen flights. . . only one baby.
Reblogged this on Meghan J. Ward.