Round the World with My Family: We’re Off (sort of)

We’re Off

After many months of planning and lots of last minute packing, it feels strange to finally be on our way. We have decided to take a year away to travel round the world as a family, but at the moment the prospect of taking a whole year away hasn’t quite sunk in.

We kicked off our journey with a relatively short trip to see my parents in Devon. We managed to squeeze in a trip to the Donkey Sanctuary at Sidmouth, along with a couple of cakes from Nanny & Granddad’s bakery, before catching a train up to London.

This was the first real test of our packing, with all of our stuff needing to be squeezed into travel mode so that we could actually get onto the train without leaving a trail of clothes and soft toys.

A slightly stressful morning revealed that we had in fact packed marginally more than originally intended. This was a foreseen risk, but we’d planned a few gentle weeks at the beginning of our trip to iron out any teething issues. At least that’s how I’m seeing things, whereas I think the rest of my family think I’m simply being ludicrous in demanding that we fit everything for a year into a couple of medium suitcases.

London to Lanzarote

Due to finishing work slightly earlier than expected, we decided to spend a few days sight seeing in London followed by a week doing nothing on the beach in Lanzarote. We will then be making our way out to New Zealand during March, stopping off in Rome, Dubai and Kuala Lumpur on the way.

We are mainly using AirBnB accommodation for our trip, which is so far working out very well. We stayed in a perfectly located flat in central London, just a couple of tube stops from the Science Museum, and our place in Lanzarote was fine as soon as the kids spied the shared pool.

Medical Storytime

However, as you know, life is never entirely straight forward. Our youngest daughter has developed a problem with one of her fingers, which has begun locking into place and not budging. She’s had “clicky fingers” in the past, but they’ve usually resolved themselves pretty quickly.

So, alongside having some fun, we’ve also been on a mini-tour of English hospitals, in a bid to find somebody who might be able to help. We started with a visit to our local hospital, who suggested doing nothing. Whilst beautifully simple, this option had a fairly major drawback, in that it didn’t actually help in any way whatsoever.

And so, with her finger still locked after six days, we decided to try the delights of Torbay hospital. The doctor we saw was very kind, but the only remedy he could offer was to straighten her finger using brute force, with some laughing gas to help numb the pain. The laughing gas was great and my daughter left with a straight finger.

Two days later and the finger locked again while we were in London. We decided to spend another few hours in St Thomas’ hospital to see if they had any more advanced solutions. We left after six hours, with input from several doctors, but all we really had to show for this was a temporarily straightened out finger and lots of sticking tape.

We are now following our daughter around with various bits of splint and extra sticking tape trying to avoid a repeat injury, while she tears around the swimming pool laughing. It’s good that she’s coping so well.

I am not coping quite so well, as all our well laid travel plans for the first couple of months on the road start to look a bit shaky before we’ve really got going. I was smugly confident a few weeks ago that all of my planning would help us ease into the travelling lifestyle, at which point we could become a bit more carefree on the advanced booking front. However, it now seems that we should have been more carefree from the start, and avoided the complication of having to consider how we fit medical treatment around our itinerary.

Before heading further afield, we decided to make a quick pit-stop back in Bristol to see a hand specialist, who I was hoping would tell us to stop worrying and that everything would sort itself out.

We’re Back Again…

This brings us fully up to date, as we arrived back into Bristol yesterday and saw our latest doctor today. He has recommended that Lexi will need surgery on her hands to properly fix the problem with her funny finger. This wasn’t what we necessarily wanted to hear, but at least we now have a clear diagnosis and course of treatment. Our next challenge is to see if we can get the surgery completed quickly while we’re back home, or organise for the procedure to take place when we reach New Zealand.

Next Time

I am hoping that our next update will be less medically focused and written while we are sat somewhere in either Dubai or Kuala Lumpur.