Fast Travel Across the Pacific

By cdelloMarch 8, 2019

Family meeting time: “Guess what kids? In the next month we will travel through six countries!”

February 7 – March 4, 2019

Vietnam -> Cambodia -> Malaysia -> Australia -> USA -> Ecuador

In our efforts to wrap up the SE Asia leg of our journey and get across the monstrous Pacific Ocean with our bodies and brains in a positive state, we laid out the continental transition plan. We’d visit the temples of Angkor, get together again with our new friends, stopover in English-speaking Australia AND make a rest stop in Hawaii (both high on the girls’ lists of wanna-go-to destinations), limit the red-eye flights that really break us (that would be me), dip back into mainland USA for whatever we needed to restock, and get to South America. Phew!!

While we were all a bit anxious about moving fast, we got the rest we needed in between loooong flights. Marriott points (and their very comfortable hotel beds) and Alaska miles helped with the increased expenses of Australia and dipping back into the U.S.

We saw kangaroos, koalas, strange beachy phenomena and lots of jellyfish (our week driving the east coast of Australia linked here).

We traveled backwards in time from Australia to Hawaii (Annabelle’s report on four days in Honolulu here).

We touched down in Los Angeles for less than 12 hours, then spent a day in Fort Lauderdale sleeping in to adjust to the six hour time change and replacing some worn-out clothes. I admit, while being back in strip-mall and office-park world wasn’t aesthetically pleasing (why is so much our our land devoted to parking lots?), it was easy to shop at a Kohl’s compared to finding right-sized kids clothes in other parts of the world.

We landed first in Ecuador in Quito, the second-highest capital city in the world at 9,350ft (and the closest country capital to the equator…Amelia’s blog here)

When we finally got to our long-term apartment in Cuenca in mid-March, we unpacked our bags, for a little while anyway. Oh what a feeling it was to empty those packs and hang clothes in a closet.

Since we’ve been in Ecuador…

We’re all working hard in our Espanol classes and catching up on homeschool, working on blog posts, both written and video, and doing some exploring in between.