The planning begins

It's easy to say:

"We're going on a trip around the world."

But what all do we need to think about?

My biggest question, though, was:

"What will our children say?"

That was our first step, because it was very important to us that our children heard it

first and foremost from us.

We called our son and told him that we urgently needed to talk to him.

Said and done.

We then met with him and his wife, and the first thing he said was:

"Either you renovate, or you're leaving."

He knew that we'd always had this in mind.

We confirmed to them that our new motto was indeed:

"We're leaving."

Naturally, he and his wife were quite puzzled.

And then a barrage of questions followed.

• What will you do with the house?

• What will happen to your possessions?

• What if your health no longer allows you to return?

• Will you never come back to Germany?

• How do you envision that happening?

Questions about questions

We talked for a long time and explained to them what we were planning. They were quite surprised.

It certainly takes a lot of courage and self-confidence to do something like this.

And we had our doubts along the way, too.

But we are absolutely convinced that we will manage it.

What I found much harder, though, was telling our daughter.

Even though she herself is constantly traveling extensively.

We then met with her and her husband.

It wasn't easy to steer the conversation toward our request.

But then my husband simply blurted out our new motto.

"We're off then"

Contrary to what I had expected, she was very composed.

The two of them wanted to know exactly what Rainer and I were planning.

The two were speechless, because they simply couldn't believe that we would do such a thing.

And again came questions upon questions:

• How is that supposed to work?

• Where do you plan to start your world trip?

• You've never been on a big trip before,

• Why now??

• How will you manage the language?

Yes, all of that was then explained and discussed in a very long conversation.

They were absolutely right about the language.

We already knew that our school English wouldn't get us very far.

But we had already taken care of that and signed up for Duolingo.

We're practicing diligently.

Keeping our daughter prepared was a bit of a challenge.

Because after a few weeks, she finally seemed to realize what wewere planning.

But for us, the Planning for our world trip was already in full swing.