Happy Birthday Once Upon a Trunki!

It's Once Upon a Trunki's first anniversary! I hope at least a few of you out there have gotten some help from this blog. I enjoy writing it immensely and I really hope that it has encouraged others to do the unthinkable and travel with their kids. I want to thank Rob, Jon, Dave, and all the other great folks at Trunki for helping me set this up and for all their support. In honor of the occasion, I've created my first video for the blog! Enjoy!

Shipping bags? Really?

I keep seeing article after article suggest that people pay to ship their bags rather than pay to check them. Now, I agree that paying to check bags stinks but really...shipping? I've got several problems with this but mainly it's the cost. Using my trip to Tunisia as an example, to ship a 30lb bag (the average weight for an international trip for us) it would cost $667.84 ONE WAY and it would take 6 days to get there. Being a bit more realistic I tried seeing how much it would cost to ship it to Seattle for my brother's wedding. The cheapest option is $126.83. The big bad airline United charges $15 for your first bag and $25 for your second for a whopping $40 if you check 2 bags. Hmmmm which one will I pay.

Cost aside, who wants to have to send off half their clothes up to a week ahead of time to a destination? And if it gets there early will the hotel accept it? What happens if it gets stuck in international quarantine? There are just way too many ifs and, frankly, way too many decimal points for me to justify doing this. Maybe this will be a good reason for everyone to learn to do my favorite thing...pack less!

A Tale of Two Humps

So our trip to Tunisia is starting to take some shape. I dont know why but I always think of North African countries as this weird entity in and of themselves. Everytime I stop and think about the fact that they are in Africa I say "Wow, Im going to AFRICA!" So it looks like we'll spend some time in Tunis, then take a train to Gabes to dork out on Star Wars stuff, then head up to Sousse and back to Tunis.

Maya is very excited about the prospect of riding a camel. She seems to be not at all phased by my warnings that they are, in fact, gross animals. She just wants to ride one. We watch a lot of Discovery channel so she's constantly seeing camels on TV and is completely enamored by them. We'll see how she feels about the reality lol.

Hopefully, Tunisia with Maya will be better than China. China was just too much for her I think. Too much of everything. Today she told us that she didn't like it because we talked about it too much. I've been pretty mum about Tunisia (mostly because I want to avoid the horrified looks of others who can't believe we'd go there) so hopefully she won't be tired of it when we go there. I think it's good for kids to experience things that are far outside of the realm of their known world but, as everyone knows, sometimes too much of a good thing can be bad.