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Round-the-World Travelers Reflect on Experience, Offer Tips to Other UW Alumni 

              COUPLE GRATEFUL FOR “INCREDIBLE OPPORTUNITY”

                                               

SAF Accounting alumni Kevin (MAcc ’89) and Tracy Elop (MAcc ’89) and their children Sarah, 8, Laura, 10, and Michael, 12, have returned from a 14-month round-the-world trip that saw them cover – as they state it with proper accounting precision – 150,296 kilometres, visit 20 countries, and employ every mode of travel from planes and their own RV to motorized river canoes, horses, camels, elephants, trains and tricycle taxis.

“In some ways, the whole experience seems a bit surreal,” Tracy admits. “We left behind life as we knew it for an entire year. Now, we seem to be able to pick up exactly where we left off – nothing much has changed. There are some days that we need to shake our heads and convince ourselves that the trip really did happen!”

In their final blog (August 2009), posted after they had completed their once-in-a-lifetime experience, the Elops reflected on the whole trip, expressing gratitude to all the friends and relatives whom they met up with along the way.“Thanks to everyone who shared their homes with us during the year,” they write. “You don’t know how much it means to see friendly, familiar faces when you are so far away from home.”

Assessing the Trip: Goals and Results

The main subject of that final blog was a reflection on their original goals for the trip. “Overall, the trip was everything we had hoped it would be!” note Tracy and Kevin. Here’s their assessment of five of their specific goals:

Parents, Kids List Top Destinations

Of course, no review of such an eye-opening trip would be complete without a list of everyone’s favourite destination. For Kevin, it was South Africa. “I loved the safari drives, the nature and the 30 pounds of boerewors sausage, of which 15 pounds are still residing on my waistline!” he reports. For Tracy, Namibia was the winner. “It doesn’t get any better than the desolation of this country, the magnificent sand dunes of the Namib Desert, and the lions and leopards we saw up close at Etosha,” she notes.”We probably could have done without the dirt roads and flat tires, but I guess they just add to the sense of adventure!”

The children saw things a little differently, but they offer good reasons for their choices. Michael chooses China and Hong Kong as the standouts. “I loved seeing the Giant Pandas,” he says, “and eating Indian food in that really old and dirty Hong Kong building (also known as ‘the place where we were staying,’ add the parents). It was great to go to another Disney World too -- three down, and only two to go (California and Japan).”

 

Laura picks Australia. “It was amazing to swim with all the colourful fish at the Great Barrier Reef and to see the koalas and kangaroos,” she reports, “although having ‘sausage on the barbie’ every night for dinner got a little old!” Sarah gives Las Vegas the nod, happily rhyming off “the pretty lights, the amazing shows, the pinball machines, the fun, and the huge buffets.” “What’s not to like?” she asks.”What do you mean, ‘Las Vegas isn’t a country? It should be!’”

 

“It was actually pretty difficult for each of us to choose a single favourite location,” Tracy explains. ”Our lists would be remiss without New Zealand and Turkey, Bali, Alaska, Peru, Hawaii and our very own Newfoundland. While the Middle East and Southeast Asia (with the exception of Bali) are prominent on our ‘things we could have done without’ list, they were still fascinating to visit.It was just more difficult travelling through these areas, particularly with the kids.”

 

Family Picks Least Favourite Things

As you might expect, family members also offer a selection of their least favourite things:


Qs and As – and Tips 

The Elops are now making the transition back into life in Canada after their once-in-a-lifetime experience. As they began settling back in, Tracy and Kevin kindly  consented to an e-mail interview that picked up on some of the points they made in their final trip blog and that gave them a chance to offer practical tips for other UW alumni who might want to consider a similar globe-encircling adventure.

Would you do it all again?

Absolutely!  What an incredible opportunity we had! To spend time with our children at such an impressionable age, to see the sights we were able to see, to experience so many different cultures – all these things are priceless. We feel very lucky indeed to have been able to make this happen.

 

 

 

Are the kids making a successful transition back to “reality”?

Yes.  We were surprised in the early stages of our trip that the kids adapted so quickly to not having any regular structure in their days. Now that we’re home, they have just as quickly embraced having a stable structured routine. The children were very excited to be going back to school and seeing all their friends. So far, they are fitting into the same grade level as they would have been in if we had not been away. 


They learned a lot during our travels and have been incorporating some of this information into their current school studies. As an example, the first social studies unit in grade five is Ancient Egypt. Not only did Laura bring in photographs showing her in front of the pyramids, sphinx and King Tut’s tomb, she could talk about seeing the treasures at the Egyptian museum and what a mummy looks like.

And in her grade three class, Sarah had to write a letter pretending she had been on vacation and tell some stories about it. Apparently she wrote that she had travelled to the desert in Namibia, where she stayed in a luxurious hotel and was treated like a king. Not too many other grade three children even know that Namibia exists, much less what it looks like. As for staying in the luxury hotel and being treated like a king – that’s where her imagination must have kicked in!

How did your plans for homeschooling the kids turn out?

We carried out our homeschooling plan pretty much as planned. We focused on math, grammar, journal writing and spelling.  While we didn’t do any French with Laura and Sarah, we did do a focused session with Michael before he went back to school. And all the kids read many, many books.

The biggest challenge with homeschooling was making the time to do it. We went through phases where we would do more (or less), depending on where we were and how much we were travelling. We didn’t do the core subject schoolwork every day, maybe on average just four days a week for an hour-and- a-half a day.

One thing we did -- the kids considered it terribly unfair -- was to work through the kids’ typical summer vacation. We started our homeschooling in July 2008, two weeks after we left home, and continued right up until we returned on Labour Day weekend in 2009. This kept the kids fresh going into school, particularly with respect to the extra French lessons with Michael and the basic Math for Laura and Sarah.

 

Now that you’re back, are you able to resume your professional careers?

We continue to feel that any professional sacrifices we made are far outweighed by personal gains. While the economy is not nearly as healthy as it was when we left in 2008, we are still optimistic that we will be able to ease back into our professional lives fairly directly. While we may not reach the same level of income that we had before, we’ve determined that in many ways it doesn’t matter. Living out of a backpack for over a year, we’ve come to realize that we can live a pretty simple life and still be happy.           

Currently, Kevin is engaged in contract work while seeking permanent employment, and Tracy has a consulting position that allows her to be home with the children before and after school every day.—Editor


Did the kids write in a journal every day?

They did write most days in the first year of the trip. On days that we were “too busy” to write, they would catch up the next day. Unfortunately, the writing all but stopped in the last couple of months. So they have about 12 months of our trip documented, including where we went and what it meant to them.

Michael found being on the trip the most difficult, as he missed his friends a lot, as he continually reminded us. He starts the second volume of his journal with this preface: “My personal journal of the time my parents dragged me in to a crazy 14-month trip around the world.” We look forward to reading it with him in five or ten years -- and hearing whether his views about the “crazy trip” have changed.

 

What changes, if any, have you made as a result of the trip?

One of the great things about being away was that we no longer had to rush around to get the kids chauffeured from one activity to another. We would often just enjoy playing a family game together or reading books. We’ve made a conscious decision to reduce the number of activities the kids are involved in to preserve some of this family time, but it’s difficult. At the very least, we are trying to always (or almost always) have a family dinner together where we can sit down and talk about our day. 

One unexpected result from our taking on the role of teachers is that we are maintaining it now that the kids are back in school. The girls benefit from doing a little extra work with us at home, so they now routinely do a page of math each day for us in addition to their regular homework.

 

Would you recommend the general idea of such a trip to other parents?

We would recommend going on a trip like this to anyone. Of course, you should probably have a pretty solid marriage before setting out – spending 24/7 with a spouse and young children can be stressful at times, particularly in small spaces!

It is critical to be on the same page as your spouse when considering what you want from a trip. Because we were gone for so long we had to minimize our costs along the way. That meant backpacking, staying in hostels and self-catering as many meals as we could. Kevin and I had travelled together like this before, so we both knew it could be done and we were prepared to give up the luxuries of home. 

Not all 40-somethings would want to live the way we lived. In our first night outside of Canada, in Lima, Peru, we landed at our hostel in the middle of the night, finding that a double room awaited us – one double bed in a room not much larger than the bed itself. We put two of the kids on the floor in sleeping bags and one up with us. After that, we increased the amount of space we realistically needed to at least three single beds – not quite up to Canadian standards, but it fit within our budget, and we made it work. 

The Elops kept up their profusely illustrated, highly entertaining blog throughout their adventure, making some 50 postings from June 2008 to August 2009. Enjoy the blogs at: htttp://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog/elopfamily/1/tpod.html. -- Editor  

FIVE TIPS FOR PARENTS CONTEMPLATING A SIMILAR GLOBAL ADVENTURE

We changed our itinerary several times, staying longer in some places and eliminating other places. We booked accommodation in advance only when there was a specific need to do so. For example, when we were flying into a country late at night, when we knew accommodation was in high demand (the national parks in South Africa), or when accommodation was exorbitantly expensive and we wanted to secure a reasonable price in advance (Namibia).

Some of our most enjoyable times were spent just taking it easy and interacting as a family.  We called it “taking a vacation from our vacation.” We spent three weeks hanging out on the beach in Bali, and it was wonderful.

We live in an amazing country, and there is nothing like seeing it from coast to coast to really understand how beautiful, vast and diverse it is.

There’s something to be said about travelling “from Bonavista to Vancouver Island.”  We didn’t quite get up to the Arctic Circle, but we did manage to see the Yukon and it was beautiful in its own right.

 

 

 

You can do most things on your own at a fraction of the cost.

 

Difficult travel experiences sometimes become the most poignant memories. For example, in Cambodia, we got caught standing under a small awning with about twenty locals during a particularly tumultuous rainstorm. Over the course of an hour, we watched the water level steadily rise. The local kids started swimming in the streets. When the rain finally stopped, we had to walk a couple of kilometres back to our hostel in knee-deep water. None of the Cambodians were too fussed about this. It is just their way of life during the rainy season. We feel incredibly fortunate now to have had this experience.

To view previous articles about the Elop Family Trip, and what they had to say before and during this 14 month adventure click here. Also, check out and relive the trip on the family's travel blog!