Blogocentric Formulations

World Travels

Prompt ▼

Have you ever traveled to a foreign country? What country would you most like to visit?

The first foreign country I visited was Spain in 2009. My cousin-in-law's parents were missionaries at a Christian school outside of Madrid for almost a decade and hosted us for their last summer before returning to the States. After years of wanting to travel but never having the opportunity, my wife and I soaked everything in and immediately fell in love with international travel.

The following year (2010) we visited London for the first time and I surprised my wife with an overnight trip to Paris, which we followed up two years later with a trip specifically to Paris in Spring of 2013. Later that summer, my wife went on a mission trip with his sister's church to Brazil (Sao Paulo, specifically), and I followed her on a second mission trip a year later in Summer of 2014.

The next few years were filled with lots of domestic travel for various reasons (mostly short getaways and attending weddings). Other than my wife's third trip to Brazil for Thanksgiving 2017, we went on trips to Hawaii, Nashville, New York, Portland (Oregon not Maine), Reno, Seattle, Texas (separately to both Austin and Dallas). When we were getting ready to start the foster-to-adopt process and start our family, we took one last "big hurrah" trip to Thailand in July 2018, and that was the last international trip we've taken. I was hoping to visit three different continents before our parenting journey began and thanks to that last trip to Thailand, we were able to get stamps for Europe, South America, and Asia in our passports.

Since then, being new parents and the whole global pandemic thing have really put a lot of our travel plans on hold, and our list of places we want to visit has only increased in the intervening years. If I were to narrow down those places to a short list, the top three places I still want to visit at this point (which one is first depends on the day and the price of flights ) are Japan, Australia, and either Ireland or Italy. There are a ton more places I'd love to visit someday but whenever my wife and I talk about international travel, those are the destinations that we most often check first to see what's available.

With the kids' adoptions being finalized earlier this year, we're just waiting on their official paperwork (new birth certificates so we can get new social security cards so we can get passports), and once that happens we'll be cleared to start traveling the world again!