A little less than a year ago, Jenn came home from San Francisco saying she was pregnant. After a topsy-turvy 9-months, we welcomed Elle into the world on May 31st. We are ready to test the waters three months later with our first trip as a trio. We decided to take a road trip to Montreal and Quebec City for our first adventure. We packed the night prior, were down at the car a little before 8 AM, dropped off Frasier at Camp Canine, and began our journey north. 

When we found out the fantastic news that Jenn was pregnant in the fall of 2023 one of the areas of our lives that we knew would change in the short term was travel. As of this writing, we’ve visited 43 countries and averaged three personal international trips a year. With that in mind, we spent many dinners, weekends, and walks with Frasier early on in the pregnancy talking about where we wanted to go before our daughter arrived. And then the pregnancy began in earnest and we had to survive the first trimester and get through the holidays. That left us the start of 2024 to go out and travel and a very limited window to do it. We landed upon mixing two work trips and going back to some of our favorite places in the world.

After any good trip, you will hear both Jenn and I say, “We should travel more.” It to me is the sign of a good vacation and since COVID we have started to ramp up our travel both with work and on our own. After we arrived home from Seoul we were deep in planning mode for where we wanted to go next. We had toyed around with going somewhere after my July work trip, but our schedules didn’t align. We thought about going to Cancun to finish off our goal to see the 7 wonders of the world, but it was far more money than we wanted to spend to go to Cancun. What we landed on given our limited availability was taking a road trip to Portland, Maine.

Even though we are flying home today our flight isn’t until 7:15 PM so we had a few remaining hours to take in Seoul before we head home. Don’t tell Jenn that she didn’t want to get out of bed today but reluctantly did after I brought her Starbucks in bed and helped pack up the last few remaining items. We departed the hotel after 10 AM and made our way to Gwangjang Market on the subway. This was our first time on the subway in Seoul and after we figured out how to get the tickets the rest was relatively straightforward.

Today marks the last day of our trip. It’s hard to imagine that we’ve already reached it but then again Jenn got to Tokyo five days before I did so she’s had a much longer trip. We woke up this morning with those last-day vibes, sleeping in, and soaking up every last second of the trip. We went down to Starbucks at 10 AM and got our normal hot chocolate and iced caramel macchiato. From there we grabbed a Taxi for our first stop of the day Leeum Museum of Art. 

Today marks our last tour of this trip and it's the one we were both most excited for. After getting room service a little after 6 AM (a bread basket with orange juice and coffee) we met our tour guide Tiger in the lobby to start an 8+ hour tour to the DMZ.