It is finally my (Julia) turn to do a blog post. I decided a little while ago that we should do a “Reality Check” post. Both because of some questions that a few friends have had and also because I am cognizant of the social media impulse to only post the great and wonderful things, not so much the normal or difficult times, leading to a skewed perspective on someone’s life. So, I’m going to write about the more mundane and sometimes difficult parts of the past three months. It is in no way a complaint; we are still thrilled and so grateful to be doing this trip as a family. It is just to provide a bit of a balance and more complete picture of life on the road. Sorry that we don’t have too many pictures for this one – we didn’t usually think to take pictures of the more mundane or less beautiful parts!
Food
While food is certainly one of the more fun parts of the trip, and has featured heavily on the blog, it is actually also one of the more time-consuming and stressful parts of our life. Finding food for our family at least 2, often 3, times a day in foreign places is no small feat! We are constantly not only evaluating whether or not we think we will like the taste of something, we are also always asking ourselves if we think something is going to make us violently ill or send us to the hospital! (Between warnings before we left, the guy at the Bolivia Salt Plains who looked awful and was contemplating whether to go on a tour or to the hospital, the guy in the cabin next to us in the jungle who was throwing up all night (which we could hear every time since those cabins were about 15 feet apart with no glass windows – only screens), and tales from fellow travelers, we are very aware that this is a constant threat to our health and enjoyment of the trip.) We are constantly asking whether fruits and vegetables and fruit juices have been washed/made in filtered or boiled water, assessing whether we believe the answer (or it is just a language barrier and they are saying “yes” to everything to appease the foreigner) and being very careful with any street foods. In La Paz, when we asked that question at a restaurant, the owner told us that after taking so many of his foreign colleagues to the hospital after going to a restaurant, he finally decided to open a restaurant where foreigners could eat without a complimentary trip to the hospital! We’ve also had a few terrible tasting meals!!! We are definitely deficient in fruits and vegetables and we are all craving them (even Annika, and that is saying something!!).
Grocery shopping is also a thing. Most Airbnbs don’t have things that we would have thought to be essential (like a can opener, paring knife, salt, oil, etc) and only two of all the Airbnbs we have stayed in have had an oven. Trying to find ingredients for any meal beyond meat and potatoes or pasta is crazy hard! We have realized how many ingredients we just have in our pantry or fridge at home. It usually involves at least two trips around the whole grocery store to see what they have and what we think we can make with what provisions/utensils there are at the Airbnb. We have also stared in bewilderment at the package of spaghetti taped to a 2 litre bottle of Coke, but couldn’t find any pasta sauce!!!
Laundry
I have discovered that I love my washing machine, dryer and clothesline and am so grateful and thankful that I have such easy access to such wonderful inventions! I plan to hug them when I get home. Washing clothes by hand in small hotel sinks is a very time consuming and not particularly enjoyable reality. Socks and underwear take so long! Trying to find places for them to dry and trying to time it so that things will dry before we pack up again, also present some challenges. Our room often looks like it has exploded!
The hot, humid weather with open air type accommodations also make for challenges in getting anything to dry. During our jungle stay, Matt and I bolted to where our laundry was hanging (thanks to a nice manager who let us use a staff laundry spot) several times when it started to rain to put it under awnings and then hang it all up again 20 minutes later, since the only way it would potentially dry in that humidity was if the sun was hitting it.
Health and Safety
Being sick at home is no fun. Being sick away from home is less fun. Being sick on an overnight bus in the middle of nowhere surrounded by strangers is even less fun. Thankfully, besides the ankle injury early on and the overnight bus incident, everything else has been minor. There have been a few fainting/almost fainting spells by one of the girls as well, which is embarrassing and frustrating for her (and we wish we knew the cause).
Friends and Family
We miss them. We try to keep up with as many as we can in different ways, but there is no doubt we miss the people we love. Also, both Matt and I have had a parent in the hospital for a few days since we’ve left, a close friend who had a stroke and another who has been re-diagnosed with cancer. It is really hard to be so far away when people you love are in crisis.
We spend a lot of time together 
We are doing pretty good together as a family 24/7. We all love each other, but recognize that space and breaks are important too, which can be hard to find.
Poverty and Garbage
Driving through big cities and some remote areas of South America for three months, we have seen a lot of poverty. We try not to take pictures of it (and almost any picture from a moving vehicle doesn’t turn out), but certainly it is something we see. Also, so much garbage. Some countries are worse than others, but in some places, it does seem that the side of the road is considered to be a legitimate garbage dump and it is everywhere. In Santa Cruz, it seemed a bit ironic to us that we saw all sorts of store owners cleaning their windows to be spotless, while there were copious amounts of garbage on the sidewalks in front of the stores. We had it for some of our beautiful scenery shots as well. We put the ones on the blog that showed the nice scenery, not the foreground, which was strewn with garbage.
Interestingly, in Bolivia especially, we also saw so many houses and buildings that were only half finished. The first floor looked done-ish and inhabited, and then there would be no second floor but rebar coming up through the roof in all the corners and other various places. Apparently it has to do with taxes. The rebar is there in case they ever want to build, but you pay less taxes if you don’t and also if you don’t paint it, so almost all the houses there stay the red colour of the bricks.
Transportation
Matt has written a few times about the crazy mountain passes that we have been on and how terrifying that can be. Traffic in the cities can be equally nerve-wracking (though perhaps not quite as deadly if anything were to happen). Basically, traffic in South America is one big game of chicken. If you think you can beat someone else to where you want to go, or you can stick your nose out one inch further than someone else to merge into traffic, go for it. If there are two lanes painted on the road, then at least 3 and maybe four cars/trucks/motorcycles can actually fit in that space, and they will! Stop signs and traffic lights are rare and in many places ignored. Many cities use speed bumps to maintain some sort of control on the speed.
Lanes don’t really mean anything on the highways either. They drive wherever they think best depending on where the potholes are. In Puerto Maldonado, as we were driving from one jungle lodge to another, going about 110 km/h on the correct side of the highway (this particular vehicle actually had a speedometer!), a very large truck with a big sign saying “Combustible” on the front was driving straight towards us on our side of the highway!! At the very last second, it swerved back into its lane. Our particular side of the highway had less potholes at that moment.
We’ve been centimetres away from so many cars at high speeds, we’ve lost count, but my poor heart feels like it has had many almost heart attacks, especially as the girls and I are usually bouncing around in the backseat because there are no seatbelts.
And we really do spend hours and hours on buses, in taxis, in airports and on airplanes.
Language
Of course, the language barrier is always a thing. We are very thankful for Google Translate, but certainly even that sometimes can’t make up for both the language and cultural barriers combined (or doesn’t work if we also don’t have internet at that moment). We’ve had a few incidents, which are funny in retrospect, but not so much in the moment when you think you might miss your scheduled bus to an expensive tour because you can’t communicate with someone properly to order a taxi. And sometimes we will order something at a restaurant (we think) and then shrug our shoulders and say to each other, I guess we’ll see what happens 
School/Blog/Booking
The girls are doing fine with their schooling, but they definitely miss their classmates and the interactions in a school environment. The combination of homeschooling, researching/planning/ booking the upcoming parts of the trip, doing the blog, paying bills, finding food, doing laundry, spending long hours on buses/taxis/airplanes, and all the wonderful things you see on the blog, means that there has actually not been as much “down-time” as we thought we would have to contemplate life!