I am obsessed with this book and need to own it. It is physically hurting me to return it to the library because I loved it that much!

I really enjoy the voice and style Tsh uses to share her own and her family's journey of traveling the world for a year, yet still living in the present and enjoying the small daily gifts around them.

It feels relational and endearing and aspiring and hopeful, yet vulnerable and honest too. I truly, deeply loved this one and already plan to read it again soon.

I could not put this book down. Reading Tsh’s story was fascinating and wonderful. I too struggle with being a homebody with wanderlust but the take Tsh has on this paradox was so helpful. I can’t wait to settle deeper into my current home and still pull out my passport.

The writing style is like a journal entry. I found it lacking ...but there were some awesome nuggets of deeper reflections I enjoyed. The story is admirable to me...I love their adventures.

It was a chore to read this book. The author purports to be this worldly vagabond who loves to travel and yet, she spends the first half of their trip taking exception to everything. She writes not about going here, seeing this, doing that, but rather of her distaste for foreign food; of her dismay at the crowds and noise in Asia; of her displeasure at the “invasion of privacy“ when Asians want to be photographed with Westerners, whose appearance fascinates them; of her loneliness and pining for home and things familiar. (Seriously, if you don’t like crowds and the unfamiliar, go to Canada, where there are fewer than 40 million people spread out over the second largest country on the planet and the Western culture shares many similarities with America. But no! She picks the most densely populated area on earth and then is shocked and horrified at the masses of people thronging in the streets.)

The more I read of this book, the more irritated and impatient I became with this woman’s ridiculous fragility and astonishing narrow mindedness. Here is her description of her meltdown after her kids played crafts and coloured with crayons for a few hours over a leisurely lunch at a restaurant—serving Western food—followed by an hour of quiet time in their hostel:

“Lunch takes hours, and afterword, I sense the need for a serious break. I’m trembling, weak, overstimulated. We take a bus and head back to our hostel for mandatory quiet time, where everyone in the family is required to stay on their beds with curtains drawn and do whatever they want so long as they don’t talk. It’s mildly stressful. At the end of an hour, my head still spins, my muscles ache … . I feel my insides spiralling downward, wonder if my outsides will soon follow suit. I am swimming in cacophony. ... I like to think of myself as flexible, that I’m good at going where the wind blows, but when I need to adapt to unsavoury conditions that test my senses, my body and brain overload.” Wow! Just, wow.

The book doesn’t offer any meaningful insights about their travels. It’s just a litany of extreme miles logged to arrive at a destination, arriving at said destination utterly jet-lagged and so depleted that they seek out the safe and familiar—pizza, ice cream and playgrounds—while they rest and recover from the arduous journey over multiple time zones and then repeat this ridiculous pattern over and over.

Their trip to Sri Lanka can be summed up as:
1. a brief terror-stricken visit to a crowded temple (during which Tsh has what can only be described as another panic attack);
2. hightailing it back to their accommodations; and then,
3. fleeing the country by first taking a motorized rickshaw ride to Colombo airport.

Not surprisingly, the overwrought author is petrified on the rickshaw ride, while her husband is exhilarated. She closes the chapter on Sri Lanka by saying the country remains a mystery! Small wonder if you’re too delicate to explore the sights, sounds and smells of the land; too fragile and jet lagged to get out and about amongst the people and drink in the awesome cultural diversity that you are blessed enough to experience.

I’m not sure how or why I continued this slog , but I did finish the book. Shockingly, she loved Africa (in spite of their ridiculous itinerary) and not surprisingly, she enjoyed Europe, so the book did pick up in the second half, although on the whole, it was deeply unsatisfying.

Confucius said, “Wherever you go, go with all your heart.” The author completely failed at this. Her book would have been more aptly entitled “Ill at Ease in the World” or “Longing for Home.”

Returned to Audible (LOVE their easy returns!) The audio production is terrible, there is a lot of hissing and echoing, and her reading is not very good. I may try the Kindle version, although the editing was also not good. She uses a lot of words incorrectly, most irritatingly "besotted." For example: "The travel itch spills into our children as well, besotted with our DNA." Huh? And, "[She] flutters a yellow fan besotted with red roses."

Audio. Travel memoir. Tsh and Kyle met in Kosovo after college. Date, get married, 3 kids later they take the whole family to spend a year circling the world. China, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Ethiopia, safari, Morocco, france, Germany, Italy, etc-all with their 3 kids under 10. All to show their kids how to a goo husband ib