Hi! It’s Katie here giving you the latest news in the Lilla world. Our family has divided in half (or 2 and 4 anyway)! The two groups have gotten into teams – the “Naps are for Babies” team and the “Babies” aka Naptakers. Why would you want to take a nap you ask? Because there is a seven hour time difference. So we will be playing a fun game called “Stay Awake.” If you do you get a bar of German chocolate! We will give an update soon. Katie – signing off

PS. Some funny things that made it into our suitcase – Batman and a dart gun! 

Switching it over to mom-

Hello! We are on our way! We made it to Chicago last night. We crashed a dinner party at Nick and Audrey Stone’s house. It was a great way to start our adventure. This morning we are up and preparing to head to the airport. We will fly to Philadelphia and then on to Munich. We will arrive in Munich at 6:45 am which will feel like 11:45 pm Omaha time. This is where Katie’s post comes in! Erik has decided it is best if we drop our luggage at our new home and then head out for adventure and sight seeing. HIS plan is to stay awake all day so that we will get our bodies on track for the rest of the trip. MY plan is to head out to see the sights, go back and take a NAP, then out for more adventure. And thus the family is divided – Juliette and I (Babies) vs Everybody else (Naps are for Babies). I guess time will tell who triumphs! (Update to come)

PACKING

Some people have asked about our preparation process. With 6 people it was important to keep things as simple as possible or I would lose my mind! So we decided to pack one week’s worth of clothes for each person. Each place we are staying (mostly Airbnb or HomeAway) has a washer and dryer available. The plan (hopefully it works!) will be to wash and dry clothes each week. Now on to my favorite travel discover thus far (thank you Stephanie Wilkey and Kristen Ritchie!) – PACKING CUBES! I am sure all of you already know about this amazing thing called packing cubes but I am late to the packing game! You guys – game changer! I found these on Amazon – set of 4 (2 large, 2 medium). Each child’s clothes fit neatly into one large cube. I used the medium cubes for Erik and me. We narrowed the packing down to 1 large suitcase, 2 small suitcases and 4 backpacks.

Packing Cubes!

The crew with luggage.

THE BUCKET LIST

Another thing we have done to prepare is create a bucket list. This list is not a check off sheet but rather a way to get everybody’s expectations down on paper. We decided to make a list of all of the things that we hope to discover along our way! If we missed something let us know!