It's Road Trip for Us, Air Trip for Lolo

As the start of our Island Travel Adventure nears, we are now less than four weeks away, some decisions had to be made regarding our travel arrangements.

One of the formidable challenges in this whole project is having to consider concerns of/about individual family members.

Our two school-age kids have been warned ahead of time that they should not have any backlogs in their school requirements as we're leaving on the same week their classes end. There's a not-so-subtle threat of risking being left behind should they fail to accomplish everything before our date of departure.

Our two younger kids, a tot and an infant, have no scheduling conflicts. We anticipate that they would have more requirements to be met on the actual road trip. Things like being in the car for more than an hour could be a big challenge. So we're carefully planning our strategies.

Our children's Lolo or grandfather who's been living with us in the past months would need special arrangements. He cannot endure the long road trip, so he has to travel by air. On top of that, he needs to be accompanied by an adult as he's not confident to travel alone anymore.

So, we need to ask our scholar to accompany him. We've asked her to plan her school requirements around our trip and she decided not to attend summer sessions so she can be with us in this family vacation. It looks like, instead of assisting us during the road trip to Luzon, she would be with Lolo all the time.

So we made arrangements with an Uncle to accompany us on the road. He immediately agreed as he can then spend the Holy Week in his home town and then he can return to Davao City after. So we're very thankful for him as there's a third adult to depend on for driving and other concerns as well as look after the kids during the road trip.

As for us, we also need to make arrangements with our writing commitments and issues/responsibilities that we would leave behind for two months.  Actually there's so many of them, that we should really make a physical list of things to do with corresponding deadlines to aid us with preparations.

So it's settled. Lolo will fly in to Manila with our scholar on March 24 using the plane tickets we bought that triggered all of these. We will do the road trip to Luzon with four kids and an Uncle. We're looking at March 23 as the ideal date to leave from Davao.

We appreciate the suggestions we received when we asked about what option to take between road trip and air travel with many different combinations, including sending the family car via Superferry.  Your feedback helped us see many viewpoints before making our decision.

As for now, the decision on the sticky issue related to the six non-refundable but rebookable (with penalty) plane tickets can still be postponed. The choices are whether to just forget about it and charge to experience *ouch!* or rebook (and pay about P4000 or $85 plus fare difference) to a distant date in the hope that we can eventually use it. What do you think?