One of an occasional series introducing black travelers and their Web sites
A black Canadian couple is preparing to take their two sons, 6 and 8, on the adventure of a lifetime — a year-long trip around the world.
When Toronto native Heather Greenwood Davis was a child, her Jamaican-born parents used to pack up her and her two brothers for annual family treks across North America.
“They wanted us to see all of Canada,” she says. “They took us to other (Canadian) provinces, road trips to the United States.”
Now with two boys of her own, Davis and her husband, Ishmael, are preparing to take their sons — Cameron, 6, and Ethan, 8 — on the mother of all road trips.
They’ve already been to Machu Picchu in Peru, as you can see here. But starting some time in July 2011, the family is going to spend a year traveling around the world, a journey that has them feeling like trailblazers of sorts.
“I’ve yet to find a black family doing this, or who have done it,” she says. “The families I’ve found online (who have made round-the-world trips), most of them take kids who are older.”
Parents who find even taking little ones to the mall to be a form of chaos theory may wonder why Davis would want to take boys that small around the globe.
For one thing, these two working parents (her husband is a government health inspector) want to break off a chunk of time in their lives they can spend with their young sons 24/7. And there’s another reason.
“I want the kids to have something I got only late in life,” she says. “I want them to know that the world is not that big a place, that things in the East affect the West. I want them to think of the world as their neighborhood.”
Their itinerary, still in the planning stages, is pretty ambitious:
“We’re going to start out through eastern Canada, then head over to Europe, where we’ll do a couple of months. We’re hoping to pop up to St. Petersburg (Russia). After that, we’ll be in Japan and Thailand for a couple of months.”
China, Australia and India are on the itinerary, as well, then back over to Africa for two to three months, she says.
“The remaining time, we’ll be in South America, then Central America and up to the western U.S., and then head home.”
The plan is to stay in vacation rentals or apartments whenever they can instead of hotels. Rather than staying in tourist centers, they want to get the real flavor of the places they visit.
“I want the kids to get a sense of what kids do in that neighborhood,” Davis says.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, they still have a few kinks to work out of that itinerary, in part because they plan to spend months in some places instead of just days.
“It’s hard to be jumping around with the kids,” she says. “We wanted them to have sort of a base to work from.”
Fine-tuning that itinerary means reluctantly crossing some cherished destinations off the list.
“It’s hard to say I won’t go to Spain this time, which I just can’t imagine. A trip around the world, unless you have infinite time and resources, will always leave things out.”
A former lawyer who switched careers to travel writing eight years ago, Davis plans to treat this as a working trip, writing and blogging about the family experiences as they move from one continent to another. That, combined with savings, is how they’re financing their journey.
“It’ll be a trip,” she says. “It won’t necessarily be a vacation. The kids know what that’s like.”
Her own first big trip came in 2001, when she visited South Africa.
“I went with a group of writers,” she recalls. “At every moment, I wanted to share a moment on that trip with someone who mattered to me. I remember standing there and thinking, `I’m never coming back here without my husband and (my) children.’ ”
Images by H.G. Davis. All rights reserved.