And another thing...

One of the other reasons I am determined to keep up with my blog is for others in my situation who are thinking about living and working abroad with their child. Eventually I hope some of them might start to come out of the woodwork and post comments so we can share our experiences, but I haven't even started the course yet so let's not get too excited.

Soon after my realisation that simply thinking about getting away had ceased to satisfy me, and I made plans to really escape, I went to my trusty google search to find other one parent families who had blazed a trail before me (naturally so I could copy everything they did and not have to jump off the deep end myself).

Annoyingly, there is precious little info out there for single parents with mad intentions of dragging their offspring to the ends of the earth.

The information that is out there is geared towards Stepford families with a male who has a stunningly successful role with some international corporation and a wife who's only worries are whether the local nanny will get in her way as she lounges about the house.

Even googling "single parent holidays abroad" did not produce much, except one website who condescended to have a page about one parent travelling with children but this was a much older mum with teenage kids so not much use to me.

I posted some threads on ThornTree (Lonely Planet's travel forum) and was surprised at the number of mums who wrote back about their desire to live overseas with their children, their frustration at the lack of information and their confusion about the safest and best path to take to realise their goals.

I have not even left Australia yet so I am no expert but hopefully by documenting my experience of taking a 3 year old on my OE I may be able to fill a little bit of that information black hole.

Here's the thread at Lonely Planet...
http://www.lonelyplanet.com/thorntree/thread.jspa?threadID=1651298&start=0&tstart=0