Living Abroad Means Missing Family: The Reality of International Travel

Welcome to As the Dinason's Turn, where we chronicle the adventures of the Dinason family. A seemingly ordinary family from Iowa who decided, hey, you only live once. So let's move to Portugal. And now your hosts, Jason and Tracy Dynason.

Welcome to As the Dinason's Turn. I'm Jason flying solo this time. Tracy was unable to get in on the recording this time around. So I am doing a solo episode, and that's okay. It's actually something that was prompted by some of my travels. Tracy was traveling too. I wanted to do a follow-up episode from our prior episode about travel because we had to travel recently. I had to travel for work, and Tracy and the kids had to travel to attend a funeral in Texas, and I actually had to alter my arrangements to get from where I was at for work to Texas for a few days. And I wanted to talk about that international travel and some of the realities that happen when you move abroad and being able to see your family. Now you can always talk to people on the phone or WhatsApp or Zoom or whatever, but I mean face to face, see your family. One of the most common questions that we get from people in the US is whether or not we see our families. And the short answer is no. I have not seen my family face to face since we moved. And Tracy hadn't seen her family face to face since we moved until we were in Texas for a few days in late September to attend a funeral. And sometimes that surprises people. And so I wanted to talk about that today. Like why is that that we haven't really seen our families since we moved? Basically it's not as simple as just hopping on a plane. I mean I guess in a way it is, you do in fact just get on a plane and fly, but it's costly and quite frankly it's grueling also. So we live near Porto in northern Portugal, and Porto is the airport that we fly out of. And from Porto there are direct flights to JFK and Newark. So if you lived in that area, New York, New Jersey, you would be able to get direct flights to and from Porto. And the flight time varies depending on which way you're going. So going from the US to Europe is faster because of the rotation of the earth and wind currents. Coming from Europe to the US takes longer. So if you're going from Porto to New York, it's eight or eight and a half hours. New York to Porto is six and a half to seven hours. If it was just doing that, and you didn't have to do it all the time, it might not be so terribly bad. Although I will say I have had to travel back for work-related things multiple times this year, and after a while it just gets really tiresome. Travel is also a grind because a lot of times you're not stopping at your first destination. You have to go on to some other destination. So for example, I have a conference in Austin in November, and I'll be flying from Porto to Newark, which again that's like an eight hour flight. Then I have a layover of a few hours in Newark, and I get on a plane from Newark to Austin, and that's like a four hour flight. By the time I land in Austin, get off the plane, get my luggage, get in an Uber and get to the hotel, it's gonna be like a twenty-six hour day. Not twenty-six hours on an airplane, but from the time I wake up in the morning in Portugal, go to the airport, get on a plane, and then end up at the hotel in Austin, it's probably gonna be around twenty-six hours. And yeah, you maybe can sleep on the plane a little bit, but that's a grind to have to do. And then the other thing is the cost. Going from Porto to JFK or Newark minimum is around a thousand dollars round trip, and that's just to get in the airplane in an economy seat. It doesn't account for things like checked luggage or selecting your seat. It just gets you on the plane. And that's just a direct flight from one place to another, a thousand dollars. If you have connecting flights, it could easily be anywhere from twelve hundred to over two thousand dollars, and that's flying in economy. That means you have to budget for these things too, and so someone traveling to visit us is gonna have to account for the fact that that's pricey. You're gonna have to save up a few thousand dollars for your plane tickets and then plan for having to be basically up for twenty-four plus hours. And for us with a family of four, if we're all gonna travel back to the US to visit family, take those costs, set aside the time, like the amount of time that you have to be up and awake and things like that, just look at the cost. One thousand to two thousand dollars times four people, that's a lot of money. And that's just flying in economy. Now for me, I travel a lot for work purposes, and most of the places that I work for, they're bringing me in to teach at conferences, for example, and they will reimburse me for my travel expenses, but most of them don't want to reimburse me for the full cost. Because they're used to paying a few hundred bucks to someone in the US hopping on the cheapest flight on frontier or whatever, and it doesn't work like that with me. So sometimes I'll have these places that say, well, we'll reimburse you five hundred dollars or eight hundred dollars. So sometimes I lose money when I'm traveling back to the US for work. Now I do it because it's kind of an investment in my business and my brand or whatever, because I need to maintain relationships and keep my name out there, and so it's almost like a marketing expense. And I don't say that to make you feel sorry for me, it's more just like the realities of it. When people ask, why haven't you been to visit your family or why doesn't your family come to visit you? Well, it's gonna cost a thousand to two thousand dollars per person, and whoever is traveling is gonna have a twenty-four hour or more day on both ends of their travel. It's gonna be grueling. And so that's the reason why on all sides of our family, I haven't seen my family since we moved. Tracy hadn't seen her family since then either until we went to a funeral in September. And that's the reason why it costs a lot of money and it's quite an adventure for the travel time. Now it could be a little different, I suppose, if you lived somewhere with a lot of direct flights to wherever internationally, but there is no pot of gold at the end of some rainbow here where your flights are going to be cheap. So sometimes on social media I'll see these ads for things like two hundred dollar flights to some overseas destination. And that's actually not totally a scam, but it's misleading because a lot of times the way that works is it's like the last seat on the airplane, and if you can get to the airport in a few hours, you can have that ticket for a few hundred dollars to go to some other country. Most of us can't operate like that. We can't just be like, oh, I think I'll go to Tokyo. That was one of them that I saw. I think it was San Francisco to Tokyo or something for a few hundred dollars. But when you really dig into it, it's like you would have had to have gone to the airport right away to take advantage of that. Probably not realistic for most of us. We have to plan in advance. If I'm going to be speaking at a conference, I've got to buy my ticket now because I need to make sure I get there. I can't wait until a few hours before I need to leave to hope I can snag a deal on a ticket. So traveling internationally, there's a lot of moving parts to it. There's a lot of cost, there's a lot of stress. You're gonna be having to be awake or somewhat awake, even if you sleep a little bit on the airplane, it's gonna be a really long time between when you wake up and when you get to go to bed. And it's just hard. Well, next time I'm sure Tracy will be with us. She wasn't able to join us today, but it had been a while since we'd done a podcast and I wanted to talk about the realities of international travel, because it's fresh in my mind, and how when you make the leap to do what we did, it might mean that face-to-face interactions with your family become scarcer because plane tickets are expensive and traveling can be very intense. Thanks for joining us on this episode of As the Dinason's Turn. We'll talk to you again next time.

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