Surfacing: KUAT comes home

So it’s been a month (or two, eek) since we’ve been around these parts, but if you’ve followed us on Twitter or Facebook, you can see we haven’t exactly been cooling our heels. After Vera’s first birthday, we packed up and said goodbye to our beloved Istanbul, and boarded two 10+ hour flights to New Zealand. We visited family in Auckland, rode the train to hipster Wellington, ferried down to the South Island, and even connected with another traveling family in Christchurch. After a few more days back in Auckland, we flew to Seoul for a fun week of wandering and having Vera’s cheeks pinched (the Koreans give the Turks a run for their money in the baby-crazy department!), then back to Istanbul for a night to catch our flights home to New York via Kiev (ugh, not recommended). With another 50 hours of flight time with a baby logged, this time with a near-toddler (she took a few steps in Auckland but has resumed crawling and cruising full-time), we learned a lot more about flying with a baby, so expect some more advanced advice on these pages.

Since returning to Brooklyn, we’ve been dusting off our apartment (sitting empty of people for over two years, but lots of belongings to collect dust), trying to figure out what baby furniture and supplies to buy in the overwhelming variety available, eating various high-concept pork-based foods, writing about New Zealand for the unadventurous, and trying to figure out what’s next. In the next two weeks, we’ll be traveling to a few places a little less exotic than normal, including Detroit and New Hampshire, but we still plan to seek out the baby-friendly bars and oddball museums we frequented in Europe. I’ve also gotten a few emails from readers visiting Istanbul with babies and it’s been a lot of fun putting all of our hard-won knowledge to benefit other traveling families.

Thanks for bearing with us, much more to come!