233. Travel With a Baby: How to Travel the World on Parental Leave with Riana Ang-Canning

Rihanna, I think for me, there's so many reasons why I love hearing your story.

But one of the things for me that really stood out was the fact that you were traveling during parental leave.

A lot of people, when they have a baby, they are staying home.

They are nesting.

They are getting into a routine and a new flow with their new addition to their family.

But instead, you packed your baby, your dog, your husband, and you spent nine months traveling around the world.

So Take us back to that moment when you decided to take this big trip.

And how did that all come about?

Yeah, so my husband, Dog, and I actually lived in Prague back in 2019 for about a year.

And that was kind of... a little spontaneous like we didn't go for work or anything like that we just kind of wanted an adventure we were you know young we could apply for these working holiday visas so we spent about a year living in prague and we came back early 2020 we all know what was happening in 2020 so we very much had this feeling like it was kind of like unfinished business and we had really loved this long-term travel like being in a place for months as opposed to you know days or weeks So when we came back, we kind of decided like, this is something we want to do.

You know, every, however many years, you know, it takes us to save up money and figure out the work and the housing and all that part of it.

We want to do this.

At the same time, we also knew we wanted to become parents.

That was like important to us to start a family.

So we kind of looked at each other and said like, hey, the math is kind of working out where, you know, the next time we'd be able to do this, save up for it would be when we have a baby.

And it kind of worked out really well because my husband was going to be able to take parental leave from work.

So this was going to be the one time in his life where he would have a huge stretch of time to, you know, be off work.

His job is waiting for him when we get back.

And on top of that, he's going to get a little stipend from the government to, you know, be a dad.

So we kind of thought like this is the perfect time for us to be together as a family, have a job waiting for us and get, you know, a little paycheck to do it at the same time.

Oh, my goodness.

Yes, yes, yes.

And for me, similar situation in terms of, like, you know, having maternity leave, parental leave all set up.

But I stayed home.

And I'm just like, oh, my gosh, if I would have thought about this, like...