Travel Channel's 'Big Crazy Family Adventure' stars a world-class clan of explorers

"Are we there yet?"

Imagine how many times your kids could whine that during a 13,000-mile road trip.

The Kirkby family took a 96-day journey with their sons, 7 and 4.

They left their Kimberley, B.C., home for a remote monastery in Ladakh, India, and never boarded a plane. They traveled by canoe, cargo ship, ferry, bullet train, riverboat, taxis, pony, elephant and rickshaw.

Their odyssey, chronicled in "Big Crazy Family Adventure," debuted Sunday on the Travel Channel, and has been streaming on TravelChannel.com, available on the channel's app and on VOD platforms for more than two weeks.

The project marks the first time the station is releasing a season of a show before it premieres on air.

"We wanted to see everything in between," Bruce Kirkby says of the adventure. "An airplane is like a time machine. It diminishes time and space. You take off from North America and you land in the morning and you are in Asia."

Kirkby, who worked as a guide and journalist, had long traveled with his wife, Christine Pitkanen. When their sons Bodi, 8, and Taj, 3, were infants, they began taking them along.

During this trip, they visited North Base Camp at Mount Everest, before the recent earthquake. They walked along the Great Wall in China. And Kirkby was close enough to the DMZ between North and South Korea that he was ordered back in his car.

The boys loved the cargo ship, where Pitkanen insisted they wear lifejackets, because the safety railings were not intended for children. The boys shuddered at some of the food, such as larvae, though Bodi says that "eating a scorpion was good because it was fried."

Still, there were moments — particularly when on a boat on the Ganges, where it was 110 degrees and they stayed below because of swarms of mosquitoes — that Pitkanen says she wondered, "What are we doing this for?"

But they knew why.

"We were realizing just how busy life was getting, and never found a more pure way of being present with our children," Kirkby says.

Living in tight quarters far from their usual life brought them closer, Kirkby says.

Yet as glorious as the sights were, and as much as the boys learned, there was still some whining — even when they got there.

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Source: Travel Channel's 'Big Crazy Family Adventure' stars a world-class clan of explorers