So, We Decided To Do This Thing

Why did we decide to pick up our lives and start traveling long-term with our kids? It is not because we won the lottery (sorry family and friends and strangers we have never met).

We are traveling long-term so we can spend more time with our children. We are traveling long-term to learn about different cultures. We are traveling long-term because it is the kind of life we want to lead.

What Led Us to Our Decision.

After Michael got cancer back in 2009 and we had our first child in 2010 and our second in 2012, we both started looking at our lives differently.

We evaluated our lives and over time we came to the realization that working in an office 40-50 hours a week during the prime years of our lives while our kids spend 10 hours a day in school/aftercare is not the path we want to lead. 

It has been a slow road to get to where we are today; about to embark on this long-term travel journey. We slowly decided that buying a house and filling it with things was not filling out hearts. 

We slowly saved up money doing our 40-50 hour a week office jobs and investing in real estate. We slowly realized that we do not want to wait until we are in our 60s or 70s to try to take this journey. We slowly got up the courage to up-end our life and start making a home on the road.

We know that this journey, as exciting and as magical as it sounds, will be difficult. We know that we will get homesick. We know that we will be spending a lot of time out of our comfort zone and a lot of time getting on each other’s nerves.

We know all of these things and still, once we made the decision to do this, we have never wavered. We both have this feeling in our gut that this is the path we are supposed to take.

How Do You Plan For Long-Term Travel?

A lot of daydreaming (the daydreaming part is fun – we have spent a lot of time doing it), money-saving, podcast listening, talking about it to everyone (sorry everyone), list-making, researching, spreadsheet populating, housing cleaning and purging, signing up for travel reward credit cards, and more.

Michael and I have spent countless hours talking about where we want to go; how long we will stay in each place; how we will home school the kids; how we will pay for it all. We think we have enough figured out to take the leap.

Our ultimate goal is to become location independent so that even if we end up putting roots down again, we will still have freedom and flexibility to spend more time together as a family and continue traveling for extended periods.

We have found many useful resources online. We were amazed to discover that a lot of families do what we are about to embark upon. A real gem that we came across in our research is the Family Adventure Summit.

The Family Adventure Summit was an annual event for families who are interested in incorporating long-term travel as part of their lifestyle. We attended the 2018 summit in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico and it solidified our decision to go on this journey. We are inspired by the people we met in San Miguel. We learned that there was a community of like-minded people out there.

We created this website in order to document this trip for ourselves, for our friends and family, and for anyone else who may be interested in doing what we are about to do.  We have a lot to do before we leave. We plan to share our planning adventures with you as well as our travel adventures. We hope you enjoy this family travel journey as much as we will.