In 2008, I quit my corporate job, sold off everything I owned and moved overseas with my husband Drew. Since then we've traveled around the world, started our careers over as creative types and nurtured our love of sleeping in late. Oh and we had a baby. Cole, our almost 2 year old has been traveling since he was four months old and probably knows more Thai than me (not that he brags).
What a Nomadic Lifestyle Looks Like for my Family
Today’s guest post is from Dee at Travel and Travails. I’m always talking about how full-time travel is possible for anyone. Sometimes, that’s just not the case. An overlooked side of family travel… I’m curious to hear your comments.
I follow Christine and Almost Fearless with some jealousy. I envy the idea of being location independent and a digital nomad… I’d like to make it a lifestyle; I know my husband would love to; it’s my two daughters who hold me back. They are 8 and 11.
Our Experiment as a Nomadic Family
Two years ago, we sold our house and cars, stored furniture, gave away toys and 15-year-old wedding gifts we still weren’t using, and decided to move our family to Spain for a year. We were looking for something new and different in life than the usual commute to work, pay the mortgage, mow the yard, go to the movies. The idea was to travel but to also have a home base. My husband was going to work remotely; I would be a freelance writer. Location independence!
We traveled throughout Spain for the first three months, spending 2-3 weeks in different cities, renting houses and apartments and living the life of digital nomads. After three months of life on the road though, we were all ready to settle, find a place to call home, unpack books and stuffed animals, make friends, and start school.
Ah, yes, school. The biggest challenge our family faces in our quest for location independence. It’s not purely about the academics. There are plenty of great home-schooling, road-schooling, un-schooling resources and online courses. And the things learned on the road… experiencing other cultures, walking through history, trying new things… are priceless and something that a classroom can never bring to life. But school is also about friends and the socialization kids want and need. After three months of traveling and only each other, our daughters wanted friends. They craved other kids. And real teachers, a lunch room, recess and the routines of school. And my husband and I craved time… for work, to take Spanish lessons, to exercise and make friends of our own.
What we discovered though is it didn’t take long for routine to creep back into our lives, even in a foreign country. We were no longer mobile, able to pick up and go. We were tied down to homework, school plays, after school soccer practice.
But we adults were restless. It was the middle of an unexpected wet and cold Mediterranean winter, we weren’t immersed and learning Spanish like we had thought we would be, and we discovered we had settled back into the routines of life we were trying to shake. The freedom we had experienced traveling was gone.
Time to hit the road again. We gave notice at school, were able to get out of the long-term lease on our house, and started planning to be nomads again in the spring. Renting apartments, preparing to homeschool, getting excited to travel again. At least we were. Our daughters, however, were not. They didn’t want to leave our new town anymore than they’d wanted to move to Spain in the first place. They’d finally made friends, they liked their school, they were learning Spanish. It was starting to feel like home, and here Mom and Dad were mixing it all up again.
Even so, and many emotional conversations later, we were off again with the intention of traveling for another three months before returning home to Colorado, just in time for… you guessed it, school!
What We Will Try in the Future
Whether we like it or not, some amount of routine and school for our family is a reality. We have tried our hand at homeschooling, but the novelty soon wears off for our daughters and us. And at their ages, they want consistent friendships and soccer practice and Girl Scouts. And we want some of those things for them too.
We have decided nomadic summers are in our future. No school to concern ourselves with, no schedules, and no travel fatigue setting in, when you could care less if you see another museum or castle and just want to curl up on the couch with a movie, no matter how old you are.
We are hopeful that 6-8 weeks of vagabonding and working remotely will meet the nomadic needs of the four of us. Perhaps I have to accept that for now nomadic for my family means being free to wander and travel once the bell rings and school is out.
What about you? What does a nomadic lifestyle look like for your family?
About the author
Dee Andrews and her family recently returned to Boulder, Colorado after experiencing life as nomads for a year. You can read about her family’s experiences moving and living abroad, traveling throughout the Mediterranean, and embracing change at Travel and Travails. Dee hopes to convince her tween children to embrace a nomadic lifestyle again, ideally in South America. Dee can be reached at dee@travelandtravails.com.
Great insightful post. I would think your kids are right at that age that it would be difficult. I was upset about moving to the country from the city at that age! It will have been an experience that will benefit them forever. Congrats on your gutsy family.
.-= Gypsy Chick´s last blog ..The Magic of Don Det, Laos =-.
I love this post. I just found your site and really am looking forward to reading more.
.-= paula schuck´s last blog ..Fabulous Friday Finds =-.
Great post. I was going to suggest that regular life interspersed with extended vacations might be the way to go. You get routine, have a chance to make friends, join clubs, have a place to call ‘home’… but you also get world experiences that provide a big contrast to ‘regular’ life and are something to look forward to each year.
I can’t tell you how happy I am to see this post. You are following what I like to call the “middle path” and it’s one I’ve had to follow as well.
I know that there are people who find living as nomads with their school-age children to be a breeze but I know in my heart that it wouldn’t work for my family. Like you, it’s not the academics of school that stymie me. It’s the fact that my boys both are extremely social and at 5 and 8, their friends are already very important to them. Which isn’t to say that they can’t and don’t make new friends everywhere they go, but I know they wouldn’t be happy having to leave their friends and hit the road after a few months.
Although we happily did 13 months of travel when my oldest was a toddler, I know that won’t happen again anytime soon. I do expect that we’ll spend a school semester traveling at some point. But for now, like you, we go away for extended periods in the summer and as much as I can get away with without getting into trouble during the school year. And that’s what works for us.
Thanks for this honest and insightful post.
Great post — I appreciate your honesty.I’ve often dreamed about living in Europe for a year or so and traveling. But then wondered how my children would be feel being taken away from routine, school and friends.
Dee,
I read about your time abroad, Sarah Lavender Smith’s travels, and other family nomads online, and I get a little wanderlust. Wouldn’t it be great to sell everything and just hit the road? But I also know that while I love to travel, I don’t need to travel all the time. Nor does it really fit with where we are in life – with a soon-to-be five year old, interesting jobs, a great neighborhood.
But we do travel every winter and summer, and our summers are often month-long adventures that we spend months planning. Sometimes I read travelers online say throw away the guidebooks – just travel spontaneously. But we end up taking two trips, one in our minds with all the guidebooks we read, and then one for real. That way the trip lasts longer! It works for us, and we travel just enough to always be excited about our next trip – but not enough to lose our routines of daily life. Plus we live in New York City, so we get to explore a new neighborhood every weekend if we want.
We find the only downside of summer travel is that everyone else seems to be traveling too – translating to bigger crowds and higher prices. Oh well.
.-= darngooddigs´s last blog ..Gary from The Green Traveler Guides Nominates Balamku Inn on the Beach =-.
Hi Dee,
It is interesting that I’m reading your post at the moment. We have recently taken up the nomadic lifestyle and have now been on the road with our 2 children (2 & 4 yo) for about 3 months now. I know the challenges of travelling with two young children, but older children must be a whole different kettle of fish.
For us it is, “don’t walk away”, “have you washed your hands” and “put your shorts back on” (why we have to say that I don’t quite know…).
The point is for us, our young children are still very adaptable and don’t really have too much that tie them down (other than missing their extended family). For older children I can see how difficult it is.
Our aim is to travel through Asia for the rest of this year and then hopefully head over to Central, South & North America (in that order – if we can afford it).
At this point in our lives we fluctuate between wanting some stability and running as fast as we can away from the stability to keep travelling the adventurous lifestyle.
I think when we come over to the America’s we’ll try to settle down for a longer period of time in a few places and let the kids learn a language
.
Thanks for sharing your experiences.
Regards,
Colin
.-= Colin Burns´s last blog ..Kuala Lumpur (again) and Melaka – our Malaysian Family holiday continues =-.
We have a 6 and 4 (almost 5) year old girl, and have been living in Costa Rica for about four months. We weren’t interested in short-term jaunts through tourist sites. We wanted to live here and experience what it was really like. So we’re renting a house for a year at least, and thoroughly enjoying our time.
We are homeschooling (unschooling, rather), so are mobile in that sense. But we’re not ready to leave yet. And maybe it’s our kids ages, but they definitely haven’t wanted to go to school. We’ve been making friends at church and in the neighborhood that the kids enjoy playing with on occasion, and it seems to be enough social activity for them. Of course, they’re always playing with each other. We do have a Spanish tutor who comes twice a week, and they’re improving, but there’s still a bit of a language barrier during play. But it doesn’t seem to stop them.
Our kids love going around to the different parts of the country, but we all need rest in a between. Spending three days doing nothing but seeing sites really wares on us. We’ll go do something fun like that maybe once or twice a week, and the rest of the time we enjoy being together at home, or doing personal things that we want to do.
After Costa Rica, we’d like to head on to different parts of the world, maybe Asia first, and spend another year or more somewhere. I’m sure it will be hard leaving the friends we’ve made. But you’d have that same problem if you moved to a different city in the same state. I moved 5 times as a kid, and learned to really enjoy the chance to start over with new friends and a new life, in a sense. I’m hoping my kids will as well. That’s my two cents.
.-= Brandon Pearce´s last blog ..Life Lessons I’ve Learned in 30 Years of Living =-.
Funny, how every family is so different!
We have a tween now, who was 5 when we began our open ended family world tour in 2006 & we ALL think the travel lifestyle has been the best blessing of our lives!
I think it is all in the planning and perhaps personality. We’re thriving on it and my child has more friends this way ( from around the world) & the best possible education.
We’ve spent the last 4 winters in a beautiful, tiny village in Spain where she has gone to the local school for 1st through 4th grade. She is a very fluent trilingual who reads and writes Spanish at the top of her class…. of all Spaniards.
She has sleep overs, takes flamenco lessons, birthday parties, takes ceramic class, goes horseback riding & plays soccer, takes violin & piano etc…every winter for 5 or 6 months.The whole village knows we are back with in minutes of our return & her friends yell out her name in excitement.
Yet, we also take off & travel some during this time as well like a ski trip to the mountains, day in Gibraltar, weekend in Seville, Granada or Madrid etc.
She also keeps up her relationships with friends at home ( California) via Skype & email and when she went home to visit after 2 years, it was like she never left. She also does this with kids she meets along the way.
We’re about to get back in our RV for several months of travel & our first stop is Barcelona where we have been 8 times since 2006, often staying a month, so she has friends that she sees repeatedly there, plus new ones, switching to a different language depending on which they speak.
RV traveling is ideal with kids because you take your home with you, never have to unpack, lots of kids to play with & free kids clubs, dances etc and things for the kids do to like pools & zoos etc right on the grounds.
We will start doing long winter stays in tropical Malaysia next winter, where my daughter will immerse very deeply in her 3rd language & literature, Mandarin Chinese. Just like she learned Spanish like the Spaniards, she will learn Mandarin like the Chinese in Malaysia ( large community there with high standards of education).
My daughter is VERY excited about her travels this summer and wintering in a new place this year and immersing deeply in her 3rd language ( even though she knows it will be challenging at first as the other kids are native speakers).
We’ll be coming back to Spain every summer to tour Europe in our RV, so we will always stop in “our” village so she can connect with her friends here ( & she will stay connected online when away). We will continue to go home for visits so she will keep those relationships up as well.
It may not be for every family, but for a family that WANTS to travel the world together, it CAN be done. For our family, this lifestyle is sooo much more rewarding than any we could imagine & we love it so much that we don’t anticipate ever stopping. When we began I guessed that we would stop when she was a teen perhaps, but now I think she is much better off this eclectic unschool way than a typical school environment which tends to teach conformity & for jobs in the 1950′s. ( We unschool in English all year round & only use the schools for the language immersion).
We’re not the only ones either, the Vogels ( tween boys) and Frosts ( 4 teen girls) have done extended travel with kids for years too with outstanding results.
Just as vagabonding is not for everyone, vagabonding families or even expat or homeschool families are not for everyone.
But some, thrive on it!
.-= soultravelers3´s last blog ..Camping Europe in a Motorhome RV: 5 Best Sites! =-.
@soultravelers3 when you come to Malaysia will you be travelling around or just stop in a particular location for the European Winter?
We’ve been tripping around Malaysia for the last couple of months and thinks it a fantastic place. Tomorrow we are off to Thailand for a few weeks before Vietnam (June), Cambodia/Laos (July) and hopefully China for a few months in August/September. Then probably a couple of months resting somewhere to recuperate…
I agree that personality is a big issue for travelling with kids. Our kids (2 & 4) are both pretty outgoing, but my 2 yo daughter has beautiful blonde hair which earns her a lot of attention and after 3 months of travelling in Asia she is only now starting to come to grips with people wanting to touch her and her hair (especially the Indian men – which she still has trouble being nice to).
So now we don’t get so much screaming (go away) when people try to touch her hair and face, she just puts on a “I don’t like this face” and excepts it…
There are many challenges to travelling which a family. But being realistic there are lots of challenges raising a family if you like in the same stable place.
After 3 months our kids already know that home is where we all are together and where we sleep is just that (a place to sleep – and explore).
@soultravelers3 do yourself a favour when in Malaysia, get up to Cameron Highlands for the cool weather and great atmosphere…
Regards,
Colin
.-= Colin Burns´s last blog ..Kuala Lumpur (again) and Melaka – our Malaysian Family holiday continues =-.
hey this is really a great post we all try to change our routine,but this is the reality you were actually try to make some changes on your life but ended the same…
This was a really interesting post. I read so many stories of how wonderful it is to take off and travel. I wonder if it’s really that wonderful or if people focus on the good stuff in their writing. We all have tough times, right? And home schooling is not for everyone, and can be a real challenge. As well the act of being nomadic sounds appealing when you call it location independent. But packing up and moving whether it’s every night or once a month can be hard. I’m always thinking about how I would like to be location independent in a few years. But then I remember that I don’t really enjoy constantly moving around. It’s made me rethink how I would like to build a location independent life. Do I go and take some shorter trips, move somewhere for a few months and try life there. Or just continue doing vacations like I have been. But part of the adventure of traveling is learning about you and how you like to live.
.-= Crissy´s last blog ..Moscow Day 2 =-.
This is a very honest look at what prevents some people from long-term travel. When we read about stories of families who love being nomads (like soultravelers3), we think anyone can do this, but I don’t think just anyone can. The kids have to be really into it, too, not just the parents. Most kids like the stability of going to the same school and having the same friends throughout their childhood. Kids who are shy especially have trouble being bounced around from place to place, having to make new friends all the time.
.-= Gray´s last blog ..Review: The Mohegan Sun =-.
Great post, Dee!
It’s really interesting to see how different families react to lifestyle changes and how different family members often want different things.
Our kids adapted pretty well to life on the road – I guess they weren’t quite as attached to the school routines. But lots of kids who’ve already spent years in school do find it hard to leave that behind. It sounds like you’ve found a pretty good compromise now – I encourage you to keep experimenting!
You make a great point, here – location independence is about much more than just packing up and moving somewhere else. There’s a huge mental aspect to it that doesn’t get discussed as much as it should. But now we’re all discussing it! Awesome!
Things got easier for us when we let go of our pre-conceived notions of what homeschooling should be like. It really doesn’t have to be a huge challenge (notice how often “unschooling” comes up in the comments!) We also had to overcome all our preconceptions about the nomadic lifestyle, and we’re still figuring out what works best for us.
I’m sure eventually we’ll find our ideal groove, just like soultravelers3. Letting go of our dependence on familiar routines has definitely been a challenge, but the rewards have been so worth it!
I’m enjoying your blog – keep it up!
.-= Marc´s last blog ..A Rebuilding Year =-.
This is a very honest portrayal of long term travel for many people. I can understand in a different way. I couldn’t wait to ditch the routine and move into a nomadic lifestyle. However I’ve been doing that for the past few months while we are preparing for our big trip and to be honest it’s been a pain. We have a little 7lb dog and without having a real home, he always comes along with me. Well then I need to find a coffee shop to do my work during the day and as a photographer I can’t really edit photos outside, even in the shade. It’s just too bright. So after days of frustration I found a little bag that he can crawl into and I can sneak him into coffee shops or bookstores with me. But it’s annoying. Sometimes having a bit of routine is really helpful and can actually help you get more done. I can understand this post completely and I think the 2-3 months of summer travel sounds like a great compromise. I hope it works out for you!
.-= Bethany´s last blog ..Vintage Vegas =-.
Hi Dee,
While I don’t have any children, I enjoyed reading about your family and your travels to Spain. I can only imagine how much you and the kids learned on this journey and I commend you having the courage to take the leap in selling everything and moving across the world for new adventures. Kids are resilent so I wouldn’t worry too much about them – after all how many kids can say the same thing about living in other cultures and they will always have those memories.
.-= Karen´s last blog ..Perception as Reality =-.
Great post Dee. And I’m glad to see Christine posting differing opinions. I don’t have any children yet, but my husband and I sometimes talk about what we will want for our kids – I’m for taking off and seeing the world with them – and he thinks they will need stability. I agree that every family is unique and has to find what works for them. Kudos for giving it a try Dee, and for being able to admit that maybe life in Colorado was better for your family in the end.
A brave family you are traveling with the children and so constantly too. I have none and I love to travel. We travel as much as possible while keeping our main lives at home. In the future, I plan to live a few months in Japan, Sydney, Paris and Hawaii. Somehow it will have to come to fruition. I don’t plan on having more than my hubby to worry about and he is all for it but I so loving having a home base…..and habits and hobbies and friends. I care about keeping my local friends while pursuing my international friendships. I guess sometimes I wish I could be in more than one place at a time
!
Hi Dee,
we are a family with 3 children (12, 10 and 2), I spent days (and nights) on thinking about how to switch to a nomadic lifestyle without having a “major impact” on my children’s “school and friends” routine…The last idea, that seems to satisfy everyone, is to travel for “extended summer”: 4 or 5 months (mid June to mid October/November) are enough to explore a part of the world (south America is the first target…), but in this way they loose only 1 or 2 months of school (and friends), because in Italy school year starts on mid September…Of course, they will have 1 or 2 months of schoolwork to recover (this can be reduced with some homeschooling), but they also will have a lot of exotics things to chat about with their friends…I hope we will check if this plan works out next summer (2011) !
Very honest and emotional post, Dee! Whatever you’ve been through, sounds like a workable balance for all involved. Perhaps a nomad existence might be something for when the kids are older? Good luck with all of it!
nice post. We are currently living the same lifestyle – driving to South America with a 5 year old and thinking about the future, school, etc. We’re certainly not alone!
I love reading these stories. I’m nearly 32, and my wife and I recently returned for a year long RTW. We don’t have kids yet, but one of the reasons we took the trip was to have one last big hurrah before settling down and having kids and starting a family. We were shocked to meet so many families on the trip, and it was very encouraging to know that our traveling doesn’t have to end. Thanks for the inspiration everyone.
.-= Adam´s last blog ..Soooo, Am I Really Doing This? =-.
I never really thought about that aspect of letting the kids have some sort of routine. I guess in that point and time of their lives a bit of stability is needed/desired. I’m glad to see that you take it all into consideration and are trying to find a balance.
.-= Cornelius Aesop´s last blog ..30 Days to Get Rid of Everything =-.
Hi Dee…We were fortunate to meet and socialize in Spain, whilst you were trying the nomadic lifestyle. We too left London behind and are completing our 2nd year in Spain. Schooling and having some roots is essential for our ‘Bite-size nomadic adventure’ to work.We see our time as individual chapters…it may last 2 years or 5 years.I think it is okay to feel the need for familiarity and the need for change too, especially when it gets dull or the fatigue of moving becomes too much.I say go with your gut feel and have no regrets,you may have to work at it and ‘time ‘ is sometimes the key, that’s my family and i feel and will look forward to the next chapter or not?
Interesting Article i wish i had the courage to the the same with my family