Our travel [un]plans

I’ve alluded to this in some previous posts – we’re getting ready to hit the road and travel for an indefinite period of time. By “we”, I mean me, my wife, and our two daughters, age 7 and 15. This is something we’ve been working toward for a long time. We all enjoy travel and seeing new places, and experiencing life through others’ lenses.

Recent years have seen us in Vancouver, Miami, Washington D.C., Toronto, Portland, Iguazu Falls, Argentina, and Buenos Aires. Each time we travel, we make a few more mistakes, learn a few more valuable things about who we are and how we relate to our world, and get more in love with seeing as much of it (our world) as we can.

Fast forward to today: I have left my job with a fantastic employer and started my own consulting business. My wife has stayed at home to school our daughters and has started several businesses around whole life health (coaching, healthy products, and virtual assisting to help you de-stress). We’re getting ready to launch another business jointly to show you how to use homeschooling to create an atmosphere that frees your children of the shackles of traditional education and feeds their love of learning about their world from an early age.

All of these businesses are mobile and can support us wherever we go as long as we have internet access. These days, internet is available pretty much anywhere around the world, as I’ve learned from following my favorite travel bloggers (there are tons of people who travel the globe and blog about it for a living).

Being avowed minimalists, we will be leaving in April (less than 90 days from the day I write this) with one small carryon size backpack each. Forcing ourselves to distill everything that is really meaningful to us down to what will fit in this backpack has been a valuable experience. Through the process, we’ve begun to realize just how much all of our possessions were manacles rather than luxuries. In fact, now that I’m mostly rid of years’ of excess crap, I’ve never felt better about it. I went through what I thought was the agonizing process of parting with things I had equally agonized over acquiring – in the mistaken belief that these things were going to elevate my life into something better and more meaningful (Roomba, anyone?).

As I sit here today, we still have to unload another round of the accumulated material things of a lifetime to get to our final fighting trim, but we’re pretty much there. Like I said, all that ‘agonizing’ was much ado about nothing. It turns out that I am me wherever I am and  with whatever things I happen to have. Home is wherever I find myself with my family – it’s a simple concept, but a leap of faith at the same time.

At this point, we’re excited to be nomadic and essentially ‘audition’ places to live. We’ll show up in Malaysia, get our bearings, and spend a month or two traveling around the region seeing, smelling, listening, and just trying to experience all the newness. Once we’ve been to enough places in the region (we’ll know when we’ve been to enough – you always do, right?), we’ll pick the one we liked most and head back there for awhile longer to slow down and just live for awhile.

We have onward tickets to Australia later in June where we plan to do the same thing. From there, who knows? Maybe we’ll be tired of the wandering and long for American suburban shopping malls, meals at cookie-cutter chain restaurants, and cheaply made goods from big box stores. I doubt it, but we may decide to head back to the US for a bit. If so, we’re planning on auditioning Austin and Asheville, N.C. – Or – maybe we’ll have loved somewhere we’ve just visited enough to head back there – or maybe we’ll have heard about some other place that is so great that we just have to see it. Isn’t it all so delightfully uncertain!?!

Along the way, we’ve got businesses to build, new people to meet, and 2 daughters to worldschool. If you’d like to keep up with us, subscribe to this blog, or just stop back by periodically for updates.