We are a family of 3 from Florida (U.S.A.), heading out to explore the world together through slow travel. Our names are Bobby, Ariel, and Macy (age 7). Our purpose in keeping this blog is to keep a log of our adventures together, and also to keep in touch with friends and family. Welcome!
Our family in Florida, before the journey
What are you doing?
We are slow traveling internationally for the next year or two. This means that we will be staying for about a month at a time in one location to really get to know the people, the culture, the food, the language, etc. Since we will be working part-time and homeschooling, and we have a young child, we did not want to rush around moving every few days. Of course we’ll take weekend trips, but we’d like to have a “home base” so we can settle in for a while. Our first month we will be in Spain, and our second month will be in Crete. After that, we plan to visit several countries in Europe, plus Turkey and Morocco. Beyond that, we will move on to various countries in Asia and hopefully South America. Of course that might be punctuated with trips back to the U.S. to visit family and friends. The U.S. National Parks have also been calling to us! We have many ideas, and are open to almost wherever our curiosity takes us.
How can you do this? Are you independently wealthy?
No! Bobby and Ariel have both been granted permission to work part-time remotely with their respective companies for the duration of the trip. Ariel has been with her software company for 9 years, and Bobby has worked for his company for the past 14 years. Tenure helps! We are also cutting costs by renting houses/apartments for a month at a time, which brings down the expense of both lodging and food. We would rather take a good hike than spend money on expensive entertainment (although good food is our weakness). There are as many ways to work and travel as there are families doing it. For more ideas how you can make it work for you, check out these families: link.
Why are you taking this trip?
Four years ago we met a man in the Florida Keys who lives with his wife on a boat, sailing around the Caribbean. When they needed money, they stopped at a resort to work (she as a massage therapist, he as a charter captain). This was the first time we had ever heard of such a lifestyle, and thus our scheming began. We went through several iterations of ideas, met many other traveling families, and finally settled on our current one.
One of our main reasons for traveling is to spend more time together as a family, especially while Macy is young. Since Bobby has been working full-time, and Ariel just finished a full-time school program while working part-time, we haven’t seen as much of each other as we’d like. We also recognize that sometimes “retirement” never comes, or people aren’t in good health to enjoy it. So we’re slowing down and spending the time to do this now. We are blessed to be able to make it work.
We hope that traveling slowly around the world will expose our daughter (and ourselves) to different ways of living, increasing our appreciation for diversity in culture, food, language, perspective, etc. We want her to be a citizen of the world, to be able to flourish wherever she chooses to be, to know how fortunate she is, and to see that all people may have different circumstances but are ultimately the same. We hope this adventure instills in her the idea that she can build a life that meets her interests, whatever they may be. She can dream big, work hard, and do what she wants.
What about school?
We will be homeschooling (or world-schooling) Macy as we travel, but we feel that the travel itself will be the greatest teacher. Macy is 7, and can read, tell time, count money, and do basic math. She has an appetite for science, has an eye for detail, and loves to ask questions about the world. So we’ll be building on her skills in a real-world hands-on way, supplementing with books and online resources as necessary.