We had “arrived.” We had made it. We were living the American Dream.
We had the model home, fully furnished, with 6 inch base boards and a home theater room. We had three cars, one of which was a Porsche. We had a large income…which also happened to equal lots of expenses, and lots of stress.
But that’s what it was about, right? Having the nice home and the fancy cars? That’s what made you a success. Feeling stressed about paying all those bills, that was just a part of it.
While expecting our fourth child, we jetted off for a last minute second honeymoon to Playa del Carmen, Mexico, never suspecting how it would forever change the rest of our lives.
Leaving Our Little Corner of the Earth
It was your typical tourist vacation – the all-inclusive hotel and tourist packages – except for one chance encounter of immersion in the local culture.
The incident was nothing special – except that we wandered off the tourist path and saw a glimpse of the real Mexico. At first it was scary – the graffiti, the unfinished buildings, the poor houses with dirt floors.
We attended a local religious meeting, and I sat surrounded by the Mexican people – submerged in their language and their way of life – and something happened to me. I saw them as human beings, as people, just like me, but different.
Right then, I knew we needed to have these experiences as a family. We needed to learn another language, experience a foreign way of living, and remove the prejudices that come as a byproduct of limited boundaries.
Returning home after our week-long getaway, immediate plans were made for our move abroad.
We rented out our model home, sold our model furniture, and liquidated some other real estate. Within 8 months, in April of 2007, we loaded up our four children (our oldest 4 and our newest only 3 months old) in our fancy SUV to embark on a border crossing, reality-expanding adventure driving from the U.S. to Costa Rica, where we planned to make a new home.
On that trip we crossed not only political borders, but psychological ones as well.
Before leaving, we’d faced tremendous fear and uncertainty – Would we get robbed? plundered? murdered? Would we be able to buy diapers? Is there even a road that goes all the way to Costa Rica? – our world-view was so limited.
Along the way we learned that third-world countries actually had stores – normal ones like I was used to – and that not everyone living south of the border wanted to come to America. Most of them loved their country and enjoyed living there.
Five years after undertaking that voyage, as I sit in my rented home in Guatemala – a pit stop along our current expedition driving from Alaska to Argentina (now with five kids), I think about the two people who had those conversations so many years ago, and they seem like strangers to me.
Now we walk at night through the local neighborhoods to do our shopping at the local stores and markets and visit friends. There’s no fear of murder or plundering. Only greetings of Buena noche.
But it’s been a long road to get us from that prejudiced, bigoted, and narrow-minded view of men and things, to the broad, wholesome, charitable views we hold today – views that continue to expand. And they didn’t come by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all our lives.
Two Roads Diverge
We made it to Costa Rica, but we brought America with us. We kept up with the Jones’ (the other expats), shopped at the local HyperMas (owned by Walmart), and lived in a 6500 sq. ft. mansion.
The best of both worlds was available to us – the daily fascination of foreign living and exposure to a new language and culture, and the luxurious lifestyle. But it didn’t last.
With the economic collapse of 2007-2008, we lost our income. We held out as long as we could – we moved in with friends to save rent, we loathed the idea of going back. But ultimately, when the money ran out, we sold what belongings we had to return to the United States for a job – the only solution we could come up with at the time.
We went back. We rented a “lowly” 1100 sq. ft. apartment. We felt like failures and still believed that in order to be successful, we needed to earn lots of money and live in luxury. Travel plans were still on some future horizon, but travel was something that happened with the extra money you had after you paid all your living expenses, right?
So we looked at buying one of the dozens of newly built homes that sat vacant after the market collapse. My husband was offered a career making six figures. The idea was to follow the formula until we were back to making lots of money, and then we would be able to travel again.
However, when we thought about actually committing to those things, we realized they were moving us further away from travel instead of closer to it. And those things in and of themselves didn’t seem as appealing as they once were. The lure of discovery, exploration, and reality expansion through travel and foreign living was becoming more and more attractive
We didn’t have the freedom and income anymore to have the luxury and the travel – we had to make a choice.
Do we take the career, buy the house, and chase the American Dream once again? Or do we pursue a lifestyle of family travel, despite having no current income to fund it?
The logical choice was to take the career. We were a family of six. We needed to be responsible, to provide a stable home and income for our young children.
But doing what was logical wasn’t what was in our hearts. Instead we were dreaming of the illogical and unreasonable – the impossible – traveling the world with our children; learning together from personal experiences; studying languages and cultures; encountering history and customs first-hand.
Why couldn’t we explore jungles, discover beaches, observe wildlife, learn other tongues, try new foods, examine ruins, and traverse continents? Why couldn’t that be the dream we pursue, the plan for raising and educating our kids (not to mention ourselves)?
Scraping together what funds we could, selling any other belongings of value (including my wedding ring), we chose the less traversed road.
We packed twelve suitcases, bought five one way tickets to the Dominican Republic (a place we’d never been before), and arrived site unseen to find a house to live.
Travel and the Soul
We spent six incredible months learning a new way of life – simplifying, living with less and living without.
We washed our clothes by hand, did without hot water, and all slept in the same bedroom/loft of our 800 sq. ft. coconut-grove-nestled beach house. We had no phone, no internet, and had to walk to town to buy water and groceries.
We read lots of books, ate lots of coconut, and spent each sunset walking along the shore exploring tide pools. We called it our Walden. It was one of the best and most memorable times of our life.
Soon the money ran out, and we hadn’t yet figured out the location independent income. We went back to the States for employment once again.
But travel had taught us new skills, new thought patterns, new approaches to life in general. It had also become a part of who we were, a positive addiction, and we couldn’t imagine our lives without it.
Really, it wasn’t about the travel. Travel was the tool, the method to the outcome. The real addiction was to the personal transformation that travel extracts from your mind and your soul.
It causes you to be uncomfortable, to step out of the familiar and into the unknown. It compels you to see with new eyes and to consider things you had never been aware of.
Travel, like a surgeon, opens you up – mind, heart, and soul – and removes preconceptions, biases, and small-mindedness. In its place it leaves a love for the world and all people; it also entrusts you with a larger understanding of our common humanity and the quandaries we share as a planet.
Travel is less about seeing sights than it is about searching your soul.
So on our second return to the States, traveling again wasn’t even a question. Every decision was made with the long term goal in mind – How will this help us be able to travel more? How will this give us more freedom to explore?
Asking these questions led us to India for five months, then back to the U.S., across it and Canada to Alaska (on the discovery that we were expecting our fifth child) and eventually to our current life experiment – slow traveling from Alaska to Argentina with our five kids.
It also helped us to design our financial lifestyle with freedom in mind. No, taking that career position isn’t going to work for us. Starting that location dependent business isn’t either. We focused on building income streams that gave us options.
To us, travel has nothing to do with cruises and vacations. It’s not about staying at fancy hotels or taking a two-week holiday.
Travel is a way of life. It’s how we learn, develop ourselves, educate our children, expand our minds, and work on solving the world’s problems. Traveling is as much a part of our makeup as the books we read and the food we eat. To suggest that we’ll stop traveling is like suggesting that we’ll stop eating, reading, or learning.
Travel is life, and life is travel. They’ve become intertwined, as inseparable as the branch and the root.
Some people think that travel is not for everybody, but the essence of travel is experiential expansion. Instead of repeating the same life experience every year for ten, twenty, or fifty years, travel can give us fifty life-changing encounters in one year.
The result is that instead of reading only one page out of the world book, we’re given the opportunity of perusing a greater proportion of it, and exercising our human-ness, rather than suffering from soul atrophy.
Travel can and will transform your life, anyone’s life, if you let it.
To read more inspirational stories to help you live out your dreams, check out the following articles:
- 11 Reasons to Stop Dreaming and Start Planning Your RTW Trip
- Why It’s Not Selfish for Parents to Travel With Young Children
- How to Travel Around the World for $40 Per Day
- 6 Reasons Living on the Road is a Good Option in a Down Economy
- Why It’s Not Crazy for Working Professionals to Quit Their Jobs and Travel the World
- Travel Profiles
- Why They Went: Adam and Megan’s Story
Photo credits: vallartavelas, all others belong to the author and may not be used without permission.
