The last time I spent extended time traveling internationally was in South America in 2001. I didn’t have any medical issues the entire trip—until one moment.

After an incredibly long hike, some of it over 15,000 feet in the Andes—one that involved multiple guides, getting lost, and eventually having part of my gear carried by a burro because I was so exhausted—we made it into a small, remote village near some Incan ruins. And then, out of nowhere, BAM! I got bit in the back of the calf by a tiny dog that immediately ran off.

At that point, it wasn’t about insurance. It was just, what do I do now?

I tracked down who I thought was the owner and tried to piece together what was going on with a mix of broken Spanish and a little English. I got the general sense that the dog was fine and showing no signs of rabies, and that I shouldn’t worry.

But I wasn’t convinced.

After an hours-long bus ride, I made it back to my hostel and I still wasn’t sure I was in the clear. I slept on it. Still didn’t feel right.

I talked with the hostel caretakers. They suggested visiting some natural healing springs, the idea being that some things are out of our control and maybe this was one of them.

So I did.

I went to the springs. Thought about it more. Called the owner again another day later. And still couldn’t shake the feeling that I didn’t have the full picture.

Eventually, I decided I wasn’t comfortable relying on that uncertainty.

So I got on a bus to Lima, checked into another hostel, and started a full series of rabies treatments—shots spaced out over time, not exactly a simple process.

Looking back, that moment had nothing to do with insurance. (I didn’t even have medical insurance for much of my twenties and I didn’t worry about it.) It was about not knowing the system, not being completely sure who to trust, and trying to make the best decision with limited information.

The Difference This Time

The difference this time is that it’s not just me.

That same kind of situation—uncertainty, unfamiliar systems, trying to figure things out in real time—that’s the part that matters most to plan for. Because now it’s about making sure the whole family has a clear path forward if something happens.

Last week, Amber wrote about the insurance we currently have—the coverage that will disappear as soon as she stops working. She also wrote about the routine appointments we’re squeezing in while we still have it, the “use it before we lose it” phase, and the vaccines we’ve been working through.

That all feels like a natural segue into the part we don’t have yet.

The insurance I’m still researching. This has been one of the bigger things on my mind as we plan the year ahead.

What Insurance Actually Looks Like

It’s not really about insurance as much as it is about the idea of something going wrong in a place that’s unfamiliar—somewhere we don’t know the system, don’t know the providers, and don’t have people we can call to ask where to go. And layered on top of that is the question of coverage. Not having the kind of premium plan we’re used to here, or at least what we’ve always assumed we had.

Because even here, it’s not exactly simple.

Almost every time we use our insurance, it turns into a process—calls, follow-ups, trying to figure out what’s actually covered, sometimes after the fact. What sounds reassuring in theory often ends up being complicated in practice.

An example played out this week with travel vaccinations. On paper, they were “covered” by our insurance. Amber called ahead—twice—and was told they were covered.

Her bill for four shots came out to around $700. Cora’s and mine was over $1,000.

When the claim came back, insurance did what they said they would do. They “covered” it. But once everything was applied—deductible, discounts, out-of-network adjustments—they ended up paying about $20.

The rest was on us.

The “out-of-network” part especially stung – because we’d done enough research in advance to know this was the only place available.

And that’s the part that’s hard to explain until you go through it. Something can be technically covered and still not actually paid for. It’s just how the system works.

It also depends on the size of the bill. When something big happens, insurance can feel incredibly valuable. When something lands in that middle range, like this did, turns out it wasn’t much help at all

The other thing I’ve realized digging into these plans is that what’s covered and what’s not is a lot more nuanced than it first appears. When you actually read the fine print, it starts to get very specific—what activities are allowed, what altitude you’re at, whether you’re properly licensed, even things like whether you were wearing a helmet or following local guidance.

For the kinds of things we’re likely to do—surfing, snorkeling, biking—that’s all generally covered under a standard plan. But then you start to see the edges of it. Something like cave tubing or driving a moped might require an add-on. Even something like playing American football shows up in a different category. And then there are things that just aren’t covered at all, no matter what—running with the bulls, which I think we can safely take off the itinerary.

It’s not just “you’re insured.” It’s a set of conditions, exceptions, and interpretations that only really come into focus when something happens and you’re trying to figure out if it applies to you. And that starts to feel a lot like what we’re already used to—just in a different setting.

And the truth is, when something comes up, I’m not even starting with the system.

I call my sister.

She’s a nurse, and she’s the person I actually trust to tell me what to do. I don’t have a general practitioner I rely on the same way. When something happens, she’s my first call.

That’s not going to be as easy when we’re somewhere remote—when we’re in a different time zone, or in the middle of the Amazon, or just dealing with a situation where getting good information quickly is harder.

There are actually services you can pay for that help with this—basically someone you can call who helps you figure out where to go, gets you pointed in the right direction, and makes sure you’re not trying to navigate it on your own.

It’s not the same as calling my sister. But it’s something. That’s really what this is about.

The Math and the Plan

The first step has been understanding the cost.

What I found was that international plans run about $150 per month per adult without pre-existing conditions, and about $75 per month per child. For a family, that adds up quickly. Over the course of a year, you’re still looking at several thousand dollars in premiums before anyone actually needs anything.

At the same time, the cost of care in many of the places we’re going is very different. Routine care is often relatively affordable, pricing is more transparent, and in many cases you can pay directly and move on without it becoming a bigger issue.

To make that a little more concrete, we’re talking about things like a $20–$60 doctor visit, a $30 dental cleaning, maybe $50–$100 for an X-ray, and basic prescriptions that often cost just a few dollars out of pocket—things like antibiotics or common medications that would cost significantly more at home. Even an ER visit can be a few hundred dollars, and a broken bone or overnight hospital stay can still come in well under what a single deductible costs back home. Those aren’t insurance decisions. They’re just expenses.

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That doesn’t remove the uncertainty of being somewhere new. But it does change the financial side of the equation.

So the question becomes more specific. Not how to cover everything, but what actually needs to be covered.

The focus is on the scenarios where cost and access really matter—serious medical events, hospitalizations, or situations where getting home quickly becomes the priority.

Instead of relying on one comprehensive plan to solve everything, we’ve been working toward something more layered. We’re in the process of putting an international plan in place that would cover emergency care and larger medical situations—the kinds of moments where you don’t want to be thinking about cost or logistics. Alongside that, there will be a separate emergency fund in the range of $5,000 to $10,000, reserved for situations that don’t fit neatly into a plan.

This doesn’t eliminate the concern. Being in an unfamiliar place will always come with some level of uncertainty. But it does mean we’re not starting from scratch if something happens. There’s a structure in place, and a way forward.

That experience in South America didn’t turn into anything serious. But it easily could have. And that’s really the point.

You don’t plan for the outcome you expect. You plan for the moment where you’re not sure what to do next—and make sure you’re not figuring it out alone.

Till next time,

Jeremy

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Once I read a book that contained this metaphor for the present: surfing the now. It wasn’t some mystical book on Eastern philosophy; just a good story about something that wasn’t even surfing. But the image stuck with me.

Jeremy has been advocating for spending much of our year-long trip near beaches. He wants to learn to surf. I can see the appeal. He grew up skateboarding, and his dad taught him windsurfing, and then he taught his dad snowboarding. For him, these are easy. Surfing would no doubt come to him easily too. Maybe it will be like he’s 25 again.

I learned to snowboard in the Pacific Northwest when I was 19; I had grown up occasionally skiing with friends in the mountains an hour east of Seattle, then switched to snowboarding after I met Jeremy and he taught me. I learned it well enough to know that it can feel like flying, on a good powder day when the snow is soft, and maybe it’s a weekday and the crowds are thin, and I’m not trying any complicated runs, just cruising a long winding blue. Just flying free.

Once after that, I tried to skateboard; a friend recommended I start at the top of a hill and just go for it. Something like sink or swim. Well, I sunk my body and pride into the pavement that day.

In Puerto Rico eight years ago when Jeremy and I took our first week-long trip alone away from the kids, we spent a couple days in Rincon, a quaint surfing town on the west coast of the island. But the waves were rough with an incoming storm, and we didn’t try our luck. Five years later we went back and took the kids with us. That day out on the boards, we all got up, for at least a few seconds.

I do love the waves. But for swimming, diving in, timing a wave just right to boogie board to shore. I don’t need a surfboard, and I sure don’t need to get tossed by the breaking waves into a reef, or dragged out in a riptide.

But, more than water, more than waves, no matter where we will be, there is the now. We’ll have so much now on our trip. It will be everywhere. No planner to keep me chained to future responsibilities; that black book that is always by my side will be nowhere in the great now that is coming. What will we do with it all?

The now, that is always there, but feels like it hides out of sight. If you look for it ahead, you’ll miss it. Behind you? Never. Where is it? The now, that even as I write it, feels like it’s there, but is already gone. Keep up. Now and now and now. Waves of nows.

I am unfamiliar with the now. Always I am thinking ahead, planning. Zooming around to stay on top of what is coming. Doing five things at once; like I’ve compartmentalized my brain and body so there really are five of me, all efficiently working away against the ticking clock.

Working mom syndrome, perhaps? The generation of women taught that we could have it all. We just have to splinter ourselves into pieces, and then drive these pieces like stakes into the heart of all the things we desire. A collection of pinned butterflies.

No, I am unfamiliar with so much now, but also look forward to becoming acquainted. This is one goal of this trip for me. To break free from the tyranny of my black book, and learn to just ride the waves of now.

Till next time,

Amber

It’s a government job benefit I don’t take lightly. So lately we’ve been very intentional about using it for everything we can before we leave. Mammograms, dermatology visits, new contact prescriptions, travel vaccines.

Use it, then we’ll lose it.

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Routine Health Maintenance

A mammogram I surely would have put off another ten years – check. Still torn on the outcome of that one; if tests that read “abnormal” lead to multiple biopsies that turn out to be benign, should I be grateful I did all the things and now have confirmation I’m fine, or was I actually fine all along and would have continued to be fine without it?

(For all you prevention enthusiasts out there, please ignore the question as I can already pre-emptively feel your anxiety at reading it; you’ve had your answer a thousand times before.)

Cora and I go in for routine vision appointments. Cora needed a new contacts prescription. I just needed a renewal of the same one – but still, since contact lens prescriptions are only valid for 12 months, it was something that had to be done. Except that I made the case to the doctor for 18-month prescriptions instead so we wouldn’t have to scramble somewhere mid-trip for more appointments – and, voila, she did it!

I swear, every tiny victory like this just has to be celebrated. When my old-school paper planner can’t fit any more ink in the to-do list, these victories jump off the page like little sparks of light.

The teeth, too—we take care of our teeth. Not only do we make sure to fit in all the usual cleanings; I take the extraordinary step of seeing my son’s orthodontist for myself, to make a back-up retainer. I’ve had the same retainer since I was 13 (Too much information? Gross? Really I clean it well and regularly.). I only wear it occasionally but those occasions are necessary else my jaw return to its original 12-year-old state of uncomfortable overbite. What if I lose this little device on the road, and nothing tells my teeth where they’re supposed to go? This one isn’t covered by insurance, and I don’t blame them. It’s reasonable to wonder if this one’s all in my head – ha.

Then, too, there is the dermatologist. We make appointments and we update our skin routines, and then we stock up on the various creams that help us glow.

Travel Vaccines

And now we get to travel vaccines. This one hadn’t even occurred to me until Jeremy whipped it out three weeks ago. It is the unsettling thing about the whole pre-journey. Things keep not occurring to me until they are right in front of me. Like walls I keep almost running into. I’ve never been all that coordinated; ask Jeremy, I really do sometimes shoulder-check door openings and stumble occasionally into walls. For years I had the same bruises at exactly the same height on my thighs, from tripping into our wooden bedframe.

But at least I know to give it a little extra effort while putting one foot in front of another to avoid these missteps. I’m giving all my effort to avoid missteps in this travel planning, and still I’m off balance.

But also, hey, I work out. I run and lift weights and when I stumble, I often catch myself. So it is with travel vaccines. Jeremy starts the research and comes up with a list. Then ChatGPT helps me with a second round of research and some new angles. Finally I start making calls to talk with humans.

First we learn these are expensive. Then we learn most insurance plans don’t cover them. Then we learn most doctors don’t offer them.

Hmm, looking for some good news… and here it is. My insurance plan does cover them. Really? I talk with a representative on the phone and she tells me. I find it in writing online and the words say the same.

I make some more calls and confirm that no regular doctor’s office around here will offer what we need (one exception, one place I call can offer them to new patients if we wait just nine months for an appointment). This makes it easy, though, it’s just the Polk County Health Department that can handle the job. The drawback is they’ll require full cash payment the day of; we can mess around with our own insurance all we want, but they’ll have no part in it. And yet, sometimes I appreciate when one option is the only option, even if it’s not perfect. Fewer decisions, thank you universe.

Also, the Polk County Health Department turns out to be amazing. These people know their stuff. The first guy I talk with patiently goes through our research with me and helps narrow down exactly what we need.

When I finally make the appointment and go in for the jabs, they bring me to a room with a giant wall map of the world. I think it’s the same size as the one in our living room. The doctor asks where in the world we are headed, and then knowledgably talks through the plan. I end up with four shots in the arm that morning, plus one preventative antibiotic prescription, along with the little yellow vaccine card that I’ll need to bring along and keep safe for all our travels.

Here was the list:

Yellow fever. Non-negotiable; this ends up on one side of the yellow vaccine card, separate from all the rest. This is what the border guards of health will check for in some countries before entry.

Typhoid. Recommended for some of our destinations—Brazil, the Amazon, Guatemala, Southeast Asia. Two options: an oral live vaccine, taken every other day for a week, for five years of immunity, or a one-shot version lasting two. I chose the one-and-done shot.

Hepatitis A. Two lifetime doses are needed of this one, and I find record of having one when I was 20, so just one more needed.

Tetanus. Just a regular old 10-year booster of this one.

Azithromycin. A prescription for pills to keep with us just in case of something like traveler’s diarrhea. I’m suspecting the just-in-case is more like it-will-be-the-case sometime in our year-long excursion.

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We also talk through other health risks and ways to mitigate them. Malaria is one risk, especially in the Amazon, with all the mosquitos that love it there. There is a malarial pill regimen, taking them a few days before and then during exposure. But the doctor advises waiting; the pills are expensive here at home, and we can pick them up over the counter on the road, just before our travels to that area.

Then there are Rabies pre-exposure pills. Rabies being one of those things that you probably don’t need to worry about it, unless you really, really do. And if you’re more than 24 hours away from medical treatment, that could be a problem. You don’t want to wake up to find a bat in your room; creepy and inconvenient here at home; more of a problem when deep in the jungle somewhere. But it isn’t really our plan to see how far we can get from civilization, so I think we are fine. Plus, this one isn’t actually a vaccine and wouldn’t likely be covered by insurance, and with a $1,000 price tag, that’s one option we’ll skip.

The doctor has a few other tips to share. Reminders for some areas: avoid ice cubes, salads, and fruits without a peel. Too bad our family loves all three, but also no surprises there. And Drugs.com: when picking up pills abroad, use their pill identifier to make sure you know what you’re getting.

All told, my bill at the Health Department is $700. Jeremy and Cora haven’t had their appointments yet, so we’ll be tripling that soon. Fingers crossed insurance really does come through to help.

If our 18-year-old Isaac-on-the-fence decides to come along with us too, the vaccines are going to be one more hurdle for him to overcome. He’s a super health-conscious Gen Z-er raised in a post-truth, post-covid world; I don’t blame him for being skeptical.

What’s Next for Health and Health Insurance

So after all this healthcare consumption this year, two questions linger:

Are we healthier? (Probably unanswerable.)

Can we store up good health for the coming year? (Probably not.)

More thanks to Jeremy for research I haven’t done myself: health insurance for our travels. He’s done enough checking to think we can buy a catastrophic plan at a very reasonable monthly rate – a total of about $300 monthly for the three of us on the road. It’s no good in the U.S. – everything is way too expensive here. But as long as we keep our feet off home soil, it’s much more reasonable elsewhere. For routine healthcare needs, we can pay out of pocket.

Our young adult sons will also need to find what’s next in health insurance for themselves, once mine no longer covers them. Neither have jobs that offer this currently. A rude awakening in how the world works. Hourly wage work in the service professions leaves many with the stress of no health insurance, or the very high costs of buying it on the open market. Add to that, changing federal laws and subsidies, and we’re not sure yet what the cost may be for them, or what kind of coverage it will offer.

Just one more thing I’ve noticed these past few months that I think actually would have helped with better health: less stress. Hahahahaha. When has it ever helped to tell anyone they need to lower their stress? Why certainly, doctor, I’ll just turn the dial down. And also, we chose this, yes.

The decisions about which vaccines just add to the decision pile. Decision fatigue set in long ago. I’m past fatigue, I’m in a permanent state now of decision daze. However, I also noticed this week I’m getting better at not overthinking some things.

Less thinking, more acting. Maybe that’s part of the journey too.

Till next time,

Amber

Within hours, it felt like it was everywhere. The language escalated quickly. Words like eruption, turmoil, and crackdown started showing up, and the country itself felt smaller in the telling — as if 130 million people and dozens of states could be reduced to a single alert on a phone.

And then the questions started coming about our plans.

“Are we still going to Mexico?” Cora asked. Isaac too. A friend I ran into asked. It keeps coming up in conversations with others about our plans.

Our intention has been Mexico for the first step. Mexico City in June, then Puerto Escondido on the Pacific coast.

It’s fair to ask if things have changed.

When I first saw the news, I didn’t just scroll past it. I found myself wondering what might happen next. Would this stay contained? Would there be retaliation? Would it spread? Was this one bad day, or the beginning of something that would change the calculus entirely?

So far, it appears to have lasted barely more than a day. But in the first moments, that wasn’t clear. And that gap — between events in the present and outcomes in the future — is where perception runs ahead of reality.

Safety isn’t just about a single moment. It’s about patterns. Distance. Scale. Whether something is concentrated or spreading.

Headlines don’t do scale very well.

A localized outbreak becomes national instability. A state becomes a country. A country becomes a headline.

And once that happens, perception shifts fast.

When something happens in one American city, most of us instinctively put it in context. We understand that Phoenix is not Portland, that Atlanta is not Minneapolis. We might be concerned, but we don’t immediately redraw the entire map and change all our plans.

Further away, that’s harder to do.

That doesn’t mean the danger isn’t real. Cartel violence is real. Political instability is real. Risk is real.

But amplification is real too.

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Years ago, when I was in my early twenties traveling in South America, I heard constantly how dangerous Colombia was. The warnings were everywhere — from other travelers, from headlines, from State Department advisories.

Then, after Amber had joined me and we spent a month in Peru, September 11th happened while we were on a tiny island in the middle of Lake Titicaca between Peru and Bolivia.

After a few days, Amber was able to get a flight home from Lima, but my flight was grounded in Bogotá. I remember sitting in the airport wondering if it was too dangerous to leave. Everything I had absorbed about the country came rushing forward at once.

Eventually, I walked out anyway.

I ended up spending a week there before I could catch another flight. And Bogotá became one of my favorite cities. Modern. Warm. Full of life. It felt nothing like the simplified version I had been carrying in my head.

That experience stuck with me, and made me more cautious about narrative.

Over the last week, I’ve tried not to react so much as to slow down.

I’ve been reading Mexican publications to see how this is being covered domestically, not just through international summaries. The articles are in Spanish, and I’m using Google Translate, which means I’m undoubtedly missing nuance. But even through translation, you can pick up tone. What feels urgent locally? What feels contained? What reads like national crisis, and what reads like something more regional?

It’s been helpful to broaden the view.

Recently we let our subscription to The Economist lapse. It isn’t cheap, and we were hoping for a renewal deal to materialize. I’ve read it off and on since I was in my early twenties traveling in South America, when I first noticed how differently the same event could be framed depending on who was telling the story. This week felt like a reminder to start it back up.

If we’re going to weigh this responsibly, I want depth. I want context. I want to avoid being pulled toward the loudest version of the story.

So far, our plan hasn’t changed. We’re not wandering aimlessly across the country. We’re planning to live for about a month total in two places — Mexico City and then Puerto Escondido — with ordinary routines. Groceries. Parks. Language practice. Work at a table somewhere.

The violence making headlines is geographically distant from both cities.

That doesn’t eliminate risk. It does make us think about scale.

The real question isn’t whether risk exists. It always does — here and elsewhere. The question is whether we’re measuring it fairly.

Are we reacting to volume? Or to actual patterns? Are we equating unfamiliar with unsafe? Are we letting amplification do the thinking for us?

I don’t know exactly how this will unfold. I’m still watching closely, and will continue to. Some part of this will probably stay in the back of my mind when we land.

As of today, we’re still planning to begin in Mexico.

Not casually.
Not defiantly.

Just thoughtfully — with our eyes open and the map still bigger than the headlines.

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Till the next time,

Jeremy

If you read her last post, you know some of the house projects we’ve been up to in preparing for our year away.

Meanwhile, I’m not as tangled up in the house decisions. I believe one of them will sell. We’ll make the math work. Amber keeps us steady there, asking the harder questions and watching the details long before I do. The finances feel like a problem we can solve.

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What’s been harder for me is winding down my role as the first and thus far only Executive Director at the Street Collective.

For more than a decade, I’ve had my hands on nearly every part of it — programs, partnerships, budgets, bike share contracts, city hall meetings, staff transitions, early mornings and late nights. It didn’t begin as a grand plan. Just a belief that Des Moines could be better for people on bikes. Over time, it became something real. A team. A board. A budget. A presence in the community.

And now I’m preparing to hand it to someone new. That’s the part that sits heavy.

I don’t know who that person is yet. I helped assemble the search committee, and then stepped back from the decision itself. I answer questions. I offer history. But I don’t get a vote.

Some days I’m proud of what we’ve built. Other days I look at sponsorship gaps, programmatic deficits, and leadership transitions and wonder if I’m leaving at a moment that feels less than solid.

I think about an early phone call from our bookkeeper, telling me she wasn’t sure our paychecks would clear that Friday. At the time, our work was seasonal and margins were thin. We didn’t have the reserves we rely on today. The checks cleared. Everyone got paid. And somehow, after that moment, we kept moving forward.

I think about a long City Council workshop years ago, when Carl and I were the only two members of the public still in the room as the budget discussion dragged on. When the item funding the City’s first walking and biking planner came up, a councilmember turned around and asked who was going to tell us it had been cut. In the end, the funding stayed. Decisions aren’t final until the process is finished.

Some days it feels like a house of cards.

Not because it’s fragile — but because I’ve been one of the hands steadying it for so long. It’s strange to imagine loosening my grip and trusting the structure to stand without me pressing on the edges.

A few weeks ago, we helped organize a unity ride in memory of Alex Pretti, alongside more than 230 rides happening across the country. It came together quickly. New leaders stepped forward, and I shifted into a more supportive role — amplifying, coordinating, and asking questions to make sure the details were considered.

And then, on the day of the ride, I wasn’t there.

I was in a gym volunteering at my daughter’s volleyball tournament — tracking serves, passes, assists, errors — and cheering her and her teammates on, while the biking community gathered, spoke, and rode without me.

It was steady. Well attended. Three councilmembers spoke. The media showed up. It was thoughtful and meaningful, exactly what it needed to be.

That landed in a complicated way — but also a reassuring one.

Maybe it isn’t a house of cards. Maybe it’s something sturdier than that. Maybe it just feels unstable because I’ve been holding it for so long.

Amber is right. We’re in the messy middle.

Here in this complicated middle, I’m learning to release something I helped shape and trust that it’s ready for its next chapter.

Some nights that feels solid — that what we’ve built can stand. Other nights, I’m still learning how to quiet my mind.

I believe we’ll more or less leave when we planned to. I believe the houses will get figured out. The rest is just timing.

I’m learning that building something and releasing something require different muscles. And maybe practicing a little distance before I actually leave is how you strengthen the second one.

I’m still here. Just not gripping as tightly.

Till next time,

Jeremy

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Recently we wrote about eating an elephant. We’re still in the middle of messy planning. Some broken parts. Things started but not finished; all the in-betweens. On one side is our big hope to do this. On the other is take-off for a year.

And yet, dare I say it… things have started to look… up.

This week we enjoyed a mid-winter break, a February valentine for us all. 66 and sunny in Iowa. (Yes three days later we’re back to snow.)

Sebastian in Vail started this month by snapping his clavicle in two. He caught the edge of his snowboard in the thin icy mountain slush. This year the snow skipped over the mountains of Colorado and came to freeze the iguanas of Florida instead. Already he’d been accumulating housing debt, with work at a ski resort that is too slow with no snow. And yet, with surgery and a steel plate, he’s on his way to recovery. This week the surgeon cleared him to ditch the arm sling; it helps to be strong and young.

Also this month we doused our basement when we tried to use our outdoor faucet for the first time since October; who knows when, but the pipe had burst. But hey, we found an amazing handy-person recently, and the pipe is good as new now.

We’ve been doing some house math. We have two houses. One of them has to sell. The first one, the house Jeremy grew up in, is a house we bought when a family member passed away. We’ve been fixing it up and renting it out, and lately we’ve been trying to sell it. The second house is where we live. If we sell one, we keep the other. Ideally we keep the one we live in now. Rent it out for a year while we’re gone, and return to something familiar. And yet, the clock is ticking. That means maybe putting both on the market.

Since our plans for this house could go either way, rent or sell, we prepare for either scenario. In anticipation of renting it out, we chase down a rental certificate. The first inspection comes back with a list of items. There is too wide a gap between our back deck and its railing. One of our external doors is missing a deadbolt. Of our seven smoke and CO detectors, one of them decides not to work that day.

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The biggest finding: our stair hand railings all need work, and I become an expert at stair railings as I research how we will fix them: the ends must return to the wall to avoid catching something (a purse? coat? fireman’s gear in an emergency?); they must have an uninterrupted graspable surface with no breaks the entire length. Inches are crucial: 1 ½ inches clearance from the wall; 1 ¼ to 2 inches in diameter, between 34 and 38 inches tall. None of our existing railings, inside or out, meet the requirements. We have lived in this house for 15 years and I never knew how woefully inadequate our stair railings were the whole time.

It feels like a minor Amazon miracle, but we did finally find stair rails to meet the moment without costing a fortune. Fixed the deck, the doors, all of it. This week we received confirmation of our right research: the house passed rental inspection.

Also this week, running in parallel: getting this same house ready to sell, if that’s the direction we end up heading. We talk with a realtor to get us started, to ground us in what might lay ahead.

We consider the vegetable garden boxes that take up most of our front yard: playing the odds, surely most people on the market for a new home are not also looking to play at urban farming. And yet, the biggest draw of our particular house is the big backyard overlooking a greenbelt, so perhaps the gardens all just fit with the theme of outdoor living. Plus, that isn’t plain old dirt in those boxes: that is a carefully curated (and costly!) mix of peat moss, vermiculite, and homemade black gold compost made with love out of vegetable scraps and dry leaves in our backyard.

For the right person, who loves gardening, and who likes to live close to the heart of the city while still enjoying some green space and a friendly neighborhood, not a bad choice of house. Hmm, also still sounds like us, which is why this decision is hard!

And messy.

While we make progress on some things, I can’t make myself look into destinations any longer. The waiting is uncomfortable. The not-knowing about the big-ticket items – like houses.

The pages of my weekly planner keep turning. I do some shopping. That is something I know how to do. I could use more of that right now. But now at Costco I think about not buying too much; how many jars of peanut butter can we get through before we leave? Covid taught us all to stock up on toilet paper, but how many right now?

For a while I may have misplaced my attitude of gratitude; that happens sometimes.

Here we are in the messy middle, building handrails and measuring our next moves.

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Till next time,

Amber

From Amber:

There is so much to do to prepare for the wild year ahead. A familiar metaphor settles upon us: how does one eat an elephant?

One bite at a time, of course.

Jeremy’s vegetarian, so at some point he notes this metaphor sounds unappetizing. Not sure why an elephant would sound appetizing to anyone else, but that’s beside the point. Still, we keep finding ourselves thinking in elephant-sized terms.

The African bush elephant, the largest land mammal on Earth, can weigh up to 22,900 pounds. If one bite is about one ounce, that’s about 366,400 bites.

There is still so much to do.

Some of that work is heavy and slower moving. Selling a house. Planning for where our 18-year-old will live. Figuring out finances. Planning a homeschooling/worldschooling curriculum for a 13-year-old.

Other parts are smaller, but there are so many: research what vaccines we may need. Update our wills (hey, everyone needs one, even if you prefer the couch to an airplane). Figure out open-enrollment policies for school when we return, since we’re not positive where we’ll live. Figure out the visa process for China. Get Isaac a passport in case he decides to come. Transfer car ownership to Isaac in case he decides not to come.

Recently I realized something about myself: I’m pretty good at a lot of things. Competent. I try hard. At work, at parenting, at budgeting, at fixing things around the house, at juggling schedules between full-time work and full-time parenting. Pride. I pride myself on competence. And yet, here’s the thing: I’m not competent at this. At planning a year around the world. I hope once we leave, I will find my competence again. But right now, it’s painful to realize, this is hard for me.

I beg Jeremy for kindness, to be extra nice, to lean on empathy. He’s also used to me being competent. Plus, it turns out he’s much more competent at this travel-planning thing than I am. So he doesn’t quite understand this new me, this me that is only mediocre right now.

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From Jeremy:

More important than any planning or to-do lists, we try to remember: we’ll be okay. Even the parts that feel unresolved right now don’t have to be settled for this to be worth doing.

Humans are drawn to big things. Big plans. Big journeys. Big meaning.

Amber ponders elephants. She tells me the woolly mammoth was a type of extra-large elephant that roamed North American until about 6,000 years ago. But scientists today are working to bring it back with gene editing. The world’s first de-extinction event; time in reverse.

Facts and numbers. Easy to learn. A few taps on a phone. But facts aren’t why we’re doing this.

The truth is, we don’t know what we’ll learn over the next year. We don’t even know all the right questions yet, much less the answers. That uncertainty feels exciting—but the scale of it also feels heavy.

Sometimes along the way, we’ve noticed our planning quietly turn into optimization. The uncertainty making us reach for anything that feels solid. The best route. The best gear. The best way to do this “right.” When that happens, the elephant looms. Every decision gets heavier.

When that happens, we are trying to remember to pause and reach for something gentler, less overwhelming. This isn’t a test. There’s no prize for getting it exactly right. The point isn’t to engineer the best possible version of this experience—it’s to actually live it. To leave room for wrong turns, missed connections, and days that don’t go according to plan but still end up meaning something.

This doesn’t need to be perfect to be worth doing. It needs to be something we can manage together.

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From us:

We’re not hungry for more elephant. And yet the plate is still full.

But we try to remember, the point isn’t to finish the elephant. It’s to keep taking the next bite without convincing ourselves we need to swallow the whole thing at once.

Or, as Jeremy might prefer, who doesn’t eat elephants or chickens or cows or fish:

How does one walk a journey of a thousand miles?

One step at a time. Just one step. Keep breaking in those travel sandals.

Till next time,

Amber and Jeremy

Share Drive Till Morning

Last week Jeremy made it public with his job: May will be the end.

Plenty of off-ramp time makes sense for him; as the leader of a small nonprofit, the board needs time to recruit a successor.

The public news came in the form of a newsletter message blasted out to a few thousand bicycling enthusiasts in Central Iowa.

I don’t know the moment we crossed over from “we’re going to give this everything we’ve got to try and pull it off” to “we’re doing this,” but we’re surely in the latter territory now.

We are both so fortunate to have jobs that we love, that are meaningful to us. Jeremy makes it easier to ride bikes in this city. I help people get into housing and out of the cold.

We get to work on hard things, to be challenged. To meet and work alongside people we respect and like.

This is one of the craziest things to leave. It seems so rare to find that kind of fulfillment in a job. And like it will take a minor miracle when we return to find anything comparable.

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I’m not trying to borrow trouble from the future. We have plenty of challenges in the present to keep us busy. We both want to leave things in a good place at work; in good hands, with positive momentum and trajectory. That will take care and focus in the coming months. And still, no guarantees. No matter how well we try to plan, there are going to be bumps in the road. And then when it comes time for the actual hand-off, then we truly let go.

Both of us have learned to be master jugglers; just keep adding balls in the air, and don’t let them drop. The problem with handing off so many balls is that there isn’t a good way for someone else to catch them all at once. That means some will drop, and since we both do care about our jobs, it’s hard knowing that in advance.

It would be easier if it were more like passing a baton: next runner up can just grab and go.

Of course, we still don’t have a date certain. Our actual departure date continues to depend on one big unknown: selling a house. Just one nice little family house in the suburbs, where Jeremy happened to grow up, and where we’ve invested what we need for this one crazy plan.

I keep reminding Jeremy, if that house continues to wait for just the right buyer, and May comes around and he’s done with his job but we’re still waiting, he may be doing a different kind of waiting– waiting tables.

Actually I think he might enjoy coming back to those roots. Endless chatting with an endless stream of new interesting people. Or, since really we live in one big small town, many of the same people. Not a moment of sitting still, and you bring them food and drinks that make them happy.

In contemplation of this, he tells me lately he’s been having “server dreams” again – anyone who has waited tables knows these dreams. No matter how fast your feet carry you, and how much you cram into your head to remember, you can’t keep up with people’s demands. These dreams can be harrowing. Nightmares, rather. I don’t remember any scarier kind of nightmare than these. Wake up sweating, heart racing, head spinning.

This is how Jeremy and I met: waiting tables at the same restaurant in Seattle. For years we both worked there. We made so many great friends. I still miss those days, with that crew.

In the scenario where Jeremy revisits those serving roots for some in-between-time while we wait on the housing market, hopefully I can keep working my same job right up until the day we pack our backpacks and hop on a plane.

Too bad I can’t pack up my job too. I like it, and I’ll be sad to leave it.

Till next time,

Amber

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What Feels Different Now

Politics has never been background noise for me. I’ve always followed the news closely and paid attention to how current events might shape where we go, how borders work, and how Americans are seen when we’re traveling.

What feels different now is the intensity. Everything feels like it’s ramping up at once. Louder. Faster. More aggressive. Harder to shake.

As our plans move closer to becoming real, the world around us feels harder to ignore. The tone coming from the government. The way protest gets talked about. How quickly force is used, and how easily it’s explained away. I’m not trying to sort out every detail or argue every headline.

What’s getting to me is the pattern — and how fast that pattern is starting to feel normal.

After last weekend’s killing by ICE, I found myself worrying about something I hadn’t fully named before: what it would feel like to leave my boys here in the U.S. without us. Not just worry, but guilt. A feeling that I’d be stepping away while the country they’re living in feels more unpredictable and more frightening than it did even a year ago.

Part of me also feels selfish for even thinking about leaving. Like I should be here — paying attention, speaking up, pushing back — especially right now. Like leaving means opting out at a moment when things feel like they need more people leaning in, not fewer. I don’t know how to square that yet. I just know the feeling is there.

There’s another truth I’m trying not to dodge. Part of me wants to get out for a while. I want distance from the constant alerts, the arguments, and the anxiety that seems to come with daily life right now. Stepping away will take the edge off for a bit.

And underneath that, there’s a more practical thought I don’t quite know what to do with yet. If things really do keep going the way they seem to be heading, then being out in the world — paying attention, learning how other places work, building real relationships — might not just be refreshing. It might be smart. It might quietly turn into a search for somewhere else we could imagine settling, if we ever had to.

I don’t know if that’s being thoughtful or being scared. Probably some of both.

An Old Question, Again

Meanwhile, people keep asking a different question about our plans:

Aren’t you worried about traveling abroad right now? About anti-American sentiment?

It’s a fair question. And it’s not a new one for me.

When I was 23, I traveled internationally for the first time — four months moving through South America. It was 2001. I was aware of anti-American sentiment even then. I remember briefly considering putting a Canadian flag on my backpack to avoid standing out, and realizing how uncomfortable that idea was — borrowing someone else’s identity to sidestep the consequences of my own country’s politics.

I didn’t do it, and honestly, I don’t remember being treated differently, with any regularity, because of my government’s actions.

The September 11 attacks happened near the end of that trip. Questions about how the U.S. would respond — and whether we’d go to war in Afghanistan — were suddenly front and center. Even then, the connection between politics and travel felt real.

I don’t want to dwell on that moment, but it reminds me that this isn’t new for me. What feels new now is the scale, the speed, and how much closer it all feels to home.

The unease I feel today has less to do with leaving the U.S. and more to do with what the U.S. is putting out into the world right now.

Travel has always been political, whether we like to admit it or not. Power, money, borders, and history decide who moves easily and who doesn’t. What feels different now is how fast those dynamics are shifting — and how often they show up in everyday interactions.

When Donald Trump talks casually about throwing his weight around — tariffs, threats, even floating the idea of taking land — it doesn’t stay theoretical. It shows up at border crossings. In conversations with locals. In the assumptions people make when they hear your accent.

What I’m Carrying With Me

I recently learned that most maps seriously mess with scale, especially near the poles.

Greenland looks enormous on my map at home — like the ultimate land grab — but that size is misleading. I’d heard before that Greenland looks bigger than it really is, but I never really understood why. On most maps, places get stretched the farther they are from the equator. Once you see that, it’s hard not to notice how the map itself shapes how big power and ambition feel.

It’s impossible to not to carry that awareness with me as I think about where we’re going and why.

That idea keeps sticking with me because it feels like a good metaphor for this moment. Things can look huge and absolute from a distance — on a map, in a headline, in a speech — even when reality is messier. But how things look still matters.

It shapes fear. It shapes behavior. It shapes decisions.

All of this is changing how I think about our route — not in a panicked way, and not as a reason to cancel anything. More as a reminder that travel isn’t an escape from the world as it is. It’s a way of stepping into it, with eyes open.

I don’t yet know how much this will change where we go, how long we stay, or what we focus on. I just know it’s changed the weight of planning in a way it hadn’t before.

We’re still curious. Still open. Still moving forward.

But we’re paying closer attention — to maps, to power, and to how both shape the paths we take.

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Till the Next Time,

Jeremy

We are borrowing from our future to fund this journey. Someday it would be nice to retire. That requires money, and good chance we’ll have less of it because of this decision.

We’re not recommending this to anyone else. We’re also not not recommending it! Hey, you do you. Decisions are complex and one cannot have it all.

One thing that helped us make this hard decision, with all its trade-offs, is the two-week trip Jeremy and I took last summer, when we realized we liked simplicity – a tent, simple food, walking.

And that opened up possibilities: what if we could retire someday, but to a simpler life? How much money do we really need?

Realizing we needed less, made it possible to focus less on gaining more.

Working backwards: planning first for the return

So that is the long-term future. Working backwards, the next step in our budgeting is the nearer-term future: what will we need when we return from our journey?

We’ll have our daughter still at home, with four years of high school ahead, and she is a little nervous about maintaining some recognizable semblance of our current life. So that rules out jumping straight into some kind of radical super-simplicity mode that otherwise Jeremy and I might be tempted to pursue.

First priority is employment: we’ll be bleeding money until we can find jobs again when we return. Assuming that may take a little time, we need to know our monthly minimum expenses.

We found ourselves at the dinner table recently doing some literal back-of-the-napkin math. If we took out every optional category and pared things down to only the bare bones, what would be required?

The biggest category is housing; that’s a couple thousand per month right there. Then food, and then transportation. Transportation is much cheaper if we can get away with just one car, at least to start with. We’re selling our two cars before we leave, so that means buying something used when we return. Then healthcare, and cell phones. Those are the basics.

Given that we don’t want to come back broke and stressed, our first job is to set aside enough money for an initial period of transition. Perhaps three months. Surely within three months, between two capable adults, at least one of us can find something to bring in some income, even if only something temporary.

Reserve fund for returning to normal life: at least $15,000.

Fixed monthly expenses

Next we plan for all the fixed expenses of our unusual year.

Various kinds of insurance, monthly storage fees for our things at home, an operating reserve for repairs and yardwork that rental income on our home likely won’t cover while we’re gone. Health insurance for a basic, high-deductible plan abroad seems surprisingly affordable compared to outrageous rates at home. More general travel insurance seems somewhat covered by using certain credit cards for major travel purchases. We’ll also need to insure our things in storage.

Overall: Perhaps $500 per month.

The trip itself

Jeremy has been deep in the spreadsheets.

At his prompting, ChatGPT helped design a system that categorizes various cities on our list as low, middle, or high-cost in several buckets of expenses: big flights to get there, local transportation, regional travel between nearby destinations, food, activities, and lodging. At each cost tier, another sheet translates that to a dollar amount, along with running totals for each category.

He then digs in deeper to stress-test the results. He researches the granular details of actual meals we might eat at specific locations that we might plausibly visit. He adjusts the tiers up or down with the results.

Over and over, we find the big key to keeping costs down is the pace of travel.

An Airbnb that costs $650 for a week might only cost $1,500 for a month. And the longer you are in a place, the more you learn where the grocery stores are and the best spots for street eats. You have time to stock up on a few basics and actually cook them, without wasting extra ingredients. You don’t have to overspend for convenience when rushing around from point A to point B.

When we add it all up, we get to something between $7k and $8k per month. That’s if we stay committed to keeping costs down.

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We do learn of some travelers squeezing it down further. Single travelers can opt for hostels, but that feels like a stretch with our teenage daughter. We plan to look further into farm stays and other community co-living spaces, perhaps for discounted room and board in exchange for light chores or other work. These also provide the benefit of a built-in community for a time.

A friend shares how she’s used TrustedHousesitters.com to arrange a free stay at a nice place in New York City in return for walking the owner’s dog. The service is more limited for families with kids, and it limits options as well for location and timing, but it’s another one we plan to research further.

Then there is our wild card, in the form of an 18-year-old we don’t know is coming with us or not, and that will matter for the budget. Some things just will unfold in their own time.

Overall, we stay committed to an upper limit, and we remember: if things turn out more expensive than we plan, we can always come home early. We both agree this would be fine.

A year sounds great. Nine months… pretty good too.

Till the next time,

Amber & Jeremy

When people hear about our plans, I’m guessing what probably comes to mind for many, even if they don’t say it out loud, is: “How do they have the money?”

We get it. We’ve spent our careers in government and nonprofit work.

Some might be thinking about vacations. Vacations are expensive: flights, restaurants, activities, conveniences. If we were trying to take a year-long vacation, that would be laughably out of reach. That is not the plan.

We are thinking of living differently in other places, not vacation. Very few big flights, long bus rides, free activities whenever possible, simple food from grocery stores and street vendors. The trade-off is time. When time is short, things are expensive.

We are thinking long and slow. More time, less money. Of course, still not free.

Recently our 23-year-old son told us he was so proud of how we figured out how to manage money. He knows; he was there from the beginning.

So this is our money journey, all the way up to the point of budgeting for this trip. It’s been a winding road.

This post will be Money Part 1: How we got here — over decades. In short: how we have the money to attempt this.

Next post on this topic will be Money Part 2: How we are budgeting for this trip, including, how much we actually think we need.

And so Part 1 begins:

From a purely numbers standpoint, this whole “quit our jobs to travel the world for a year” might not turn out well for us. But I don’t think regret will be the thing we feel if it doesn’t. If regret starts to creep in, we’ll try to reframe: we made the best decision we could with the information we had. We learned from it. We adjusted.

We’re in our 40s now, so backing up a couple decades —here goes:

Our 20s: No money, no worries (at first)

Early in our 20s we just were mostly young and dumb. We had no idea. We never knew what bills were coming. We racked up overdraft fees in our checking account. We put our future hopes in education (not dumb) and took out student loans to pay daily living expenses, paying little attention to the ballooning totals (maybe dumb).

We moved from Seattle to Washington, DC. Jeremy worked a couple internships while I started as a 9^th-grade public school teacher. We lived in income-restricted housing and are still grateful for it. As the decade wore on, and we had two kids and two jobs and no time, the daily scramble started to take a toll. We made it through each day and we were okay, but not great.

At 29 we took our first big trip out of DC and came back to Iowa for a family wedding, where Jeremy grew up. We saw a 3-bedroom house for sale on a quiet street and pulled one of the flyers out front; $150,000. Coming from Seattle and then DC, this was insane. We knew right then that a different life was possible here – one with room to breathe. We decided to move to Iowa.

Our 30s: The scary in-between, when we worry and then learn

This launched our next phase of money. Coming out of the housing crisis of 2008-2010, once in Iowa we took advantage of the $8,000 First-Time Homebuyer Tax Credit as a down payment for our first home. During closing, I remember asking the lady what a mortgage was.

Slowly we started paying more attention to money. We consolidated our school loans to reduce the number of bills we received each month from seven to three.

Once we were paying more attention, we started worrying, and then arguing. It became a source of near-constant stress. Especially when Jeremy was between jobs, and the in-between times stretched out long and scary.

A lifeline then came in the form of a gift from my older sister: Dave Ramsey’s book, The Total Money Makeover. Sometimes a book comes along and it’s exactly what you need, at exactly the right time. This was it. A framework. Clear rules. Here were the lessons about money that I needed, and I devoured it all. Then moved on to his podcasts, offering endless hours of information and stories of people learning how to navigate their money challenges. I could probably count to the hundreds the “We’re debt-free!” screams I heard from callers to the show, after they’d done the hard work and followed the plan and made it to that milestone.

I made our first budget, starting with Excel spreadsheets. Tracking every expense by hand. This was entirely new. When we squeezed an extra $200 in a month, it went toward our credit cards. It was such hard work, but we finally killed those balances. Then to our car loan, before finally the school loans. The debt snowball.

Slowly, slowly, we climbed our way out of debt purgatory. For so long we climbed.

By our late 30s, we reached an important milestone: in our big Excel money workbook, we could track that our assets (mainly our home) now exceeded our debts. No longer when I met with a retirement plan advisor at work and they asked what our net worth was, would I have to reply that it was negative.

Finally we owned more than we owed. We were in the black.

Our 40s: Do smart things when possible

When our 40s dawned, then, we had momentum. We kept (mostly) following the plan. Still did plenty of dumb stuff with money; spent on things we didn’t need. But tried to do smart things too when we could.

By then, with three kids, we thought about moving to a bigger house - or at least one with more than one bathroom. We were tired of playing bathroom cops, mediating kids’ bathroom visits with timers. In the end we decided to take out a small home equity loan to install an extra half-bath downstairs, and stay put instead.

And still, we worked on our finances. We tried out about six different budgeting apps. We stuck with Mint for a while until it folded, and now Monarch Money is much better. We didn’t always stay on top of things. But always kept learning.

A loss, and a gift

When Covid came along, we lost a beloved family member to the illness.

We received the gift of an inheritance, about $15,000. We wanted to find something meaningful to do with the money. We decided to use it to help buy the house Jeremy had grown up in.

Combined with a home equity loan on the house we live in, we financed the down payment along with rehab: new carpet, flooring, vanities, bath fixtures, lights, deck, and more. As much as possible we did the work ourselves, replacing drywall, removing wallpaper, painting every surface, cutting and installing baseboard molding. We thought about re-selling then, but ended up renting it out instead.

Almost five years later, we turn to this house, for our travel plans.

We think often about the family member who lived in this house last. He was not a traveler. He seemed never to need to be any place other than where he was. He was kind.

It is time for us to sell this house. Five years later, with upgrades and sweat equity and paying down our various loans, this house has the equity we need. Our tenants have moved out, and we’ve been painting and refreshing a few things throughout. We’ve tested the market once without success. We’ll put it back on the market soon.

No house sold = no money for travel.

So, in decades, that is how we have some money. Or rather, we hope we will, whenever this house may sell.

Far from enough money to retire. But that is kind of the whole point. Who knows when that will be. This is a mid-career break, when we are still healthy and well enough to hopefully enjoy it.

We don’t plan to come back broke. We have a little money in a state pension, and a little money in retirement accounts from our jobs, that we don’t plan to touch.

We have a little money saved up for kids’ college - maybe enough for about a year each - but so far our older kids have taken paths that don’t involve traditional college right now. Perhaps if our boys had shown more initial interest in college, we would have stayed focused just on supporting those goals. Perhaps our daughter will show more interest in college, and we’ll wish we had more funds to support her then. Thinking purely in terms of the value of education and learning, though, surely a year around the world is worth quite a lot.

Till next time,

Amber and Jeremy

Stay tuned for our next post, Money Part 2: How much we actually think we will need, and how we are figuring this out.

P.S. One thing we’re figuring out as we go is how to write and record what is a shared journey, with one person (Amber) doing more of the initial writing, and then the other person (Jeremy) adding perspective and editing. Moving back and forth from “we” to “I”. If anyone has suggestions on this, would like to hear them!

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Plenty of takes on “Don’t Go There, Go Here,” “What NOT to Do in (Madrid, Egypt, Vietnam, etc.),” and “Watch This Before You Go to (Brazil, Cambodia, Romania, etc.).” We turn from YouTube to podcasts and the occasional travel book. We become discerning consumers in all our research.

Some hosts seem like they’re ticking through lists of all the Instagram-worthy hot spots. Sometimes when it’s bikini shots on the beach again, it’s hard to tell whether it’s the bikini shots or the beach that is supposed to be the feature.

We look for videos with a sizeable number of views, but that’s not a guarantee: plenty end up featuring mostly disembodied drone footage of scenery with AI-generated voiceover; think of your most formulaic travel guidebook translated to video form. Like eating pre-packaged muffins; they might fill you up but they don’t really satisfy.

The channels and podcasts we come back to are with hosts that balance human connection with information. They’ve done their homework with footage or interviews or miles on the ground, they’ve carefully sifted through it all, they’ve learned something, and they have a thoughtful perspective to share. Travel that is less about checking places off a list, and more about being open to experience.

As for books, we find the big glossy “50 Destinations for a Lifetime”-type travel books are probably best left for coffee tables. A couple memoirs stand out, though, and one book stuffed full of useful information that somehow still manages to be readable.

Where that all led us: See our last post below for our Top 10 List of guides we have turned to for both information and inspiration. It’s random, it’s our list, and we just appreciate these people.

We Learn from the Explorers - Our Top 10

It’s a Top 10, sure—but mostly it’s a record of who’s helped us slow down, look closer, and stay curious.

Till next time,

Amber & Jeremy

Not Lewis and Clark seeking out the elusive Northwest Passage. Not sailors with Shakleton endeavoring in 1914 to cross Antarctica (589 days on the ice after the ship sank and they all survived!). Nor are we astronauts on Apollo 17 headed for the moon. And we’re not climbers dreaming of Everest like George Mallory, “because it’s there.”

It might feel like Mars to me, but my brain does recognize: there are a whole lot of people who have gone before. So we seek out those we can learn from.

Not too much – God help us in our human drive for knowing, more knowing. Adam and Eve just had to know. Yes, we want to know too, but if we promise to keep some mystery, can we keep the nice garden?

Thanks to the YouTubers, the podcasters, the bloggers and vloggers and writers. Shiny people all over the world, that bring us news of how to do this. We pick up pebbles of learning and place them on the scale; unknowing on the other side, heavy with boulders.

We look for:

• Budget travelers: We’ve saved our pennies for this. Nuff said.

• Families with older children – but this is rare. (Where are you all? Surely we’re not the only ones trying to do this? Are you just spending too much quality time with your kids to be bothered to share what you’re learning with the rest of us?)

• Active adventurers: Just not too competitive or reckless or elitist about it.

• Slow travelers. We know our frenzied selves. We’ll be constantly battling to slow down and try not to do too much. We need models of the same.

• Not too young and not too old. Like us, of course! But also, we might think we’re like sweet Goldilocks in the middle, but apparently it’s not sweet enough, because most of those we find are indeed quite a bit younger or quite a bit older. That’s fine. We’re all fine. Everything’s fine.

• People who like other people. Things might get lonely on the road for a year. Or at least mighty bored of one another. We’ll need to expand our circle of friendly faces. Tell us how.

Here are our most helpful guides so far - in no particular order. One might even call it our… (nooooo, not another one!) Top 10 List:

1. Jumping Places, YouTube show with Chris and Carol. They are an English-Brazilian married couple that travels the world and shares what they find. They are beachy laid-back adventurers, sharing the beauty of what they find, along with budget and other travel tips. If I had to find fault, I’d say they are slightly too cool and too good-looking and seem too care-free; they make travel look a bit out of reach to me. But of course that’s not actually their fault. I like that they stay in non-fancy places, though, and do non-fancy things, like going for a walk or going for a swim while hoping nobody steals their camera bag from the beach. Plus they are savvy content-creators; they know the algorithms like bikinis, and who can fault a good business strategy?

   

2. Amateur Traveler Podcast with Chris Christensen. This is a podcast with few frills or fancy guests; just regular people exploring and sharing practical tips. Jeremy’s been listening to this guy on and off for almost two decades. Episodes are straightforward about places, such as Travel to Central Portugal, Travel to Turkey, Travel to Bangkok, Travel to Guatemala, etc., etc.; you get the idea.

   

3. Buffer Travels, YouTube show with Buffer. Buffer sounds like he’d be a surfer and he is. He’s 55 and he sold everything to travel the world. Often he’s on a beach, sometimes he’s meeting ladies, always he’s sharing stories. He introduced us to Da Nang, Vietnam, and plenty more.

   

4. How to Win at Travel, Book by Brian Kelly. I’ve heard of The Points Guy for at least a decade or two. I’m mid-listen currently. I need to purchase a back-up paper copy and re-read from the beginning, because every other page has something to bookmark and highlight and come back to. It’s heavy on credit card points and airline miles, but with plenty of other info. From Brian Kelly I learn that if our 18-year-old comes with us, he needs a new adult passport. Now imagine if we had not realized this until it was go-time? Such a small detail, such a critical step. It took me a whole book of wading through mountains of credit card points tips and tricks that are way beyond my skill level, to pick up this essential tidbit. Yet another reminder, ya don’t know what ya don’t know.

   

5. We Came, We Saw, We Left: A Family Gap Year, Book by Charles Wheelan. Jeremy read the book first; a friend gifted us a copy. This author took his family of five on a 9-month world adventure in 2016 and lived to tell the tale of the ups and downs and the fun of it all. And they did have fun. So much fun. It was Julius Caesar who staked out decisive victory in his claim of Veni, Vidi, Vici – we came, we saw, we conquered. Charles Wheelan may as well have taken the full title for his book; he slayed, he murdered, he conquered all on his family quest.

   

6. Travel Support Thursday Podcast/YouTube Show, with Lisa and Josh. Lisa and Josh are appealingly normal. They are so relatable. They are like your best friends next door; they could be anybody’s best friends next door. People you would always be glad to have show up unexpected for a porch beer. Lisa and Josh spill the goods on what it really costs to travel the world for a year. And they don’t make you wait until the end of an episode either. They did a trip in a year for $40k. Nothing fancy, but not just free couch surfing either. Two people, 12 months, $40k.

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7. World Travel Dad Show, Podcast with James Olsen. He took his family on a 14-month trip to Europe and Southeast Asia. His itinerary looks suspiciously like ours might look for about three-quarters of our trip. That makes me think he values some of the same things we do, like… budget and family stuff. Confession though: I haven’t listened much to this one yet. I’ve left this one so far to Jeremy: from one dad to another. (Jeremy says less news and politics please, Travel Dad!)

   

8. Zero to Travel Podcast with Jason Moore: Start with Anything. Go everywhere. This is high-energy polished podcasting here, well-paced and with a relentlessly positive host. Not just where to go, but how to go. A few of Amber’s favorite episodes:

   1. Career Breaks: How to Start Planning Your First (or Next) Career Break Today (Using 5 Simple Steps) with Cali O’Connor

   2. From Burnout and $70k in Debt to World Travel with Annette and Daniel Fortner

   3. How to Become the Hero in Your Own Life with Derek Loudermilk

   4. Co-living 101: How to Build Community While Traveling with Fabio and Juls

   5. Alcohol-Free Travel with Margaret Ward

   Really, Jason covers it all. If I had years to soak up everything I might want to know before traveling, I’d dedicate serious time to Jason. As it is, I can mostly only marvel at the topics on offer, and select just a few like choosing from a box of zippy chocolates offered by a friend.

   

9. Travel with Rick Steves, the Empire of Podcast/YouTube/Books/Tours/PBS. One doesn’t always have to be original. Sometimes one just wants to shop at Costco and know that someone else has already done the research and made the decisions, leaving you with just what you need. Yep, Rick’s an OG master, and I’m okay giving him the respect. Plus he’s from Seattle, and I’m from Seattle, and Jeremy met the guy in Seattle in 2003, so bonus points there.

10. Intentionally left blank. Room for growth. Who are we to pretend we have things figured out enough for a Top 10 List anyways? More importantly, what are your suggestions, friends?! Leave a comment and share.

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Recently after we posted about the crushing anxiety of it all (okay, Amber’s crushing anxiety), a good friend shared her advice: Control the Controllable. Learn. She’s right and we are definitely learning, thanks to all who have gone before.

Sweet Maria
The sunlight surely hurts my eyes
I'm a lonely dreamer on a highway in the skies

Till next time,

Amber and Jeremy

Oh, and one more honorable mention:

Finding Gina Marie, Podcast/YouTube show with Judy and Kevin Hoctor. This friendly couple left high-pressure jobs in San Francisco to retire early and live a simpler life exploring the world. Apparently this couple has been together since 1979, making their relationship about as old as me. It started with Judy setting out at age 55 to find her birth mother. Now they are at 182 episodes and counting. They cover helpful unsexy topics like getting sick while traveling, travel burnout, communication strategies while traveling, the cost of travel, and other topics about how to actually exist as a human while changing locations across this earth. They are cheery and unpretentious and I’d be glad to end up sharing a tour with them, anywhere.

Luckily Jeremy is there and sometimes what is oblivious to one person is obvious to another. He gives me a significant look and says the word with meaning: July. What did we learn in July?

Ah yes, there it is. July is when we decided to try this thing. When we decided to turn our lives upside down and empty out the contents. To turn them back around and look for new treasures to put back in – in Phuket, or Rio, or Seville, or Luxor.

We didn’t only decide to take on new stress, and uncertainty, and fear, and overwhelm. We decided to take a chance at something a little bit extraordinary. To live closer to the edge.

If you’re not living on the edge, you’re taking up too much space.

I don’t know if I agree with that. I don’t know if I agree with half the thoughts that come into my head. Or the bits of wisdom shared by others.

Eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.

Thanks Dave; if it’s Dave, it might or might not be true, but in this house we believe it’s worth at least considering the words for an extra moment. (That’s Dave Matthews, for any of you that either missed the late 90s or were too cool for his sincerity.)

So, back to July. Waaaaaaay back. In July Jeremy and I gave ourselves two weeks to make our big decision, after our hairbrained idea the month prior had arrived out of the blue and quickly grown tentacles. Not just any two weeks, either. We had an epic road trip planned, no kids, just us, and that’s rare.

Once before, just once, the two of us had spent two weeks roaming the long wild roads of the west, when we were 21 and cruised the Pacific Coast Highway from Seattle to San Diego and almost but not quite made it over to the Grand Canyon. We were in the old maroon Honda Civic back then, with no air conditioning, body parts literally hanging out of windows to try to cool off, big map unfolded while we pondered our choice of road: the direct but slow one, seemingly slower by the minute in the hot dusty desert. In the end we decided it was just a big hole in the ground and we would come back another time. It took 25 years but we finally did come back another time, with the kids, last year, and it was breathtaking.

This time our July road trip out west involved mountains instead of coast. The Northern Rockies. Glacier, because we all know those glaciers are disappearing, then up north into Canada. Banff, and then Jasper, even though last year Jasper was halfway eaten up by wildfire. Then back south to Montana and through Yellowstone and the Beartooth Wilderness. Adding North Dakota’s bonus Theodore Roosevelt National Park and Canada’s Kootenay National Park because they were on the way, that was six national parks total.

Starting from the middle of the Midwest, Iowa, home of no national parks, where tallgrass prairie has been replaced by corn, leaving a meager 1% of public lands, we put on more than 5,000 total miles to get into the wild.

It was epic, epic, jaw-droppingly gorgeous at every turn, and we just couldn’t believe our eyes, and then our eyes would again about fall out of our heads at the next unbelievable panorama of shattering beauty. And still more miles, and we zoomed on.

During those two weeks of July, we alternated between the open roads of pure gold and finding simplicity in the mundane: where to sleep and what to eat. We packed only the three-person backpacking tent, which everyone who tents knows is really a two-person tent, and not exactly generous with space at that. But we didn’t want to get blown over in the wind, and it’s a lot faster to put on a rainfly when one person can just reach right over the tent. Plus, you know, living on the edge. So we camped 13 of the 16 nights of our journey.

For food we packed a cooler, and then kept packing and repacking it with yet more sandwich materials when they were depleted. Except for about three meals in restaurants, we ate from the back of our car, on the side of the road, or by the fire.

This is what we found: we didn’t need more than this. We packed light, we traveled light. We felt light. We decided we wanted more light. We also wanted more time. We wanted to slow down. We could barely take in each new view before it was on to the next one. It was simple, it was stunning, it was rushed.

We gave ourselves those two weeks and committed to making a decision by the time we returned. We anticipated endless hours on the road to research and learn everything there was to know about traveling the world for a year. We would come back knowledgeable, informed, ABC plus 123 and we would have our rational decision.

In the end the days flew by and we could barely squeeze out half an hour here or there for the gathering of useful knowledge. Plus, the long open roads often had no internet, and then what? One was forced to simply enjoy the scenery. It was also hard to know where to start. How does one make a pro/con list for trading in one life for another?

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Still, we did decide. We decided to make it if we could. To open our minds and our hearts and our bodies in space, to learning about the world in a new way. Not based on a formula. No arithmetic, no algebraic equation, no great calculus could give the solution. Just three people among 8.2 billion, and there isn’t an obvious answer.

In the end, it was more philosophy than math. We want to see and understand more, what it is to live in this world. To have time to slow down, to take it all in, just once.

The wisdom of July to guide us. Our good fortune, to try to follow.

Till next time,

Amber

🪇May Week 1: Jump right in with Mexico City. This is a city of 22 million people, elevation 7,350 feet. We hear of cultural and culinary delights. Jeremy loves big cities; he loves the energy of so many people, so much happening, getting swept up in crowds. Plus UNESCO World Heritage Sites like the ancient city of Tenochtitlan, along the banks of an ancient shallow lake, all within what is now Mexico City.

🏖️May Weeks 2, 3, and 4: Playa Del Carmen, Mexico. After a hectic few days in the big city, here we plan to unwind for three weeks, and find our rhythm of slower travel. This is coastal resort tourist central on the Yucatan Peninsula, 90 minutes south of Cancun, across from the Island of Cozumel. There are Mayan ruins, and cenotes with natural pools of water carved out of rocks, and plenty of beaches and islands to explore. There is a Spanish language school offering flexible classes for an hour or more a day, perhaps for weeks 2 or 3.

🤿June Week 1: Make our way south along the coast to Belize. Bus 8 hours from Playa to Belize City, then a ferry over to either Ambergris Caye or Caye Caulker, two islands known for snorkeling and diving among coral reefs.

🌋June Week 2: Head inland to cool off in the mountains of Antigua, Guatemala. 10 hours total by bus from Belize. Stay in the small island town of Flores and visit the Mayan ruins of Tikal along the way. Antigua is an old colonial city famous for coffee, cobbled streets, and historic churches, and surrounded by mountains, including the Acatenango and Pacaya volcanoes that are popular for hiking. Fit in a couple days in Lake Atitlan, with its traditional villages and handicraft, and get up early for a sunrise volcano hike.

🩴June Week 3: Back to the beach – Bocas del Toro, Panama. This is a laid-back beach town on the northwest Caribbean coast of Panama, very close to Costa Rica.

🏞️June Week 4 and July Week 1: Two weeks in Panama City. Located at the Pacific entrance to the Panama Canal, a thriving metropolitan area of 2 million people. Rainy season will be fully in swing, with an average 24” of rain in June, although mornings and afternoons may still see sunshine. Plenty of museums to explore to escape the rain.

🐒July Week 2: Head to the Amazon near Puerto Maldonada, Peru, by way of flights to and from Lima. Fit in a jungle tour for a few days.

💒July Weeks 3 and 4: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. July is winter in the southern hemisphere, making for pleasant weather in the 70s for exploring the glittering city life of Rio and nearby. One of these weeks, hop on a flight to explore Iguazu Falls, on the border between Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay.

From there it is on to leg two of the journey, across the Atlantic for three months in Europe. More on that to come.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood…
and I, I took the one less traveled by,
and that has made all the difference.”

Frost wrote his poem in 1915 while living in England, taking long walks frequently with his friend and fellow poet Edward Thomas. Apparently Frost’s poem influenced Thomas’ decision to enlist in World War I, where he was killed in battle two years later.

All the difference. The difference between living and dying. We can’t know what’s ahead.

We plan to leave everything in our current lives and travel abroad for a year. We don’t know what’s ahead.

Franklin D. Roosevelt: There is nothing to fear but fear itself.

Anais Nin: Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.

Google: Being brave isn’t the absence of fear, but the act of moving forward despite the fear.

I am overwhelmed by fear. Last month when I felt like bawling for fear, I found myself researching crying retreats; I’d never heard of such a thing, but it dawned on me I’d like a whole weekend to just cry cry cry for the all the bad things I could imagine and all those I couldn’t: known unknowns and unknown unknowns.

Google gives me grief retreats; close. Do my fears qualify as grief? No, that just adds guilt.

Maybe what I want is more like a scream club. I don’t find one in Des Moines, only haunted houses. In Chicago one can join the Chicago Scream Club for “a safe, judgment-free space to release stress, heal, and connect.” Weekly screaming events with friends.

I can pray.

Something I read once to deal with fear: imagine the worst of your fears being realized. Then ask yourself, and then what? What would you do? Then what would happen after that, and what would you do then? And so on. The unknown becomes more known. Perhaps a good tool for public speaking, or trying a new dance class?

So many of my current fears end in death abroad. And then what?

Literally. Kidnappings and ransom, Rio. Beheadings, the Yucatan. Flesh-eating parasites, Guatemala. Scooter crash, Bali. Washed out to sea, Portugal. Stung by poisonous jellyfish, Phuket. Bitten by poisonous snake, the Amazon. 13-year-old daughter goes missing in a crowd, Anywhere.

Okay, I get it. This is catastrophizing. Also, ridiculous.

Cora is the one to remind me that bad things can happen anywhere. Also that getting in a car every day is one of the most dangerous things one can do.

Jeremy shares a website that ranks places in the world according to dangers in a range of categories: We have the Global Peace Index, the Global Terrorism Index, the Ecological Threat Report, and so on. Out of 163 countries in the Global Peace Index, the United States is ranked 128^th. And yet, we carry on here, in one of the most dangerous countries around.

Or what about when we return? We are leaving behind jobs that are interesting, with people we like, and decent pay and health insurance. What if we regret all we gave up?

Jeremy learns of a traveling couple encountering an early morning laughter yoga class in Hanoi. No jokes, just laughter, accessible to all.

I need to laugh or I might cry.

Have you ever felt petrified by a big life move? What did you do? Leave a comment and help me cope. 😊

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Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Jeremy buys a drone, because drones are the future (and present), and for our travels.

At $299 on Amazon, it just passes an entry-level threshold; it does interesting things; also we won’t lose too much sleep if it breaks or is confiscated at a border. It’s a DGI Mini 4K.

He’s been practicing and urges me to try it. The controller attaches to a phone screen to view. After five minutes, that’s enough for me. Call me shy with new technology. It just takes me a little while to warm up. But it does provide the feeling of the thing. It doesn’t immediately crash to the ground, nor hang in tree branches.

One odd thing is that because it swivels around so it can face away from or towards you, the direction of the buttons also changes. Left is right when you turn yourself around.

Jeremy thinks the controller might be second nature for a video gamer. The last time he’s spent meaningful time with video games was last century. So he’s been practicing. We get a birds-eye view of our neighborhood for the first time in 15 years of living here. We see the changing colors of fall from above. He’s had it one month now, and it records his stats: 39 flights total; 10.4 miles traveled.

He was initially deterred by research. Countries and localities have developed different laws. Religious and historical sites are likely no’s. Some countries are serious: in Egypt, tourists are not allowed to fly drones, and bringing one in is subject to confiscation. If anyone thought we were trying to import one without permission from the Ministry of Defense, the penalty could be fines or imprisonment. Some countries allow them but require preregistration.

Here in the U.S., drones are regulated by the Federal Aviation Administration and by states. We don’t allow them in National Parks, or near airports of course, or near critical infrastructure. One can avoid some of the red tape by staying below 0.55 pounds (250 grams).

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We also learn that some drones made in China are considered by the U.S. government to be a national security risk, kind of like TikTok, and perhaps at some point in the future it will be harder to buy and fly them. That includes ours.

So there are limitations. Then Jeremy recalls the Dave Matthews show at the Gorge three years ago that ended with the sky story light show with 450 drones. Videos from China of drone sky shows of 50,000. Then of course the drone delivery services and whole wars seemingly fought by drone.

So Jeremy jumped in. After a 30-minute video and a test, he earned his recreational flying approval.

It is interesting to learn the technology. He sets it to a max altitude of 400 feet. It doesn’t seem to have a max range, although at some point it will lose connection with the controller; we have yet to figure out what happens then. The battery lasts about 20 minutes, after which it will come home on auto-pilot by shooting up to 300 feet to avoid potential obstacles, and then flying back to home base. It comes pre-programmed with several other auto-pilot flight modes, providing solid footage even from a novice. That footage uploads to the cloud, and Jeremy is learning editing to splice it, add filters, music and transitions, and other tricks.

He’s envisioning practical uses on our travels. If we’re out hiking, how nice to see where we’re headed. How far to the beach? What’s right over that next ridge?

Or perhaps when we document our journey, some visuals may be nice. I like words but pictures are worth their thousands more.

It’s small and lightweight, so it meets the packability test.

Plus, Jeremy sometimes gets bored, and while we will surely have much to explore, a new hobby he can bring in his pocket should also be handy.

Drones, robots, AI – there is no fighting the future. One piece of that future is coming packed for travel.

How should we use our drone while we travel? Leave a comment below and let us know.

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Amber

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Stuffed olives. Stuffed peppers. Stuffed animals. Stuffed suitcases. Stuffed after Thanksgiving dinner. Stuffed after most of my dinners. Feeling full, satisfied. I like stuff. I love Amazon. I love how Amazon brings me exactly the stuff I need and want. This is my attitude of gratitude.

I also like liberation. Liberation from stuff. Feeling free. The nice picture on my wall of the woman biking that says All Good Things are Wild and Free. I love the bracelet my big sister gave me once on my birthday that says Run Free. Maybe my favorite song since I was 16 has been Tom Petty’s Wildflowers, in which he sings

You belong among the wildflowers,
you belong in a boat out at sea,
sail away, kill off the hours,
you belong somewhere you feel free.

I’ve thought since I was 20 this was the one song I really want played at my funeral. My favorite place on earth is the wildflower meadows hiking from Paradise at Mr. Rainier. I like free.

Stuff is one thing we won’t have when we jump off the Earth next spring and fly into the universe for a year.

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So we have choices: what to do with all the stuff here at home?

We have houses, we have cars, we have furniture, we have clothing, we have some very large houseplants. We have books from our own childhoods long ago; we have collections of our kids’ Pokemon cards that nobody really knows what to do with.

We have a few things we know early on can go. I make the long-overdue conversion from Craigslist to Facebook Marketplace. Seriously, I was a dinosaur until this year; I escaped the comet and have been walking the earth with my reptilian self for 165 million years. Now I’ve evolved and I’m a bird, flying high.

I feel very good about some early sales as I learn this new handy tool. We offload an extremely heavy old oak desk that just last year I had carefully painted white with gold trim for Cora’s room. We part with our sturdy Costco outdoor glass table set. We give away stacks and stacks of plant pots. I post a giant aloe vera plant that might possibly be too heavy to actually move; so far no takers on this one.

One nice person comes to pick up a mini-fridge and we learn she’s a good friend of a second cousin and we’ll be seeing her at an upcoming wedding (Des Moines, we love you!); also she’s a teacher and this fridge is headed to her classroom. My heart sinks a little when I learn this. I thought I’d made the sale for a little cash, but no way now can I keep that money. She Venmo’s us for the sale and we promptly refund it after she leaves.

We pare down our bookshelf. Over and over we slim it down. I dislike parting with books.

We sell Isaac’s racing bike from when he was about 10 years old, and I remember him racing that bike for a kids triathlon, and the swim in the little lake. Isaac was a kid born strong.

We are thinking about options for storage while we are away. Internet research says we’ll need about 200 square feet of storage for our average-sized three-bedroom house. I find a climate-controlled 10’ x 20’ unit for $99/month nearby.

It’s time to go through the basement again, and see what more we can shake loose. There is a price for every item we store. A price in currency and in work to move it. I try to conjure the spirit of Marie Kondo for some life-changing magic to help me tidy up our stuff.

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Amber

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We know worldschooling will be our framework. Last week we learn how our local Iowa home school district can help with the nuts and bolts while we spend a year around the world. We make an appointment and meet with our district’s homeschool coordinators. They are encouraging and helpful.

Turns out Iowa has almost no rules for this. Maybe I’m missing something, but the overriding theme seems to be: you can check out anytime you like. Parents rule. We can educate our kids however we see fit. If we feel like it, we can notify the school, but if don’t feel like it – also okay.

We assume it’s mostly about religiously-inspired homeschooling, but at least here in Iowa’s capital, our new homeschool liaison friends share that it’s a more diverse mix of motivations than it used to be.

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I’m grateful to be so free to pursue our plans. Also it’s strange. Should we be a little alarmed for the future of our country when public school, with its inclusivity and its shared educational experiences, is so easily disregarded? I could argue with myself both ways on this for a whole afternoon. Perhaps our public schools should also have changed more with the times, rather than staying stuck in a century-old industrial age factory-production model of kids in chairs for hours, and expecting teachers to make it all somehow still relevant. Cue Pink Floyd here: just another brick in the wall. Maybe there is a reason more families are opting out.

Anyway, it seems that Iowa has had decent support for homeschooling for a while now – maybe several decades – and that in just the past couple of years this has really ramped up, in parallel to the change in laws that now follow students to provide public school funding to private schools.

Good to be free, and also we’d really like some support if it’s on offer! Our district homeschool coordinators explain the options. Currently they provide homeschool support for about 350 students, and they estimate that about that number locally are also homeschooled but with no connection at all to the district. About 700 kids total, compared to 30,000 in the district overall. We just have to keep a permanent home address in the district, with plans to return, to be eligible for some support. (We file this information away; good reason to sell only the rental house, and keep the house we’ve been living in).

With a physical presence nearby, we’d have many more options – splitting time between school and homeschool, coming to school only for electives, participating in sports and activities, etc. Abroad, we learn the best option that would still provide some measure of support and structure, is a plan for Cora to check in once a month for a virtual conference with one of the homeschooling teachers. This can be flexible to account for differences in time zones. Normally they would do these check-ins in-person, but already they evolved to accommodate one student that was spending a year on a boat, another that was spending a year in Indonesia, and a third that was studying ballet in Milwaukee. They are prepared to offer us a virtual option.

Our job as parents will be to create the curriculum, and share it with the teacher, and then these monthly check-ins will be a way to share progress and discuss adjustments. At the end of the year, keeping this level of connection, Cora’s middle school transcript will list this continuing connection to the school, providing a seamless entry into high school.

We talk through curriculum options. A steady math course is first. The district will provide free access to ALEKS math online, or Khan Academy provides an alternative. For language arts, she can read about the places we are visiting and keep a journal. For history, museums galore. Science, let’s learn about the geology of volcanoes before we climb one, or evolutionary biology and biodiversity, before we visit the rainforest. Spanish lessons will come while we navigate Spanish-speaking countries.

The plan for education seems eminently doable. We’ll need a computer, reliable internet access, and dedicated time built in. We need to remember slow travel.

We can do this. It also helps to remember that long ago I spent years of my life training to be a classroom teacher. It’s a secondary thought, so different from our current plans, but still it helps.

Any ideas for homeschooling an 8th grader abroad? Please leave a comment; would love to hear them!

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Amber

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Unschooling is interesting; worldschooling is for us.

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I get over my avoidance of Facebook to join several worldschooling groups. I learn about worldschooling hubs all over the world, where traveling students join for a few weeks or months at a time, in community with other traveling families. There are pop-up options, more loosely organized and on the move. Then there are simple meet-ups, just families networking virtually and connecting for a week of planned activities somewhere. There are alternative schools, and camps, and family eco-lodges, and co-living arrangements.

We learn about evolving worldschooling hotspots: Albania, Bulgaria, Costa Rica, Bali, Portugal, Chiang Mai. Time of year matters – Portugal in the spring or fall; Costa Rica in December or January during north American winter, etc.

We also learn about options for volunteering abroad as education. International Volunteer HQ makes it as easy as selecting from established locations, noting what type of traveler (families, solo, teens, medical, missions, etc.), and what kind of work you prefer – construction, teaching, animal care, teen summer camp, medical, and much more. We can sign up the family and spend two weeks on sea turtle rescue and restoration in Costa Rica if we’d like (and for a price).

Cora really wants to learn more Spanish. We find language learning schools set up perfectly for travelers interested in a week or more at a time, with flexible daily lesson options for all ages. We find a nice one in Lake Atitlan, Guatemala, along with options to start our trip in Playa del Carmen. Some offer the option of pairing up with a local host family, for more language and cultural immersion.

This is the world as classroom. Options seem as endless as the sky. No walls. We will have to create our own boundaries, our own plan. We have a lot to learn.

Know of a worldschooling hub or resource especially geared toward teens? Let us know in a comment!

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Till next time,

Amber