How Our Story Began
We get lots of questions about how we decided to start traveling full-time. Long story short, Megan has wanted to do this her whole life. Rem promised her he’d help her find a way to do it when he proposed, and since then they’ve been working on this big goal together.
Long story long, we’ve been working on getting to a point where we could do this for over a decade. In fall 2024, the stars aligned and everything came together financially, career-wise, and family-wise for us to be able to go for it. We spent 9 months creating and booking a 12-month itinerary, either selling or storing (in a small storage unit) all our belongings, selling our cars, and getting our house cleaned & rented out.
All of that was a LOT of work. Remington literally spent hours and hours for weeks putting together our itinerary (exactly how we did that is another blog post). We went through many versions, many countries, and many plans before we settled on this one. And “selling everything to travel the world” sounds so whimsical and spontaneous, but let me tell you, it is the opposite. My full-time job was selling things on Facebook Marketplace (which funded a lot of this first year of travel), cleaning, and sorting out what we’d be keeping or getting rid of.
To also be very honest, we owe almost all of the credit to God. We’ve prayed about this lifestyle for a long time, and have felt very guided in every big decision we’ve made. Much of the time steps we felt directed to take seemed opposite of what would get us to full-time travel, but again in 2024 we could see how all of those steps worked together to bring this whole dream to life. We’re big proponents of letting God in on your dreams and giving him the director role in bringing them to life. The hard part is trusting and doing what you’re told to do!
In regard to doing this with kids that are ages 6 & 2, we realized that with kids, there is never an “ideal” time to travel. Doing this with young kids makes things much easier in some cases and harder in others. Pros – the kids get into a lot of museums, excursions, and public transportation for free. We don’t have to worry as much about keeping up in school (I’m homeschooling Aven’s first grade year this year, and Talon isn’t even in preschool yet), nor do we have extracurriculars the kids are missing out on. Most airports will shuttle families with a stroller to the front of security and customs lines, which is awesome! We’ve also met amazing people and had incredible cultural experiences offered to our little kids we probably wouldn’t have had without them.
Cons – we do have a very emotional two year old who is very expressive in public! We are in a phase where going to restaurants is not easy, so we don’t get to eat as much of the local cuisine as we’d like. We do have to pick activities based on what little kids can do, so sometimes we don’t get to do everything we’d like to do in a country. We also have to plan our schedules around a mid-day nap.
So, it’s not perfect, but like most things, it was definitely better for us to start where we were in life instead of waiting for a future, non-existent “ideal” time.
All this to I guess say – we can’t give anyone an exact guide map on “how” to be able to travel full time. If it’s a goal, you can work your way into a good position to do it. It’s scary to leave behind the security of a full-time job, a “normal” school system, and launching into the unknown. And if you have kids – there is always going to be a give and take. But the experiences we’ve had, the things we’ve seen, and the growth and closeness our family has created in just a few months have all been worth every minute of preparation and risk taking. I’m so glad we took the jump!