Traveling Family Spotlight: Worldschool Adventures

By Admin PostSeptember 27, 2012

Meet The Worldschool Adventure Family for our next traveling adventure series post! This family of four travels for six months out of the year while unschooling and taking life slow. The blog offers insight on how to achieve a goal of traveling with lots of tips for planning and preparation. Enjoy!

Tell us a bit about your background, why you want to travel, and what led to the decision.

My husband and I have always shared a love of travel. Our first trip together was back in 1998 where we traveled for three months, driving from our home in Canada down to Mexico where we camped on many a beach in our van. Our next trip we took things a bit further and drove for six months down into America, Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, then all the way back up and across Canada. A few years later we got married and instead of having an extravagant wedding we had a small ceremony and then used the money we had saved to backpack across South East Asia for ten months. It was in South East Asia where we dreamed up the idea to travel with our future children. Since then this idea has morphed and evolved so much it now encompasses our goal of creating a new lifestyle for our family where we travel for six months of every year and has also helped to shape our own philosophies on education for our children.

Your blog chronicles your journey of preparing to travel. What are your favorite blogs and websites that have helped you get ready for a traveling life?

There are so many amazing blogs out there I get inspiration from! A few of my favorites are familyadventureproject.org, thedropoutdiaries.com, snapsandblabs.com, and goinganyway.com

I love the name of your blog, Worldschooling. Which came first unschooling or traveling? How do the two effect each other and work together?

Great question! Traveling came first for us. We knew that traveling with our children would be in our future so when it came time for my oldest son to go to Kindergarten we had to make the decision of whether or not we put him in school and then later took him out or if we should just keep him out entirely. It was a VERY hard decision for us! In the end we decided to try out homeschooling and we are so glad we did! When I started to research the ins and outs of homeschooling I came across the philosophy of unschooling, or child-led learning, and it really seemed to be the right fit for our family and our lifestyle. In my opinion, unschooling and travel are a perfect match for each other. We learn about the world through our experiences. Different cultures are understood by immersing in them, language is acquired by the need to be understood when no one around us speaks English, history flows through our learning from visiting monuments and museums.....the whole world is literally our classroom!

What advice do you have for other parents of young children who want to travel? What do you *need* to keep and what do you need to get rid of?

My advice is do it! If travel is in your blood like it is in mine then you know how amazing it would be if you could do it with your children. It would be a life changing experience for your whole family. As for what you need my answer is not much! With technology at our finger tips the whole world opens up! We will be traveling with only our backpacks. The only toys our kids will bring with them is a small pouch of Lego, a favorite stuffed animal, and some drawing supplies. Kids really don't need a lot of toys, all they need is their imagination and nature!

It seems like the biggest question most people have is how to fund traveling without having a lot of money saved up. Do you have any tips or advice on how to make it work on a budget?

We will be on a tight budget and I plan on doing a monthly tally of our expenses on my blog so our readers can see if a similar trip is feasible. One of the easiest ways to keep costs down is to travel slowly. If you want to go around the world in one year, it's going to cost you! Choosing a few countries within the same region and traveling slowly will make your dollar stretch so much farther. We plan on settling in the places that we like for one to two months at a time and renting our accommodation by the month. Not only will this save us money on accommodation but it will also save us money on food and incidentals because we will start to know the rhythm of the place and know not only where to buy things but how much they should cost.

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