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 Homeless Hartlens (minus me) Circa Jan. 2013 as we get ready to head to Morocco from London My goal is to see as many countries and cultures as possible, my official goal is 100 countries and all seven continents before death departs me, and at 31 and 6 down, I have a way to go. Since 2008, I have been a family man, so my dream should have died then right? Certainly that is the common thinking - that when you have a family you have to stop travelling, give up on your own dreams, right? People think this way for many reasons: it’s too expensive, too hard, kids need structure etc. My wife and I disagree. Leaving home in 2012 has been one of the best decisions we ever made.
Some context for you: we sold our home in Alberta, Canada in 2012, and with our two eldest daughters, moved to New Zealand with no job guaranteed. The money from our home sale did fund this initial move in terms of flights and spending money, but most of the money we made, we invested for our eventual return to a traditional lifestyle. I would say we had around $15000CAD to start. If things didn’t work out in 90 days (the length of my wife’s visitor visa) we would head to Australia. If it didn’t work out there within the same timeframe, we would return home and to our traditional life. It is now 2019, and after three and a half years in New Zealand, ten months back home, and now two years in Colombia our now, family of five, is contemplating the next chapter in our journey. So, while the last six years of our life has not been conventional, it has not been the life of traditional travellers either. We have chosen to work and travel, but not as digital nomads, as proper secondary school teachers, though for our time in New Zealand we were a single income family. In this time we have tried to balance some kind of structure for our kids, while still travelling as much as possible and getting immersed in culture along the way. The idea is that we locate ourselves in one new area of the world, and branch out from there. This gives us stability and structure for the girls, and travel opportunities for everyone. From New Zealand we did Australia, Indonesia, Fiji and south East Asia, and from Colombia, other parts of South America. This has allowed our kids to go to school in three different countries, learn new languages, and still have normal kid activities like ballet in the mix. The journey has not always been easy, or cheap, and there are a thousand other ways we could have done it. This is not the right way, or the wrong way to have travelled, but it is, our, way. And, along the way we have learned these important things:
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