​Reinventing your Lifestyle as a Family

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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1. Don’t get hung up on the things you didn’t do: the purpose of travel, we view, is to make memories, not to carry around regrets. Travelling with kids is expensive and slower than travelling solo, or as a couple. We hosted a lot of couchsurfers over the years who were on these epic backpacking adventures able to come and go at the drop of a hat for a fraction of the cost/time it would take us to do the same. This initially caused me much frustration (more for my wife who was frustrated that I didn’t get why this was not possible for us!), but I eventually learned to realise that while we were not in the state of constant travel and adventure that I envisioned in my head, what we were doing was still way more of an adventure than most families ever contemplate. I instead looked at things in more of a big picture kind of way, and realised that these places we do visit, and the countries we choose to live in are experiences many will never have, and living permanently with a family and travelling as we do is as much of an adventure/accomplishment as solo-backpacking through forty countries and getting blitzed in hostels with other likeminded travellers. My daughters have been to 21 and 16 countries respectively, and while this is not an accomplishment for me directly it is something I am pretty proud of.

The moral: Focus instead on the things you did do. Some highlights for us include: snorkelling the Great Barrier Reef on our eldest daughter’s sixth birthday, taking an overnight camel ride through the Saharan desert, fishing for piranha in the Amazon, having our middle child go parasailing at the age of 7 in Colombia, and giving birth to our youngest while travelling/living in New Zealand.

You can read about this adventure by clicking the photo!

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2. Keep the needs of your children/family ahead of your own personal agenda: If are not able to do this, you should reconsider pursuing a lifestyle similar to ours. Kids are still kids, they do not have the autonomy to decide their future at such a young age (our eldest is currently 10 and youngest is 5). None of our kids asked to be uprooted from family and friends and move around every couple of years, we have tried to keep this in mind in every decision we have made. Our hope is that we are giving them a one of a kind cultural experience that they will shape them as adults. We think we have been successful in this, all three of our girls are currently in a Spanish/English school in Colombia and more or less fluent, but it was not always this way. We needed to be supportive of this transition, especially for our eldest who was nine when thrown into a grade five classroom and asked to survive with her Dora level Spanish. This was tough for her, and tough for us, helpless to provide as much support as she no doubt needed while we were coming to grips with our own struggles in adapting to a new language and culture. Nearly two years later though, by being involved and spending a lot of time together as a family, all three are more or less fluent and thriving in Spanish. (our middle does not want to leave!)

This is a big-time example though. Even in smaller day to day travel the needs of the family should take priority over your desire to visit that epic temple on top of a mountain after you have been wandering around museums and markets. Those temples will still be there tomorrow, but are you really going to enjoy the experience if you are arguing with your partner and fighting your exhausted children when they start whining and asking to colour, or play at the park they saw a few blocks back? When we travel, we try to travel at a child friendly pace, and this includes child friendly activities. Is there a park nearby? Is there a kids museum? Sometimes it’s ok to just have a day of colouring, or watching a movie and relaxing. Our kids are reasonably easily entertained, and they enjoy much of the cultural stuff that we do, but they are still kids it is important to keep this in mind.
We have learned so much more, but that is all for now.
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We have robbed our kids of a traditional upbringing, but we strongly believe that in the absence of toys they didn’t have, family they weren’t as close to, and friends that are always changing, we have instilled in them a first-hand knowledge of the kaleidoscope of culture that exists on this planet.  Hopefully, they will come to appreciate this and know that the places they are from are not necessarily the best or only example of how to live life. We hope that they take a little bit of something from each place they have experienced and learn and grow from it. This adventure has brought us so much closer together as a family through shared experience, and literally being on top of one another in the absence of a big support network, and I wouldn’t trade it for the world!