• The Realities of a Location Independent Life
• 10 Ways Long Term Open-Ended Travel Sucks
• Practical Advice for Location Independent Professionals

There’s nothing for a moment of clarity like standing over a casket. My grandmother’s in this case. For one eternal moment there was no one in the universe but her and me, and in that moment everything became crystal clear: “The old woman is not in the box. Her stuff is not in the box. Her names, her accolades, her accomplishments, her houses, cars, and businesses: not in the box. No one knows for sure what, if anything, we take out of this world, but at best, it’s our relationships and our memories. Nothing more.”

A year into planning our major life change, if I needed a shot in the arm, that was it. I kissed her wrinkled hands, closed the lid, and walked away. Once upon a time, my husband had a six figure job with a company you’ve heard of. We lived in a four story castle of a house tucked into a mountain forest, drove two cars, had four kids in 6 years, and a quiet little existence. We loved every minute of it because we knew it was just one chapter of an epic life. Brewing beneath the surface of cookie baking and sand piles, fort building and remodeling projects was our big dream:

I have a confession to make: We did not set out to travel for seven years.

We had a solid plan, with a beginning and ending date. We’d organized everything well. We’d budgeted carefully. We knew where we were going, and we had a plan for when we returned. That dream, that plan, seemed big enough to us – ridiculously big, in fact. The idea that we could take a year off of “real life” and have an adventure felt like the biggest thing that we could hope for and a dream of epic proportions.

It didn’t occur to us to think bigger. It didn’t occur to us that we could have, from the beginning, planned for an open-ended journey that would last years, if we wanted it to. If it had occurred to us, we’d have done so many things differently, but at the time, all we could see was the year ahead of us, and a year seemed like a very big adventure indeed.

It started with the dream to take a year off and ride our bicycles from London, England, to Tunisia, and back. For my husband, who’d traveled very little outside the corporate world, it was a leap of faith. He knew he wanted to do something extraordinary, to travel in a big way, but he didn’t know how. He’d long had a dream of riding his bicycle across the USA, and that was the seed of the dream for our trip around Europe and northern Africa.

The children, ever ready adventurers, were instantly on board. Their biggest concern was whether or not they could box and save their favorite toys for some future date. Of course they could. The more we thought about it, planned for it, and took test rides for weekends around New England, the more excited we got. One year before our projected launch we took a 500 mile “sanity check” ride through the Maritime Provinces of Canada to test our gear and our mettle. We were solidly out of the closet with our plan by this point. We were gearing up for the launch of our lives.

Our friends humored us. My in-laws were worried. The great grandmothers thought we were downright crazy. The kids were wildly excited. There are no words for the euphoria of pushing off on that first day’s ride, or the prescience in one of hundreds of moments that first year when we realized that our dream was now our life:

• Logging 80 km our best day with the wind at our back on the North Sea route from the Netherlands into Belgium.
• Camped in “himbeer valley” in nowhere Germany.
• Standing with one foot on either side of the iron curtain between Austria and the Czech.
• Staring at the shadow my body cast on the floor of the original Roman Senate.
• Hearing my children hoot and holler atop camels on Christmas day on the Sahara.

And then, there are the nightmares. We planned for two years, saved for two years, worked for two years, all to make our one year trip a reality.

One night, when we were camped quietly on the top of the highest sea cliff on the Adriatic coast of Italy, among fig and olive trees, with the sound of the sea pounding the rock wall hundreds of feet below, the stock market crashed.

Overnight our money was gone. All of it.

We then faced some very tough choices.

At the time, it was terrifying. We felt adrift in the world with no anchor and four kids with trusting eyes waiting to be fed, clothed, and housed without respect to continent or economic crisis. In retrospect, it was probably the best thing that could have happened to us. It forced us to really evaluate our dream, ourselves, our life, and our potential. It forced creativity. Would we keep traveling, or pack it in and go “home” and get jobs and a “real life?” Would we trade our dream for “reality?” Or would we push hard against the odds one more time and create another new path for ourselves and our dream?

We took a deep breath and pedaled forward, bending our plans for Greece and Turkey toward Tunisia instead. It was a cheap, warm place to winter, and in addition to giving our children a few months to become comfortable in a Muslim culture, it provided a place to hunker down and work hard toward creating new income streams over the winter.

I worked at developing online writing contacts. Tony taught himself iOS programming and put out his first few Apps. We started a company and began trolling for clients. It was from the fine sand of the Sahara that we sifted the grit to create location independent careers and support ourselves as we traveled. Of course at the time, nothing was clear. Everything was scary. We did the best with what we had. We put one foot in front of the other. We kept pedaling.

It was in the spring of that year, 2009, walking hand in hand along the rive gauche of the Seine, on a day that the cherry blossoms were just beginning to test the spring air with swelling buds, that our lives changed forever. That was the moment when my non-traveling husband, who’d taken a frightening leap outside of his gene pool and experience to travel for a year, looked at me, with plane tickets in his pocket, and said, “I don’t’ want to go home.”

Neither did I.

Neither did the kids.

So we didn’t.

We returned to the States for the summer, but immediately planned for the next adventure. The thing we’d learned on that high sea cliff in Italy and in the months that followed was that security isn’t found in the number of zeros behind a particular number in your bank account, and quality of life isn’t dependent upon whether or not you have a “home” to call home.

For us, home became synonymous with relationships and people. We’ve found we have several “homes” around the world. And after the economic crash when so many of our friends lost much more than we did and were caught in upside down mortgages and jobless, we realized that our lack of security and our freedom was, in the end, our salvation.

We can live and work anywhere. Making first world money while living and spending in second or third world places affords us a lifestyle we’d be hard pressed to maintain had we kept our house and real jobs. In the end, what we discovered was that living our dream was really the only way to live; not just for a year, but for as long as it remains our dream. There were some in our circles who didn’t understand that, who wanted us to “settle down” and “get back to normal.” But the people who know us best saw it coming and weren’t surprised when we took off a few months later for a long road trip through Central America.

Those seven years evaporated before our very eyes. Our family traded toddlers for teenagers and bike trailers for guitar cases. We look back on that audaciously big dream of our first year on bicycles with the kindly smile that the mother of teenagers reserves for the antics of a toddler: it was a good start. We had no idea what we’d gotten ourselves into. It was going to get bigger and better than we could ever have imagined, but we couldn’t see that from where we stood.

There was so much we couldn’t see from the dark valley that was the top of that Adriatic Sea Cliff. We couldn’t see:

• The cottage on Cape Cod that soothed our souls
• A cross-country road trip with 11 kids under 15
• Falling in love with a certain lago
• Adventures on the border of Burma
• Kite surfing in Thailand
• Sunrise over Angkor Wat
• The Ho Chi Minh trail
• Planting rice on an island in Laos
• The jungles of Borneo
• The kindness of the people of Brunei
• The sea turtles of the coast of a nameless Indonesian island
• The joy of salad in Bali
• The smiles of the hundreds of friends who’ve found us on the road
• The view from the top of a Karri tree in Australia
• Sunset over the karst formations in Cheow Laan Lake
• The eerie light of glowworms on a dark New Zealand night
• Or any of a million other things we’d have missed if we’d packed it up and decided to head home.

Little did we know that our dream of a year in the world was only the first step of a much larger journey. From where I stand now, it feels like the foothills of the Himalayas. We’re higher than I thought we could possibly climb, and the path from here just gets steeper as it leaps toward the sky. It’s exciting to contemplate what’s around the next bend and just out of sight.

As long as there are dreams to chase, we’ll be chasing them. That is, perhaps, the greatest lesson of all for the children: that a life of dreams is not only possible, it’s the expected norm. They know how to dream, but more importantly, they know how to work hard to manifest those dreams. They know how to do hard things. They aren’t afraid of themselves or the world.

I stood on the balcony of our second story apartment over looking the Mediterranean Sea and watched the sun dissolve into a fiery soup one evening. Everything was uncertain. We were still figuring it out. So many things were scary in our inner worlds. The muezzin was calling evening prayers, and the kids were playing in the street below with an Arab boy they’d befriended across the language gap.

It was one of those perfect moments where time slows, and for just a second you’re really you and really in a moment. When I dropped my eyes I gasped and then smiled. There was my grandmother, perfectly embodied in my hands, folded just like hers had been a million times before, over my balcony railing. Genetically, I’m just like her. I remembered our good-bye and the last lesson she taught me as I folded our hands and thanked her again for the gift of life and the confidence to go against the flow, do hard things and dream big dreams, all of which are part of her legacy. That lesson continues to carry me forward.

This is the first in a series of articles about open ended travel and how to make it happen. If you have questions you’d like Jenn to address, please ask them by posting them on our Facebook page or tweeting them to @edventuremama and @BootsnAll!

To read more about family travel and transformational stories, check out the following articles:

• Sign up for our free program – Plan Your Family RTW Trip in 30 Days
• 21 Reasons to Travel Around the World with Kids…From Those Who Have Done It
• It’s Not What You Think: Long Term Family Travel
• Why You Should Ignore All the Urban Legends & Take The Kids to Mexico
• Searching for Summer
• Trading Divorce for Travel