What 7 Years of Full Time Family Travel Actually Taught Us

We just passed our seven-year full time family travel anniversary. The part that stayed with us most isn’t a place. It’s what the whole thing taught us about how we want to live.

Ask my almost-fourteen-year-old why he likes traveling the world, and he’ll tell you he’s on a mission to find the best internet, because he’s a gamer.

That’s it. That’s his answer.

He’s built a snowman on a cruise ship deck, from snow thrown off A23a, an iceberg so enormous it was still making its own weather.

He’s driven the length of two continents on the Pan-American Highway. But the through-line of his childhood, in his telling, is broadband.

I love that about him. Because for all the extraordinary in his life, he came out remarkably, wonderfully normal.

Which is funny, considering his parents.

We didn’t blow up a normal life to travel full-time. We never really had one to blow up. Back in Chicago, we kept chickens in the city.

I was the working parent while David ran the home, stayed involved at school, and juggled side hustles, the opposite of the setup we were “supposed” to have.

Our kid did kindergarten and first grade at a Spanish-immersion public school, learning most of his day in a language we didn’t speak at home.

We’ve always walked to a different beat. Having a kid didn’t change that. It just gave us someone small to bring along.

So in the summer of 2019, we left. Chicago in June, the country by October. Full-time travel wasn’t a personality transplant. It was just the fullest version of who we already were.

Seven years later, here’s what it actually taught us.

We can handle more than we think

The first thing this life taught us, it taught us fast.

Five months in, we flew to Malaysia to meet up with about twenty other traveling families. Six weeks at Legoland, then on to Hong Kong, Shanghai, and South Korea. That was the plan.

Then the world shut down.

The borders started closing. One by one, the families we’d come to see packed up and flew home. Our travel besties left with two hours’ notice, a car to the airport, gone. I stood outside their building and watched it pull away while Little Man refused to say goodbye.

We could have gone home too. Plenty did, and no one would have blamed us. Several people in the US offered to put us up if we “came home”. It was the easy, reasonable call.

We stayed instead. We talked about it late that night, after Little Man was asleep, and neither of us could explain exactly why. We both just knew we wanted to. So we did.

Those two weeks became more than seventeen months in Malaysia, thanks to an overstay amnesty I’ll always be grateful for. Those months were hard in ways I didn’t have words for at the time.

Looking back, I was depressed and too busy getting my kid through each day to notice. But we got through it. Five months into this life, barely knowing what we were doing, we handled the thing everyone else fled.

It took me years to understand what that actually gave us. Not a good story. Proof. If we could get through that, this early, we could get through just about anything.

Nothing since has scared me the way it probably should have, because we’d already done the hard thing before we knew we could.

Home is wherever the family is

We don’t have a house. No country that’s officially ours, no address that stays put. For a long time, I thought that I would feel unmoored. It doesn’t.

Somewhere in these seven years, home quietly stopped being a place. It became the people in the car. The house-sit dog asleep on our feet in a stranger’s kitchen we’re watching for the month.

Wherever the three of us are, that’s home. We’ve felt at home in dozens of countries and homesick in exactly none of them, because home has been sitting right next to us the whole time.

The people stretch wider than the three of us, too. This life is full of goodbyes, friends made fast and left too soon, and I used to think that was the hard part.

It turns out the goodbyes get easier, not harder. Not because we stop caring, but because “so good to see you again” keeps happening far more than we ever expected.

You say goodbye to someone on the road, then run right into them three countries later. Some friends we’ve now seen on multiple continents. The hard part isn’t the goodbye anymore. It’s not knowing if, or when, the reunion will come.

Those are our people. The ones who turn into family out here, scattered all over the planet now. They’re the best part of this whole life.

Some places wow you. Some don’t. Both are fine.

Seven years in, here’s something I wish I’d known at the start. You don’t have to love the places you’re supposed to love.

We skipped Kyoto our first time through Japan, then made it there on a return trip. And it was fine. Beautiful, sure, but so packed with foreigners that whatever magic we’d been promised never quite showed up. That’s not Kyoto’s fault.

We’ve spent so much time in Japan now that when we land somewhere swarmed with westerners, we feel the same tourist fatigue a lot of Japanese people do. Honestly, we’re part of it. I still wrestle with that.

Some places we visited just didn’t land for us, even ones people rave about. Not because there’s anything wrong with loving them, plenty of people do, but because once we looked past the glossy version, we saw things we couldn’t unsee.

Like Bali, where the tourist economy seemed to matter more than whether locals had basic sanitation.

Or Cartagena, a famous beach town that pipes raw sewage into the sea near its resorts, where a local friend quietly rerouted us to cleaner water on the islands instead.

That’s the thing slow travel gave us. Time. Enough time to actually know a place instead of rushing it, and enough experience to tell the difference between somewhere that’s touristy for a genuinely good reason and somewhere that’s just a well-marketed trap.

We don’t need to see everything. We don’t need to love what we’re told to love. And we almost never regret skipping something, because in this life, skipped usually just means not yet.

Mostly, it’s just life

The influencers who sell this lifestyle never talk about how most of this life is deeply ordinary. We go to the dentist. We do laundry. Our son got his first pair of glasses in Cusco, same errand as anywhere, just with better scenery.

We still eat McDonald’s, too. It used to be Little Man’s favorite, a reliable taste of home when everything else was foreign. Somewhere along the way that flipped.

He’s tried so much food around the world now that McDonald’s lost its shine, and these days we go more for the novelty than the craving. The menu is different in every country, so we make a point of it wherever we land.

An ebi shrimp burger in Japan, a Brekkie Burger at Macca’s in Australia, where even the name is different. Same yellow arches, same life, quietly rewired by where we happen to be.

That’s the whole thing, really. It isn’t a permanent vacation. It’s a normal childhood set against an ever-changing backdrop. Homework and dentist visits and new glasses, in Okinawa one month and Bangkok the next.

Maybe that’s exactly why our kid turned out so normal. Underneath the extraordinary, his life has always had the most ordinary bones.

The best moments are almost never the ones you plan

Machu Picchu lived up to the hype. It was on my lifetime bucket list, we hired a local guide, and it was worth every single penny. Some famous things are famous for a reason.

But when I think about Cusco, that’s not the first thing I reach for.

I think about the puzzle cafe. We stumbled into it one of our first mornings there, hunting for coffee before we’d managed to buy groceries.

It was just a little spot full of puzzles and good food. And we went back, once or twice a week, the whole time we were there. The staff got to know us. We got to know them. It became ours.

That’s the pattern, seven years running. The moments that stick are rarely the ones we scheduled. Not the landmark, but the cafe near it. Not the itinerary, but the accident.

So we leave big gaps in the plan now. Room for whatever the next puzzle cafe turns out to be.

Seven years into full time family travel

That kid who wouldn’t say goodbye in a Malaysia parking lot is almost fourteen now.

He grew up out here. He learned to sandboard in Peru and ski in Patagonia. He learned how the Maya designed their temples from a guide at Chichen Itza whose ancestors built them.

He can walk into any playground on earth and come out with a friend in about four minutes flat. Yes, even at 14, we still hit up an occasional playground.

Thanks to the lack of peer pressure from classmates in a school, he’s holding onto his childhood longer than I expected.

A while back, he asked us to slow down. To stay put longer in each place, to have a little more consistency now that he’s a teenager. So we did. Not because we’re done, but because this was always supposed to be built around him.

So that’s where we are, seven years in. Still going. No house, no residency, no plans to head back to where we started.

We’re spending another year or two deeper into Asia, and then we’re dreaming of a base somewhere with four real seasons, so he can get back to the snow he fell for in Patagonia. Maybe we’ll even go back there because we did miss a few things we want to go back to.

He’s picked up things out here you can’t teach in a classroom. How to solve a problem in a language he doesn’t speak. How to be the new kid, again, and be fine. How to be comfortable anywhere.

And he still wants to know where the good wifi is. Because underneath all of it, he’s just a kid who likes his games. We gave him the whole world, and the thing he wanted most was a strong connection and someone to play with.

Some days I still wonder if we made a mistake. If a kid needs a hometown, a bedroom that stays his, friends he doesn’t have to say goodbye to.

Then I watch him wander into a new country like he owns it, and I stop worrying. He’s more at home in the world than most people ever get to be.