Hi there, so you’re as crazy as us! Great to meet you. You’re thinking of selling everything you own and setting off to travel the world or just moving abroad for fun. We did just that. We were that family that sells everything to travel. We didn’t sell everything but we sold a lot, and …
Family Gap Year
A lady in our Living Differently group was telling me yesterday how a photo I shared had stuck in her head and constantly inspired her to keep working towards her own dream lifestyle. It was the one below, taken in Richmond Upon Thames, London. Home, after too many years away. It was incredible to be back …
You want to know how to travel the world, right? We’ve done it, so can you. It could be a 2-week vacation to an exotic, far-away place that just puts you a little outside your comfort zone, or you could be wanting to travel for a year, maybe more, as a family, as a single …
It’s traditional to do a year-end wrap post, so here goes with 2016. This year was a big one for me, it was my 50th on this endlessly fascinating planet. I’d like another 50 years of exploration but I doubt that will happen so I’ll just concentrate on sucking all the life out of however …
Thailand is one of the more tricky countries for travellers to handle their travel money at minimum cost. We normally tell our readers just to get money out at ATM s or cash points, but in Thailand, that costs a lot. Just withdrawing cash from an ATM in Thailand can cost you half a day’s budget, …
I received an e-mail from a reader recently. He and his wife were thinking of taking their child on a travel adventure, a taste of worldschooling, but were concerned about socialization. They thought she wouldn’t “get enough socialization away from her friends” and asked for my opinion. It’s an interesting question. Homeschool socialisation (and here …
Finding accommodation as you travel (budget to free being hardest) is a huge topic and one that is mentioned all over this website, but you, and I, need one post to put everything on the same page. Finding a place to stay, be it a hotel, guest house, hostel, apartment, caravan, mud hut or longboat …
I’m famous for saying that AirBnb is useless for families and we never use it. If you’re not on Facebook you may not know that, so I’m putting it out there via the blog today because I’ve (possibly) changed my mind. After 3+ years of full-time travel I’m sitting in a glorious light-filled apartment in …
Shhhh! They’re all asleep. Wiped out like a small pride of lions after a big day on the savannah. All 4 of us in this little apartment, 2 big beds, happy as can be. Chef has his first day off today, he can sleep in. Boo lost a tooth yesterday, he’ll wake to find 2 …
I’m going to say what I really feel (surprised, right?) and that is, long-term family house sitting as part of family travel, isn’t for us. Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s not for you, plenty of families house sit with kids, find good house sits, and enjoy house sitting with kids. But for us, as …
Why do we do this crazy thing, why travel with kids? More importantly, why we think you should travel with your kids, or at least give it some serious thought. By travel I don’t mean a 2 week vacation, that’s fine and absolutely better than nothing but what we’re talking about here is a complete …
When we think of skiing we normally consider Europe, the United States or Canada. Australians often head to Japan or enjoy their own domestic ski slopes. Then there is New Zealand for those in the know, but there are a whole bunch of less well known ski destinations scattered around the globe. My kids learned …
This post is about the planning stage of travel. How we do it and how you could do it. How to put together a big trip, be it a month, three months, a year or an RTW (Round the World Trip). Some tricks and tips to put together a trip and arrange flights, accommodation, tours …
Asia is full of brilliant, sun-drenched beaches that all the family can enjoy. If you’re committed travel-lovers looking for a truly memorable experience and want to feel the warm sand beneath your feet, snorkel over coral reefs, or dine on the best cuisine Asia offers, here are the top beaches you should put on your …
Strewing. What is strewing? Strewing is a common word in homeschooling or unschooling, what does strewing look like in worldschooling? To strew, what to strew. Strewing What’s the definition of strewing? To strew means to scatter or spread objects over an area in an unorganised matter. In an educational setting, these objects could be games, …
It’s true. We are great at budget travel – without a budget. People ask about our travel budget, what it is and how we afford to travel as often and as long as we do. It still surprises me that anyone should care about our finances, but I guess that’s the world we’re in because …
In this post we share the some of the cheaper family accommodation in London that we’ve used over the years. We include cheap hotels for families, hostels in London with family rooms, apartment style hotels, rentals and a few suggestions to save you money on accommodation in London with your family. London is expensive and …
It’s been two years of travel now. Two years of us, the boys and our backpacks. Two years of adventure, fun, amazing times and disasters. Two years taking us from Australia to Asia, to Europe, to the Americas and back. If you haven’t been following along from the start, here’s our journey, the short version. …
Everyone knows you need to haggle over prices in Thailand and most other parts of Asia. Some are good at it, knocking prices down casually with a confident smile, some are rubbish. I fall into the second group. Luckily my 10-year-old son is a haggling ninja. A post and very short video on How to …
A new year is just around the corner, all sparkly and shiny and waiting for you and me to enjoy. It’s there, like a gift full of surprises, fun and excitement. I feel like that about mornings too. Guess I’m lucky. But, and this is a big fat BUT worthy of capitalisation, I’ve been having an …
You may think we’ve not been to many places in 2014, after all, we’ve been exploring London in minute detail since May, but 2014 saw us visit 10 countries in total. We were pretty busy. We’ve loved what we’ve done and it’s amazing to see the changes in the boys, physically, educationally and in every …
What are the best Harry Potter Experiences around the world? Harry Potter experiences can be found in theme parks in the US and Asia, filming locations in the UK, and the Warner Bros Harry Potter Studio tours in Europe and now Asia. We compare them to bring you the best places to go. The author, …
A reader has asked for information on the kayaking and caving trip we took in Vang Vieng Laos, so, happy to oblige, here’s the run down. We took this tour twice, we enjoyed it so much the first time we just had to go again. This was, to us, far more fun than tubing ( …
We are what’s called a digital nomad family. This means that our ability to generate a location independent income while homeschooling (some call it worldschooling) our 2 children, leaves us free to travel and explore the world. It’s about freedom, learning, adventures and stimulation, but it’s also about making memories for the kids and for …
I’ve just checked out Trip Advisor’s Top 25 Landmarks in the World, as voted for by readers. I’ve only been to 8 of them. I’m sure it was a fair vote, but come on, seriously? The Canberra War Memorial? I’ve been, it’s very good, I’m not knocking it. I wonder how it got on that …
We left home with a vague plan to backpack our way around Asia for as many years as possible, with two kids and a tight budget. Well, plans change, life happens and the universe sometimes points you in directions you never anticipated. We never expected to take a cruise, ever, let alone a bargain trans-Atlantic …
Many travellers encounter mosquitoes or mosquitos (both spellings are correct) as they travel in warm and tropical climates. We have travelled for years, and our home base is full of mosquitos. This is what really works in avoiding mosquitos and their bites. Mosquitoes carry diseases that you really want to avoid. If you thought too …
House sitting is a mode of travel in which a volunteer moves into a house to take care of pets, a garden or home, when the owner is away. A house sit can be for a few days or months on end. It is free accommodation for the volunteer house sitter, anywhere in the world. …
If you’ve read our previous post One Year of Travel, What Did it Cost? You’ll know that we worked out our average daily spend for one year to be just under $100 per day. That’s for a family of 4 people, 2 kids, 4 continents, 12 countries, and two cruises. This is a realistic figure …
We’ve been “Living the Dream” for 2 years now. We’ve been travelling full-time, seeing the world and spending most of our time together as a family while hardly working, other than on the blogs. Before we set off on this journey we weren’t rich, we were a very normal family struggling to make ends meet …
We’ve just completed one year of non-stop family travel. We made it from Australia, to Asia, to Europe, to Central and North America and back to Europe. We are very into food, my husband is an exec chef, I’m just a big food freak. We’ve tried some amazing new dishes, bur what were our food …
Now in year 5 of full time travel, I can’t believe we travelled so cheaply in year one. We had $30,000 to spend and we were trying to make it last as long as possible. That sum was for 4 people and you’ll see below how long it lasted and how much travel we got …
This post was written after our first full year of homeschooling around the world. We continues homeschooling worldwide for another 6 years until lockdowns forced us to stop home or world schooling. This is our year end wrap up after homeschooling in Sri Lanka, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, the UK and many more countries. We even …
Travel highlights from the first 1 year of a multi-year trip. Yes, it’s true, we’re just coming up to one year of non-stop travel. It’s flown past, it really has. We thought we’d share our travel highlights, our absolute favourites, the things still fresh in our memories and the things that make us go wow! …
We took 2 10 day + cruises in a year a little while ago. We wouldn’t take a second or third if we hadn’t loved the experience of cruising and found it extremely affordable. We were budget travellers for that year, yet we managed to find 2 cheap cruises within our budget. Our repositioning cruises …
Welcome to our Cheap Family Accommodation UK post. We try to tell you where we stayed and what we paid on every leg of out trip to give you an idea of what bargains are out there. We cheated in the UK. We stayed with friends and family for most of our 5 week stay, but …
How do you start an adventure? I started mine with my first ever blog post on my free wordpress.com site. I took it down when I started a self-hosted blog with my own domain name. (Read how to do that here, I know a lot more about the business of blogging these days, but the …
In our first year on the road we weren’t just about family budget travel, we were rocking extreme budget travel. Our budget for Asia on on our first year of full-time family travel was crazy-low, it hovered between $40 and $50 per day. That’s not much for a family of four and it’s certainly a …
I could tell you how we got from Laos to Bangkok easily on the fabulous sleeper train and how we’re now safely installed in a hotel in Bangkok, but that would be LIES! And I’m not going to lie to you, so here’s all the icky, grumpy, boring bits of real life family travel from …
I keep quoting this figure of $41/day as our budget, that’s actually a lie, our budget for Laos is working out at a lot more than that, everything considered. We’re cheating rather too much on cake, beer and coffee, but Laos is indisputably cheap, cheaper than Thailand, and low accommodation costs are a big part …