Living Differently

Which things do you really need to homeschool on the road? (Some call this form of homeschooling travel schooling, road schooling, or worldschooling) What books, supplies, materials, equipment and resources do you need to carry with you? It’s not much. I’m not going to write a list. I’m not going to make you buy things so …

Thailand is a fantastic, easy, and cheap country to travel around. Thousands of backpackers, travellers and holidaymakers travel within Thailand, and all the other countries in Southeast Asia, daily, this post is about travel options, booking tickets, and arranging travel in and around Thailand, but the same applies to all countries adjacent to and near …

This post is hard to write because our family lifestyle has very little consistency, nothing is fixed and the sands are always shifting. But people ask and people assume, so I’ll do my best to tell you about family life on the road, as it is. We’ve been travelling for 3.5 years now with two …

This post tracks our blogging income for 2021, the second year of the pandemic lockdowns. I’ve been a full-time blogger for almost a decade now. This site is the largest of the 8 websites we own, and normally, it makes the most money. At the end of 2019, as the pandemic hit, we were making …

My kids are big now. Bigger than me. Young people with minds and opinions of their own. I think it’s time to ask them, honestly, what they hated about travel and travelling for 6 full years as a digital nomad family. There must be something, surely? All those long hours on planes, vomit-inducing bus rides, …

Problems of travelling with kids, oh yes, there are a few. Some consider them major problems, others, tiny inconveniences outweighed by rainbow benefits. We are firmly in the second group or we wouldn’t be doing this crazy non-stop travel thing. We did it for 6 years, full-time, maybe we’re nuts. A post on the problems …

I have never, in the 9-year history of this website, posted income reports. I find it uncomfortable to talk about money. I’m British, of course I do. However, 2020 was the year our business was smashed. Monumentally destroyed, by the global pandemic. I thought I’d give you some real figures. How much money we made …

We chose to homeschool almost a decade ago. Today I have teens. One child would be sitting his GCSEs this year and is technically old enough to leave school. Covid seems to have cancelled his exams, but no worry, he can sit them next year, or not at all. The younger child would be in …

This post is about learning to be parents on the road. How we handled parenting children while travelling, without routine, without consistency, schedule, or any of the things the parenting rule books will preach. We believe in throwing rule books out of the window. Parenting and Travel is an extract, edited, from our e-Book, The …

An anonymous commentator dropping their venom under a fake email address felt the need to call our travel lifestyle self-indulgent after we were stranded at an airport recently. Thanks, so nice. These trolls and bitter keyboard warriors maybe don’t realise there is a family of sensitive souls at the other end of the internet just …

Quizzes, be they online, Zoom, virtual, or real-life are all the rage lately for a family game night involving adults, plus some trivia questions for kids. We recently had loads of fun with a family quiz night with our lovely friends in a different hemisphere. We now have to write quiz questions for them, so …

Have you heard about worldschooling (AKA world schooling)? All the cool parents are doing it, it’s the latest buzz word in alternative education. Is it simply taking your kids on holiday to learn about other countries? In this post we try to answer that question, what is worldschooling? We did it for 6 years, during …

Why do people travel? People travel for many reasons and love travel for different reasons too. Some people don’t enjoy travel, but they still have to travel. Reasons to travel can involve work, family, health or medical treatment, social or economic needs. People who love to travel may enjoy relaxation, new cultures, foreign food or …

My dad used to say that to me when I was a kid. ” School days are the happiest days of your life”. I can see from the internet that it’s still a thing, people are searching for posts that tell them how to write an essay, speech or debate on that topic, so I …

We left home over 5 years ago to travel the world and we never wanted to go back. Becoming a modern day nomadic family, a digital nomad family, and adopting the lifestyle worked well for us. We visited around 50 countries, several of those 4 or 5 times. We’ve been to 5 continents and flipped between …

Travel can be one of the most important and incredible things you can do in your lifetime, opening you up to amazing new experiences, teaching you more about the world and its people while giving you a chance to enjoy freedom and exploration. Of course, it also means time when you are not working in …

This is a post about what a modern nomadic lifestyle actually means. We enjoyed this lifestyle of freedom for almost 7 years, a nomad lifestyle with kids, in Asia, Europe, parts of Africa, the USA and Central America. We loved our nomad lifestyle and no, we were not “living hand to mouth”. And then I …

This will be a short post. I’m having one of those unsettled days where I think far too much. I find it’s often best to put troublesome ideas down in writing and share them. That way they’re easier to acknowledge, process and move on. If I were to ask you what you thought were the …

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 …

We’re loving this city in strange and unexpected ways. I’m loving the Thai environment sure, the Old City of Chiang Mai with its ancient walls, stunning temples and teak houses, the amazing Thai food and it’s abundant availability, the clear blue skies and tropical heat, but I’m loving it in more than a tourist-sort-of-way. I’m …

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 …

Hi guys, greetings from London where we’re sweltering in the final throws of summer. We made the mistake of taking the tube into China Town on the hottest day of the year for a family lunch today.  It was a great lunch, it’s a family tradition of ours to do lunch on Chef’s day off, …

I get ideas for posts in all kinds of ways, sometimes I want to tell a story about some cool  place we’ve been, sometimes I want to help or inspire, sometimes ideas just pop into my head and sometimes, like today, I get ideas from other people’s words. Earlier this week I read a post …

My husband (Chef) was on the phone to his sister. She asked where we were, what we were up to, where we were going next, “Well right now I’m eating breakfast in a hostel in Kuala Lumpur, but tomorrow? No idea” Yesterday our great-grand-nanna asked where we’d be next week. I said I didn’t know. “And …

4 amazing years of seeing the world, somewhere between 35 and 50+ countries each, an amazing education for the kids and a new career for me. More family time, more fun, less work. But to some it must look crazy. How can we prefer backpacks to bedrooms, co-working spaces to steady jobs and challenging destinations …

This post, and entire “Living Differently” series, was written when I finally woke up to what we’d achieved, and realised that we were living life differently and loving it. It was the moment everything changed for us and our website’s following and monthly views started going through the roof. It was when I first came …

Who reads blogs? Why do people read blogs and what is the point of blogging? A look at the blogging industry, which is still very lucrative today, and why people need and read blogs still. I am a blogger, I have been a blogger for over a decade and I doubt I will ever quit …

This morning at sunrise I sat down to my computer to start my work for the day. It’s what I do every morning before the kids wake up. The first thing I do is check my emails, messages, data and comments. Some good news, some bad, a couple of lovely comments and readers asking for …

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 …

It may look like we’ve spent most of 2015 not travelling, sitting here in our little house in Romania, but we’ve been to 16 countries this year. I know! I couldn’t believe it either. They haven’t all been short trips, a month here, a month there, a few flying visits and long stays in London and Romania, …

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, …

I’m going to introduce you to our neighbours and share a book, Somewhere Different, with you. I want to let you now about a family with an incredible survival story and an interesting outcome. It’s a story that has now become entwined with ours. We met them over the internet and we’ve ended up neighbours  in Breb …

Our lifestyle isn’t conventional. We travel and have done for over 2 years now, we do unusual things like falling in love with Romanian village life and buying houses in rural Romania, some people think we’re crazy, but that’s cool. Sometimes I think we’re crazy too. Yesterday I reshared an old post, a reader had …

Many people talk of travel when they win the lottery. That would be what it would take for them to really start living, start travelling and have more free time. It’s not true you know. You don’t have to win the lottery to make big changes to the way you live. I commented on our …

World Travel Family, a name picked for SEO reasons, we don’t call ourselves that in real life. We are just a normal family, like yours, the only thing different about us is our passion for travel and education and our tendency to share destinations and travel experiences on our websites and social media. We hope, 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. …

One day we were enjoying India in beautiful Kovalam, planning our next-day flight to Kathmandu and subsequent overland return to North India, the next we were landing in Heathrow, tired, displaced, confused, sick and thoroughly disorientated. It was a very weird experience, India one day, London the next. We hadn’t had enough, a month in …

We’ve been in Istanbul now for almost 2 weeks so I thought I’d do one of those posts where I tell you about life on the road, what we’re doing, why we’re doing, what’s Istanbul like and what is there to see and do. The Istanbul Blog We love Istanbul. We’ve explored and roamed this …

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 …