Posts – Page 4 – Kids on Camels

How to leave your home and travel for a year

We’re leaving for a year! Finally, after over a dozen years of planning! It’s exciting! Right?

Well, of course it is. It is now, at least, now that I’m writing this from Stockholm, a couple of days into our trip. The last couple of months, though, were really stressful. When you’re a family of five living in a community for 18 years, there are a lot of ties you need to cut and/or preserve. That’s not to mention planning for the actual trip. Here’s a rundown of some of the biggest things we’ve been focused on for the past few months.

The House and our stuff

We’re coming back to our house at the end of our trip, so are renting it out while we travel. The renting part is pretty straightforward because we’re paying a management company to find the renter and manage everything while we’re away. It’s still stressful, though, because we hadn’t found a renter by the time we left, so Karen is still texting the agent from Stockholm about the latest, although we know it will get rented eventually. At least the showings are now easier since we’re no longer trying to live in the house.

And those showings were just a small part of the hassle of the house the last couple of months. Mostly, it was Karen’s constant task to pack everything up progressively and put most of our stuff into the crawl space in the back of the house. (A few weeks ago, when she took down all the wall hangings, James indignantly asked, “are we just going to have to live in a boring house for the next 10 days?!”) She fit almost everything into the 10′ x 12′ x 4′ space with an astonishing feat of three dimensional packing. For what didn’t fit there, we rented a small UHaul and moved to my parent’s basement a couple weeks before we left. (Thanks, Mom and Dad!)

We also had to leave our pets: the five chickens we’ve had since the start of the pandemic (donated to a local woman who was excited to get started with grownup hens) and the foster dog, Shelby, we’ve had for the last 6 months.

Shelby — They’ve been trying to pet the dogs here in Stockholm too

Money and work

It’s no exagerration to say that I gave 10 years notice that I was leaving my job. During my interviews, when asked how long I’d stay if hired, I said I was leaving, for this trip, in the summer of 2020. I then continued to remind my managers of the not-so-imminent impending departure every year. So, luckily the transition was several years in the making, especially with the extra couple of years the pandemic added to our well laid plans.

In fact, we’ve been planning the trip for 14 years now. It was Karen’s idea when Henry was a baby, so among other things, we’ve been saving up for most of that time in order to spend over a year on the move without any income.

That’s probably the biggest positive of our pandemic delay–the chance to save up a little more funds and consequently spend a little more time than originally planned in more expensive places like Europe. We’re definitely on a budget, though, and were delighted to learn that we could get 3 months of unlimited train travel for the whole family for $3,300. Our accomodation, mostly Airbnbs, are all at least $100-150/night, so our budget is definitely looking forward to the second half of the trip where we’ll be staying in more inexpensive places in Asia and South America.

Homeschooling

One big reason we’d planned the trip for 2020 was to time it to be Henry’s 7th grade year. We figured most kids would appreciate missing the middle year of middle school, and the academics aren’t so rigorous that we were overly concerned. Of course, now with the delay, Karen and I will be his 9th grade instructors and Henry very much wants to keep up academically with his friends.

Thankfully, his high school, Oak Park River Forest, has been incredibly helpful. When I reached out to the department heads for each of the subjects he was scheduled to take, all of them shared plans for what they’re covering so we can give Henry comparable lessons. The math department did even better and set him up as a student in their online class so he can do the exact same Advanced Algebra as his peers.

In terms of the actual “school year” and “school day”, we haven’t exactly figured that out yet, but are hoping we can do a lot of the work during the aforementioned train times. Charlie and James will be doing 6th and 3rd grade, but the standards they’re supposed to learn are pretty straightforward with lots of online resources.

Actual travel

And, of course, none of that even gets to the fact that we have to plan the actual one-year trip too. The rough plan, which will likely change some, is to spend about 3 months in Europe, 3 months in the Middle East and Africa, 4 months in Asia/Oceania, and 3 months in South and Central America.

We’ll mostly try to do most of the planning 1-2 weeks in advance, but because we’re starting during the high travel season in Europe in the summer, we’ve been trying to plan out our hotels/Airbnbs and trains/airplanes for that first 3 months ahead of time. So far, we’ve got 23 hotels/Airbnbs booked and about as many trains, planes, and rental cars planned out. (We’re planned through mid-August as of now.)

So, to summarize, it’s been a lot of things to think about! We’ve had a great last few days in Stockholm, though, and are grateful to final have this opportunity!

We came, we saw, we ate, I ran

Just a quick post, almost two months later, but I wanted to capture here our first flights since the pandemic started. Here’s just me and Karen on our way to Rome at the end of March:

Recovering after — And here’s the traditional crash (briefly) in the bed after the transatlantic flight

It was only a brief rest, though, because we were only in Italy (without the kids!) for a short 72 hours. Our first night and then Saturday, we walked all over and took in some of the sights of the city. Saturday afternoon, we went to the Vatican and took a tour of the museums before heading over to a fancy dinner in Trastavere.

St Peter's Square, Vatican City — St Peter’s Square, Vatican City

Raphael's School of Athens — Raphael’s School of Athens, Vatican Museums

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Friday night party in Trastevere square (@kidsoncamels)

Sunday morning was the marathon! I ran with 10,000 other people through central Rome. The first half or so of the 26.2 miles covered neighborhoods that Karen and I had already walked through. I was excited to finish in 4 hours and 5 minutes, which was a personal best by at least 12 minutes. (This was my third marathon ever.)

Waiting to start! Masks on at the start and for the first half mile or so.

9 miles into it. Doesn’t that guy to the right look SUPER Italian?

Passing Piazza Navona, only a couple miles left

Karen proudly slept in while I ran my race, but we ate some pizza in a park afterwards and then went out for a second fancy dinner before flying home the next day! Both of us have visited before, so we didn’t feel bad about skipping a few of the big sites, but we’re definitely planning to return with the boys, likely in September.

Speaking of our trip, we leave in 2.5 weeks! Our first stop will be Stockholm. I’m planning to post something here roughly every week, posting more frequently to Instagram. Next week, I plan to write about some of the logistics of taking a one year trip around the world while homeschooling three kids. (As a preview, the logistics are mostly annoying.)

Since this is intended to be a family blog and I’ve only shown me and Karen so far, here is a recent shot of the boys with their fancy easter baskets at my parents’ house.

Easter 2022. Only one egg stayed missing.

Marathon Madness!

I wasn’t sure if I’d ever run a marathon. It’s something I toyed with briefly in my late 20s, but shin splints and long hours of work quickly put it out of my mind.

That was until I turned 40 and decided to do a half marathon to mark the occasion. Here I am finishing that race in Maine in 2016:

The Rail Trail Half Marathon, Augusta, Maine

I did one every year after that and was about to run my annual half for 2020 in Oakland, California when the pandemic hit. Realizing we’d have to postpone our trip around the world, as a consolation I decided to run my first marathon in the fall. The regimen and repetition of the training was a comfort to me for those middle months of the year as the pandemic stretched on.

Of course, unfortunately no marathons were held that fall, so I just made one up to run by myself. Karen dropped me off at a park in Indiana and I ran the 26.2 miles home. I picked the same day that the Chicago Marathon would have run in October for my “Chicago Marathon” and ran past 5 of Noble’s schools, so someone from our sports team followed me and made this cool video to commemorate the event. (Thanks, Anna!)

In 2021, I finally ran the real Chicago Marathon:

Even though I look in pain there, my training was good and I felt fine a couple of days later. Good enough that I thought I ought to squeeze one more big race in before we start traveling for a year this summer. I’d been eyeing the beginning of April in St. Louis over the boys’ spring break, but had to look for something else when we changed plans for that weekend.

Then, I got an email about $500 flights to Rome. We haven’t been on a plane since Jan 2020. But…in my search for marathons to replace the St. Louis one, I’d briefly noticed that the big one in Rome was on March 27. I’d assumed it was out of the question. Maybe not? (Obviously not.)

So, Karen and I are going to Rome for 4 days while my brother Paul and his wife Özlem come and watch the boys. It’s kind of a crazy thing to do, but crazy like we’re used to doing. It feels good after this long pandemic, which we’re hoping will stay manageable.

To make things even crazier, we’d already noted a cool opportunity at the beginning of our “big, big trip”. We’re starting off in Stockholm on June 10 and realized that on my next birthday, 8 days later, there was going to be the “Midnight Sun Marathon” north of the Arctic Circle in Tromsø, Norway. It starts at 8:30pm and even though I’ll finish after midnight, I’ll have daylight the whole time. Since all of the training will happen before we go, it somehow works. More of the good kind of crazy. Charlie and Karen are planning to run the shorter race there too.

So, even though I’ve never really been a marathon runner, that’s how I’m going to end up doing 3 of them over the course of 10 months. I’m excited for how memorable the races I’m running are meant to be. In fact, this article puts all 3 on a list of the 23 “World’s best marathons in 2022”. I won’t really have time to train after Tromsø, but can’t help but think how fortunate I am to get to do all of this.

(Cross-posted to mattniksch.com)