Travel Q&A : Why do we travel?

When people learn that my family travels and homeschools, instantly the questions start flying! How will your kids get into college? Did you win the lottery or something, how can you afford to do that? How will your kids make any friends? Aren't you afraid you'll mess your kids up by taking them out of their schools? What about sports? What about...? Did you consider...? Etc. Etc. Etc.

The questions people have for us have no end. Today I'm going to start answering them! Our lifestyle decision was radical, but it was also endlessly natural and way more attainable than you'd guess! Our first Q&A we're going to address is the most simple, but maybe the most important!

Why?

Why do we travel and homeschool? Why did we sell our house and make this "crazy" decision? The answer is simple: God called us to. For those who have been attuned to

God's calling for them in the past, you'll be able to relate when I say that when you aren't following God's calling for you, He makes things VERY uncomfortable! For years and years we felt uncomfortable with our lifestyle. We were living in it as best we could, but it felt unnatural. It was easy to push away our heart callings at first. However, things started to get harder. We bought a cabin in northern Michigan and slowly began to spend more and more and more time up there. We started skipping school as much as we possibly could.

Things were okay for a while until COVID hit and I started high school. That was when we knew we needed a change. In my freshman year of high school, I received a letter from the school that if I missed anymore days, I wouldn't get credit for the classes I was taking! Even though I still had maintained a 4.0 GPA despite all the missed school, technical rules prohibited me from skipping any more school. With this we felt a cage close around us more tightly! Our schools kept getting shut down because of COVID lockdowns. In Michigan, COVID lockdowns were the worst because you couldn't even go outside due to the winter weather!

My mom was nannying for two families whose children she absolutely loved, but she spent everyday wishing she was nurturing her own children instead. My dad was working remotely by himself at home because he never went back in person after COVID. My siblings and I were stuck wearing masks at school and begging our parents pretty much everyday to skip school and head up north. We all look back on this time as a really rough period. We have always been a really tight knit family, so it was difficult to spend our days only seeing each other at dinner. A typical Tuesday for us was jam packed with activities, and we were usually out of the house from around seven A.M until eighty-thirty or nine at night. My high school was FORTY-FIVE minutes away from home so I was waking up at five-thirty most mornigs. We all had extracurriculars after school and sometimes needed my Grampa to come and pick me up because we couldn't get to everything even with two cars! In the evenings Lucy would be at volleyball, I would be at drama or cheer, and Charlie would be at hockey. We would eat dinner in our cars often. We were only all together as a family for just several minutes and were all too tired at that point for it to be very nice. This was very tiring and unnatural for us. Some people really thrive in these environments, but it wasn't a good pace for our family. It felt like we were all room-mates who slept in the same house but led separate and different lives during the day instead of a family.

In January, for us it just became too much so we decided to finally pursue our heart callings! What did we have to lose? Well maybe a lot, but the potential reward outweighed the risks in our minds. Our parents officially decided that this would be our last school year and then we would travel! We didn't tell anyone until the school year was almost over, but having that knowledge gave us a burst of excited energy to finish out the year! We started traveling in the fall of 2021 and don't regret it in the slightest. The foundations that we gained in Michigan and at our schools are irreplaceable and infinitely valuable. The relationships we had in Michigan with our friends and family were hard to leave behind, but we still nurture them! We look back with countless fond memories and happiness! However, we are so fulfilled and so happy now that we are living out God's plan for us! Of course we still hit rough patches, but we know that this is what He wants our family to be doing! Per usual, He was exactly right with what would fulfill us the most.

So when people ask us why we travel, we usually tell them something like "we felt God calling us to" or "COVID pushed us over the edge." Both are accurate. We travel because its natural and we love getting to spend that time together and do incredible things while we're still young and together! We left the norm behind because it wasn't normal to us; it was unnatural. We travel because its what we're supposed to do.

Sooooooo now I'm going to bounce the question back to you! Please share in the comments below: when is a time in your life (big or small) when following God's plan yielded some awesome results? Let's share our inspiring stories!

In future posts, I'm going to break down more travel questions and answers. Let me know in the comments or a DM: is there any question in particular about our lifestyle that you'd love to have answered?