The Decision is Final! We are Going to Travel the World with kids

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Last Updated on April 3, 2024 by Leslie Stroud

Oh. My. Goodness.

My mind is a jumble of excitement, nervousness, being overwhelmed, and feeling incredibly blessed!

We are going to do IT. The IT we’ve been brainstorming, daydreaming about, talking about endlessly. We are going to pack up our belongings in a storage unit, get out of our rental house, and travel. Oh, and we have five young kids in tow.

Like most people who choose a life path as this do, we are doing it our way. The way that feels most comfortable to us. It isn’t the way many others will and have done. And that is OK. We will probably spend more than most. We will take some risks others wouldn’t. We will do this all in our style.

A bit about us: most of our initial readers will already know us, of course! We are a family of seven. We have been married for 13.5 years and have five kids ages 10-8 months. We have two girls, our bookends, and three boys in the middle. Our life is in a constant state of chaos, noise, fighting, laughter, and, hopefully, a lot of love mixed in. We have learned that we absolutely LOVE to travel with our kids. We’ve been taking babies and toddlers traveling internationally for many years. It is a bit harder this year with five in tow, but we just did a 7-night cruise and extra days on each end of our trip with all five.

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Every day has its highs and lows. Every day, we wonder why we decided to travel, and every day, we wonder why we don’t do it more. Like most good things in parenthood, it is a constant dichotomy!

A bit about our “big trip”: We’ve been talking about taking our family on the road, in a sense, for a few years. We own our business, which consists of basically my husband doing online marketing for mid-sized, well-funded companies. We are now in our ninth year of business. My husband can do all his work online and has done variations of that for many years.

In 2014, we did a trial period. We rented a house in Florida, on Sanibel Island, for the month of June. Why a month? Because that was the minimum amount by county law. So we took our (then) three children and went. The month period was very interesting for us. It was long enough that we could settle in. We made good friends. We felt what it would be like to live there. We looked at real estate (because we fell in love with it everywhere we go). The first few days were very lonely for me. I cried in the shower one night because I realized and knew that NO ONE was THERE outside with the kids I was taking care of. However, I got to know some women through the church. They were kind and invited me to join their families for their summer activities at the beach. It was like a lifeline to me!

Us and our, then, three kids in lawn chairs on the beach

At the end of the month, we didn’t want to leave. We were ready to leave our possessions back in Colorado and just move on. I have a feeling we will feel that way most everywhere we go.

So, we are going to stay in places we go to for about a month. Yes, this will limit how much we can see. However, that’s OK. I don’t need to see everything a country/city/state has to offer. We want a flavor of the place. We want to see our family in that place. We want to grow in that place- not sightsee at breakneck speeds. We want our kids to call it “home,” even though it hasn’t been home for very long.

Finer details: We don’t have everything nailed down. This is due to just how busy we are every day, limits on how far out you can plan, and our need to “feel things out” for a while before we decide. What we have nailed down is this: starting this summer, we are packing up everything except our travel backpacks and 1-2 pieces of luggage. The luggage will carry my husband’s work equipment and some of our other larger necessities. We are still finalizing what those are.

We will head to Denver first to spend time with my parents. Then onto Honduras for a week’s vacation.

Next Portland. Next Pacifica. Next Anaheim. Then onto Hawaii. After that? We think we will venture into Asia. It is extremely hard to pick just a handful of places on the map!

Our goals: Grow together. Show our children how little space they actually take up in this world. Make priceless memories. Figure out where we want to settle down after this trip. Figure out if we ever want to be permanently settled.