3 Things We’ve Learned While Living Outside the USA

When you live a “different” life than most people, you get to see life through a different pair of lenses.  Whether you homeschool or are a vegan or walk and bike instead of drive a car, the opportunity arises for you to be outside of the norm and experience, even if it’s just a tiny bit, what life is like as a minority.

I’m certainly not comparing our life as long term travelers to those who have suffered the injustices of discrimination due to race or religion, but there are some things that only other traveling families “get” about our lifestyle.

“Lifestyle”

That sounds so strange…yet we have fashioned the life we currently live based on our families goals, desires and faith.  And during this season of being thankful, I am thankful for the lessons (good and bad) we have learned along the way.

So what have been 3 things we’ve learned on this journey?

1.)  It is okay to not know where you’ll be 6 months from now! 

You may not know that we went from happy Florida residents one day to “frantic sellers of all our stuff so we can take a HUGE leap of faith-ers” the next.  We literally had our landlady show up one afternoon with a pie in her hands to tell us she couldn’t extend our lease (as we’d planned) and needed to move into her house in THREE months.

3 months + 2800sq ft of stuff + 5 kids + picking a place to live next with only weeks before our departure + transitioning our main business & income source into new hands = CRAZINESS!

But, we did it.  We uprooted and left everything familiar to embark on a life of travel experiences to enrich all of our lives.  Some people spend years planning and purging.  Not us.  I think I would have lost my sanity.  It was SO hard at times, but I never want to diminish the fact that we did it!

I used to be such a planner.  I wanted to know everything as far in advance as possible.  There are times when some certainty is nice, but I’m coming to grips that life isn’t always a pretty straight line.  There can be good curves and bad ones and not living with a certain level of expectations of how life is going to be can be good!

We’ve now been “travelers” or “expats” for 15+ months and have no clue where we will be in another 6 months.  Like Abraham and Sarah in the Bible, we’re on a journey and we only see enough into the future to take the smallest step forward, yet like these Biblical characters, we know we’re on the correct path. 

Only other traveling families seem to understand this…we had “these” plans to go “here”, but now “that” country looks more appealing and “this” airline has super low fares to “there” right now, yet “which one” to pick?  It can be overwhelming and exciting, all at the same time and I am thankful to know that not having a plan “set in stone” is okay!

But, in all of this, we get to mingle with people from a different culture.  Life, as we live it, is NOT a vacation.  We do normal stuff every day, but in some pretty cool locations as non-locals.  Yes, sometimes we get what is called the “gringo special” when someone takes advantage of us, but those times are few and far between in the places we’ve been so far.  I’m thankful that slow travel affords us the opportunity to live a fairly normal life, lost teeth and all, no matter where we are on this beautiful planet.

Travel is an amazing teacher, often showing you things you need to learn without realizing how much you needed to learn them.  Other traveling families have shared what they have learned from their travels.  You can read about the lessons they’ve learned through the links below.

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Thanks for reading!