Our Crazy Worldschool Year

Here we are… Late August, the “dog days of summer,” normally a time to prepare for the return of classroom routines and all that.

But instead of normal “back to school” worries, I am currently contending with some new and unique anxieties, centered around our impending departure from the US. You see, instead of doing “normal” things, we’ve decided to leave “normal” behind and spend the next year traveling internationally while “worldschooling” our three children.

While very exciting, this choice has led to occasional yet exponentially-increasing anxieties.

First let’s start with a trip-logistics worry that kept me up last night… Will Route 32 (the main thoroughfare connecting Costa Rica’s capital, San Jose, with our first “hometown” on the Caribbean coast) be closed again when we arrive due to persistent rain and mudslides?

You see, it’s the rainy season in Costa Rica. I knew this when I booked our trip. However, normally the Caribbean has a mini “dry season” of its own in September and October, thus my well-researched decision to first spend a month in the Caribbean town of Puerto Viejo. However, it’s been an unusually intense El Nino year, and as a result the east coast of Costa Rica has been hammered by wave after wave of rain for weeks on end.

In addition to the dampening of our sunny beach dreams, this has led to mountainsides between the capital of San Jose and our weather-dependent Caribbean “paradise” falling into the roadway, repeatedly leading to days-long road closures. Google Maps recommended going through the country of Panama as an alternate route, adding a day or so to our journey, a less than ideal alternative.

So I lay awake thinking, “What happens if the road is closed when we need to get through or a mudslide takes us out en route, or we all get dengue fever, or malaria, or…?” Never mind my concern about how the nonstop rain may make any of us feel about our new “home.”

This “trip-related” anxiety then gets compounded by a “life-related” anxiety, the main one currently being, “What the actual f** are we doing!?”

We just sold our house, quit our jobs, said goodbye to our friends, uprooted our kids’ lives, and are voluntarily going on a year-long “road trip” just weeks after swearing off from road trips for the rest of our lives after returning from a memorable, yet white-knuckled and conflict-rich cross-country jaunt.

But we’re doing this! And we’re doing this on purpose!? Yes! (?)

“But,” you might say, “nobody does this. This is very, very uncommon.”

I know this! In fact, I know this too well from the looks on people’s faces as I sense their internal circuits jamming and combusting while I tell them about our upcoming adventures.

“And it was a choice, right!?” Yes, yes it was. It was a choice made after months of research and planning, several years after the seed of a dream was planted.

Around 2020, I stumbled across some blogs of families who had decided to leave the “American Dream” behind and set out on globe-trotting adventures to “worldschool” their kids. As an educator with a background in alternative education and social studies, a love of travel, and enough disillusionment with our own culture to pine for a change of scenery, the seed of this idea found fertile ground.

The timing wasn’t right in 2020, though. We had three kids under five, my father-in-law’s February 2020 death in a fat tire biking accident left Tasha grief-stricken, and there was a pesky (and travel-hampering) Covid-19 pandemic to contend with. So, yeah, the timing wasn’t right.

But that dream seed never left my skull garden, and slowly things changed. I left teaching and returned to teaching, then decided to leave again. Once Tasha and I decided the time was right to sell our house in Nobleboro, Maine, after eight years, the seed resurfaced as a seedling, and I proposed my hare-brained idea to Tasha.

“Hey, what if instead of just buying another house a little further south in Maine, we stored our most important belongings and spent a year traveling the world and homeschooling our kids? Then we can get back to ‘normal’ if we want.”

She agreed, but counter-offered by requesting an itinerary that let us more or less skip winter. Seeing as Tasha has weathered a lifetime of Maine’s seemingly never-ending winters, it felt a fair compromise. So I spent the next several months carefully researching and meticulously planning our “endless summer worldschool year.”

And now it’s happening!

So here we are. Still unsure if there will be a road to get us to our first home, but flying to Costa Rica on September 9 regardless. We’ll spend just over three months there, before visiting family in the Los Angeles area for Christmas. On January 1, we’ll fly to Australia and then in mid-February to New Zealand, before heading to Spain and Portugal in the spring. If we still have money and patience left, we’ll spend summer in the British Isles.

I hope you join us for the journey! We’ll be posting weekly updates here. We’ll also include a post on our summer road trip, with some highlights (and lowlights – because I promise we will not be “that” social media family who fantastically seems to have all fun and no trouble or sadness).

The website will be built out and improved upon over the coming months. And for those who are interested, I’ll eventually post some of my prior blog posts and writings in the “Archive” section.

Thanks for visiting – we hope to see you again soon!