My husband and I love travel. But I’m betting you guessed that if you’re on my travel blog. Anyway, we’d travel more if we could, heck we’d live in another country, but life seems to get in the way. You know: money, work (but not really because we own our own businesses), and child.
Our son will be 11 next month. He’s stuck in his ways. To help you understand, here’s an excerpt from a book I’m writing about traveling in Provence:
Max is an old man. I mean, he’s 10-going-on-11, but he’s often closed off to new ideas, sticks to his same tried-and-true Nutella sandwich every single day for lunch, and hates it when we disrupt his schedule with spontaneous events. There are not enough words to explain what a curmudgeon this kid is. In fact, he’s actually more like 10 going on 65. If they had a junior chapter of AARP, he would be the president. When he’s tired, he’s cranky as my dad used to get without his nap.
So naturally, we have to think about his feelings before we pack up for points unknown permanently. Still, we’ve devised a plan that the second the kid gets packed up for college, we’re outta here. We’ve decided to spend several months in several cities around the world for a year or two (points TBD) and then find a place to settle down.
The Back Story
How did we get here, you wonder? Well, seeing as how I met my husband in French class, travel has been a part of our relationship since the beginning. We traveled to Europe together just months after we started dating, then we studied in Belgium for a semester the following year. At that point, I started looking for a job in Holland, another favorite country. No luck.
Throughout his career, he’s looked for international opportunities that would allow us to live elsewhere. Nothing panned out.
Then we almost moved to China. I’m talking sell-everything-including-your-3-year-old’s-toys-because-you’ve-got-a-job-in-China. But it was the start of the recession, and the university that wanted us to teach said they couldn’t afford to run the program.
We kept seeking relocation opportunities, at least up until the point when Max started kindergarten. At that point, we felt it would be a disservice to him to uproot him once he’d made friends.
Since then, we’ve traveled for a month at a time, hoping that would be a decent substitute for not living somewhere else. What it’s done is make me want to do it more.
The Plan
Because I run a marketing firm from home, I could feasibly continue to run it from anywhere in the world. My husband, currently at least, is a consultant, so he has flexibility as well. But what I really want to do is get paid for writing about travel. Thus this amazing blog full of samples of my high-quality travel writing. (Pay me to write!) I’ve also written a book about Paris that I won’t promote here because it’s crap, have started a book about Provence, and can see myself writing more travel memoirs. So there’s that.
Being in a country for 2-3 months will, we feel, give us the opportunity to live like locals. Make friends. Get off the beaten path. Experience a place, a culture, and its food. So that’s the plan. There are so many people who’ve done similar things, so there’s a lot of inspiring blogs out there to guide us.
In the meantime, I’m picking up travel writing opportunities where they come. I lucked out and got to contribute content over on Perfectly Provence, and there’s more of that to come.
All this is to say: there’s more to come, folks.