Slow traveling with kids: Traveling globally to live locally
I enjoyed slow traveling beginning before college, before it had a name. From the age of 18 on in non-chronological order: A year in Denmark, three months in Baltimore, Jerusalem, New Jersey/New York, San Francisco, Tromsø (Norway). A month in Cairo, in Manila, on trains in Europe. Nearly a year at the South Pole in Antarctica — perhaps as slow as it gets. Five years with Boston as a home base, then Zurich, the Los Angeles. Countless weekends and weeks on all seven continents with some cities/locations as hubs I kept returning to. New York, San Francisco, Paris, Hawaii, Berlin. Attempts at assimilating in various cultures and languages, and always the chance to start anew, to restart when I returned to home base.
Then came two babies and a two year pandemic isolation — slow travel in my own home, living in an exotic cultural world of new norms and challenges. I remember at the onset of the pandemic thinking that it would be hard to compare my pandemic isolation to that of Antarctica, because it would be much shorter. It lasted more than twice as long. My radius in geographic and social context reduced to a perimeter of my nuclear family. Husband, two toddlers, a job done over wires without leaving my bedroom. And as we emerged from it all: a chance to restart, to redefine home base: and to leave home base again, this time as a group.
As the pandemic receded in the concerns of many in 2022, I reflected on what this transition meant for my family. Face-to-face time had become an incredibly valuable currency to me, and one that I didn’t want to squander on experiences that weren’t meaningful (casual workplace interactions, casual acquantainces). At the same time, in the previous years I had learned how much I valued spending time during the day in my house and with my family, and yet how much I needed and missed a real community for myself and my kids. A job pushing for in person work and a preschool which was a 30 minute commute away no longer fit my values.
Starting in March 2022, in the space of three months, I found a fully remote software engineering management job, in a fully remote organization. I found a new preschool for my children, walking distance away, where I could volunteer alongside my kids, pick them up at a moment’s notice without a car, and meet more local children and families. I moved the majority of my services (grocery, health, errands) to within a mile radius, and bought an e-bike. I began my new job and my kids started their new preschool in the fall of 2022. I even kicked off an unsuccessful run for my city council and met hundreds of my neighbors.
My “pivot to local” was an attempt to hoard my valuable time for my family and community, and to invest in relationships with those who surround me. To do that I had to cut out or move items in my life which were casual, far away, or both. This local investment for me is ongoing, and challenging in Los Angeles: a car based, spread out, culture, where children’s and parent’s social lives often revolve around structured disparate activities instead of free play or meaningful conversations.
What I really want out of a community is something that is difficult to achieve with geographical spread based on chance, heritage, or work. I wanted adventure, family community for both children and adults, shared experiences, valuable work, and education. As I realized the challenges of achieving this full-time in any given location, I began to search for a part-time way, targeting summer of 2023 as my first toe dip into that. This co-existed with the goal to resume travel (and specifically slow travel) now that I had a family, and a world I was willing to travel in.
I was delighted to come across a few organizations targeting remote workers traveling with families, and to sign up with one: Noma Collective, for a four week trip summer of 2023. I just finished four weeks in Belize with Noma Collective, during their family edition. This brought together roughly a dozen families to a single location in Belize, and held a summer camp for children, events for kids and adults, and a coworking space and community.
The summer camp was organized as a collaboration between local Belizian and American Montessori educators, and held onsite. My camp dropoff/pickup “commute” was approximately a minute, and my kids participated in activities like swimming, cooking, learning Creole and Spanish, and about local flora and fauna, alongside children who happened to live a minute from them as well. My eldest child complimented the camp saying they liked it because “it was like Magic School bus, every day”, which I consider the highest of compliments.
Each week there was a predictable schedule for the group: family yoga several mornings, adult yoga several evenings, family group dinners Wednesdays, family inside outings Friday nights, family outdoor outings Saturdays, and adults outing Saturday nights, plus a variety of self-organized impromptu outings, playdates, and get togethers organized in the Slack group for the community. Childcare was provided during the camp, for the adult outings, and was easily and affordably available outside of that from the community or a team of trusted babysitters the community relied upon.
All the while, each of us continued to do our day jobs — over the internet, out of a variety of locations, including on on-site coworking space and restaurant, our condos, and a variety of coffee shops and restaurants in town. Here truly was everything all in one place: not within a radius measured in miles, but in a radius measured in feet. Experiencing this, it seems to me the way families are meant to be raised, with education and work, peers for all ages, and community coexisting in a single location.
At the end of my Noma trip, I signed on for another two weeks in Belize, this time on vacation (yay) with less of a community (b00) as my Noma friends and family departed. Four weeks seemed just not quite enough to spend getting to know a place. I’m now confidently able to say I’m ready to sign up my family for more next summer, should it work out: hopefully for 6–8 weeks. I’m curious to see if Noma plans to offer another family edition, and also considering another organization — Boundless Life — which caters solely toward families with cohorts in four locations throughout the year.
All the while, I hope to replicate some of this experience locally for myself and my family by continuing my investments in my local community. I also hope that more organizations and communities spring up to offer more choice in terms of specific amenities, cost, and location for those seeking pop-up communities for our families outside of our home-bases. I hope you and your family consider joining me — by building up your local community, or meeting up in a pop-up community somewhere in the world in the future.
