Shrinking Technology

It's hard to travel light when you need to lug around technology as well.  My MacBook is dying an ugly death right now, so this was the perfect time for me to try out a replacement.  I'd looked into Chromebooks as a possibility, and I think we'll likely still have one along with us for the family.  But I'm currently typing this from a cheap bluetooth keyboard hooked up to a Samsung Galaxy Tab A 9.5, and it's working fairly well.  (links to those below)   Costco sells a good variety of electronics, and they have a very generous return policy.  So basically I'm using the hell out of my 90 day trial period to find out what I can - and more importantly CAN'T - do with a tablet vs. my laptop.  If I can meet about 90% of my needs with this thing, it'll stay.  So far I'm close, but I have found a couple hiccups.  For instance, I haven't yet found a way to use Android messenger through the tablet.  That's a feature I love and use daily - "texting" through my computer so I can type longer messages on a real keyboard.  I may find a workaround for it, but so far no luck.  That's okay, that's what the 90 days is for. 

Typing this blog post is another test.  And I have a couple documents to print in a minute, so that will be one, too. Wish me luck!

Gathering Balloons

When our son was 1 or 2 years old, we discovered the existence of Home Exchange.  (Thanks, Tim Ferriss and your Four Hour Work Week, for that!)  We were in the half of people who hear about it and say, "Wait, WHAT?  I need that in my life immediately."  We have since discovered that almost everyone has a similar reaction OR the polar opposite, which is, "Wait, so people are, like, sleeping in your bed?"  There's rarely an in-between.

Anyway, since that discovery a decade ago, most of our more adventurous, extensive traveling has been done within the Home Exchange system.  M has a list somewhere, but since he's all the way in the dining room and I'm very comfy in my office chair right now, I'm just going to throw out some destinations I remember from past exchanges.  Taos, New Mexico.  Amsterdam (twice).  Hawaii (twice).  Lake Tahoe, California.  Chicago, Illinois. Edinburgh.  Prague.  Dublin.  Manhattan, New York.  And a whole lotta others, but you get the idea.  It's gotten us all over the place and saved us many thousands of dollars in the process.

So our hope is that most of our 2020 travel will continue that tradition.  And now, there's a system-within-the-system that will make this work even better for us.  It's called the Balloon Program, and it allows you to lend a family your home (as opposed to trading houses) and get "paid" with a credit for hosting.  So, let's say someone from Iowa wants to stay in your house in Florida.  You don't really have a desire to go to Iowa (nothing against Iowa!), but you're happy to clear out of your house and go visit your grandma in Texas, which lets the Iowa family have your house for that week.  The Iowa family gives you the Home Exchange Hot Air Balloon (think of it as bitcoin just for H.E.), and you can then use that Balloon to stay at some person's house in France next year.   That's a messy, quick explanation so apologies if it still doesn't make perfect sense. 

But the point I'm trying to get to is our strategy now.  We're currently trying to work on collecting as many of these treasured balloons as we can, in the hopes that we can use them around the world in a couple years.  And if we do that rather than actively swapping houses during our long travel, that also allows us to find one renter of our home for our whole trip, which could potentially cover most of our travel expenses.  See how magical that is?

For instance, we'll be visiting family over Thanksgiving.  House is empty, let's fill it and get a balloon!  Over Christmas break, we'll be on a cruise.  House is empty, let's fill it and get another balloon!  Someone wants to come here when we don't have a trip scheduled?  Let's find somewhere to go so they can stay here and give us another balloon!   (We actually have a huge advantage here, because we have a small garage apartment that we can live in for short stretches while others stay in the house.  We know not many people have that option, so we're very grateful for this cheat.)

Last week I did a reverse search on Home Exchange, for folks who have Boulder listed on their "places I'd like to visit" section.  I blasted out an email, explained what we're trying to do, and invited folks to start a conversation if they're interested.  I sent out 70-something emails, and I already have strong interest for hosting folks in November, December, March, April, and June.  Bam!  Just like that, we might have 5 balloons ready to use in the future. 

Home Exchange has taken great care not to assign a value to the balloons, which I respect.  A balloon is worth a stay.  That stay may be a weekend, or it could be a month.  It's whatever both parties agree to when they discuss their plans.  We're hoping that we'll typically be able to get at least 10-14 days out of a balloon during our year, but we'll just see how it goes.  And of course we know we'll fill in days here and there with AirBnB, hostels, hotels, camping, or whatever.  It's just nice to know that we won't be going broke in the process of this trip.

Also, I have to add that the part of me that hates waste LOVES the new sharing economy.  How many times have people paid to have a house sitter, while also paying to stay in a hotel?  Meanwhile, there's some other family visiting that same town and paying for their own hotel?  It's so much waste!  Home Exchange saves money in countless ways, in all directions.  You can cook meals instead of only eating at restaurants.  Want to bring your friend along?  Great, you've got a whole house!  It makes me giddy how great it is. 

Sometimes I taunt the "but people sleep in your bed?" folks with pictures of the great experiences we've had due to this system.  Am I smug about it?  Hell yes.  But I'm smug from a beach house that I didn't have to pay for.  So there.

Global Entry

Big step today - all four of us have officially applied for Global Entry.  My application was accepted a couple weeks ago, and I wanted to wait for that to happen before I went through the process for the kids.  M filled out his own, and I did the applications for S1 and S2.  Weirdest part?  I couldn't figure out a way to start applying for the kids without providing a separate email address for each of them.  Luckily, I already have email accounts set up for them through gmail, but in order to do that I had to lie about their ages to Google.  (Sorry, Google!) 

So, the U.S. government requires even infants to have their own email addresses, despite the fact that you have to be 13 to get a legit one (unless you have a school account, in some cases).  And by the way, even infants have to be "interviewed" for this process, which I'd love to see.  "Little baby, could you please tell me how long you were employed at your last place of business?"

Well, whatever.  The applications are filled out.  Now I'll wait and see if the rest of my family has made the cut, and hopefully then we'll get to the interview process.  Siiiigh.

A Journey of a Thousand Miles Begins With...

...a shit ton of planning.  Since the earliest days of our relationship - I'm talking '98 or '99, way before kids or even marriage - M and I have had a plan to do at least a year of worldschooling at some point before our kids leave the nest.  There wasn't even a word for it back then, but we met this lovely family in Teacapan, Mexico who was doing just that.  We were camping in our VW Westfalia, and they were doing the same.  They were a family of five, with the kids' ages being pretty spread out (high schooler to kindergartener or something like that).  We were smitten with the family and the idea of their life.  The kids were happy and engaging.  The parents were interesting and fun.  We asked a lot of questions, and they were more than happy to share.  We tucked the information into the back of our brains for future use.

So here we are, 20 years and 2 kids later, and we're finally gearing up to take our own similar journey.  Over the past couple of decades, as we've traveled more and gotten to know our kids' personalities, we've narrowed down which year(s) would work best for us.  Our son (S1) and daughter (S2) are 5.5 years apart in age, so the timing is a little tricky.  We want the little one to be old enough to really grasp and remember what we're doing.  And the big one can't be so big that he's bored by the idea of traveling with parents and a little sister.

We also want to disrupt their public school educations as little as possible, because we plan to put them right back into the system when we get back.  In doing my research on that, I've realized that temporary homeschooling is quite different from long-term.  Long-term folks can kinda go wild with any number of curricula, but we'll need to stick pretty close to at least the math and science bits they'll be missing, so when they come back it won't be difficult to keep up.  I'm not at all concerned about the reading, writing, history, and geography parts, because they'll be experiencing those in a very real way every day.  And I'll discuss the rest with principals and teachers as we continue to plan.

The kids will be in their 8th and 3rd grade years when we're traveling.  S1 will be in his last year of middle school, so he'll come back to start high school with all of his buddies.  This will also allow him two full years of the bilingual program at his middle school (6th and 7th grades) so I'm hopeful that will allow him to get some real world practice in Spanish-speaking countries.  S2 will be in the middle of elementary school, and we've been a part of that community for 6 years already.  So sneaking out and back in after one year shouldn't be too disruptive.  The school's teachers also happen to be really, really supportive of stuff like this.  We're very lucky to have an amazing public school as our homebase.

I'll be blogging here occasionally as we do the initial planning.  And my hope is to have at least three of the four of us blogging daily or weekly when we're actually on The Big Trip.  Expect a lot of brainstorming and flip-flopping regarding our plans, because we're learning more every day.  But maybe you'll read this and be inspired to try a big adventure of your own!