We Answered Your Questions About Our Return!

We’ve finally got a wrap-up post here that answers the Instagram questions we got a couple weeks back (if you need more context, feel free to read our kickoff FAQ, which we posted before we left).

We’ll also be doing some photo roundups in the coming week so keep checking back!

Where did you guys end up going?

Over 366 days, we went to six continents, 29 countries (if you count the US/Hawaii at the end), flew on 79 flights and “laid our heads” in exactly 100 different places. 

Jamaica 

Colombia

Peru

Chile

Brazil

South Africa

Zimbabwe

Zambia

Mozambique

Jordan

Egypt

United Arab Emirates

Spain

France

Germany

Netherlands

Denmark

Norway

Sweden

Mongolia

China

Vietnam

Cambodia

Singapore

Indonesia

Australia

New Zealand

Japan

USA (Hawaii)

Was that too much?

It was a lot, but we decided early on to “go for it” and mentally got in that headspace.

Somehow it was not exhausting. 

Part of not being worn out is that we didn’t have jobs. Amazing how much energy and attention you suddenly have when you don’t have work responsibilities! 

Couple other factors:

• We got to bed early and didn’t have to get up early (nowhere to be).
• We packed crazy light, so moving around was easy.
• We varied the pace to keep it interesting, alternating rural/urban, longer stay/short, luxury/budget, tour-heavy/chill.

It was surprisingly relaxed. 

That said, if someone told us, “I’ve got a magic time machine that could send you back to the start of the year so you could re-live your itinerary a second time,” we’d pass. It was the best year of our lives but once was enough.

Would you have extended your trip for another year if you could?

No. We needed to get back to reality to see family and friends and try living in New York again for a bit. But once we catch our breath and satisfy the desire to “feel settled” for a bit, we might be off again.  

Would you do this again in a few years?

Definitely. In fact, we’d say it’s a current life goal.

Would you consider moving abroad for work?

If the right work opportunity presented itself abroad we’d be far more game to give it a try now than we would’ve before, yes. But we’re not proactively pursuing that right now.

What would you do differently? 

Looking back, there are a few things we did that we wish…we hadn’t. Stuff like “do-gooder tourism” that got it all wrong — going to an orphanage in Vietnam (criiiinge — children should never be a tourist destination) and an awkward village water pump/filtration project we joined in Cambodia (white savior charity at its finest). 

Also: overpaying whenever we weren’t sure about what to expect from a place. Like, we’d book a guide to help us in places where, we’d realize upon arrival, we absolutely did not need one. As we gained more confidence, we relied less and less on such costly help. (Glad it was this way and not the other way around, but sometimes wish we’d had more faith in ourselves. There was some sissiness there, for sure.)

What would you keep exactly the same?

All the documenting we did. Maintaining Instagram, the kids’ journals, a massive photo archive and, the biggest beast of them all — a daily blog — was *painful,* but has already proven to be one of the greatest treasures of the whole trip. 

How will you travel differently on future trips?

So many things we learned that we’ll do from now on.

For one, this trip generally eliminated a feeling of obligation and/or FOMO we used to have about travel — “Well, we came all the way to China, we may as well also see the Terracotta Warriors!” or “We’re in Bali and have to see the rice terraces in Ubud because everyone else seems to go see those!” 

Our best experiences by far were in more obscure places where we could just be our ignoramus outsider selves, bumbling around lost, meeting new people, trying to participate in local life. The equivalent of traveling to East Nashville and the Minnesota State Fair versus the Statue of Liberty and Hollywood sign.

Other travel tactics we adopted and plan to stick with:

• Packing even lighter than we did (which was already carry-on size only)
• Having “teams” — Teddy responsible for all things James (eg, clothes, bag, boarding pass, bathroom breaks) and Margaret for all things Willa
• Having “roles” — Teddy does navigation and finance ops, Margaret does content
• Checking bags. By actually checking our bags we 1) could move breezily through an airport. We didn’t have rolling bags in bathroom stalls, gift shops, etc. while trying to manage small children. 2) We could be the last ones to board the plane. When everyone else was jockeying for the front of the line, anxious to secure real estate in overhead compartments, we were still lounging in our gate seats reading. We’d eventually mosey over and get on the plane, knowing our little backpacks would fit comfortably under the seat in front of us. No stress.
• We learned early on that when we’d rented a car in a new place, it was best to split up upon landing, with one parent heading to baggage claim and the other darting straight to the rental car desk to be first in line. A lesson hard won after realizing — too late, enough times in a row — that everyone gets off the plane, gets their bags and then goes to get in line for a car. 

Highlight of the year? 

Ah. This is by far the most F A’d Q of the FAQ.

In a trip of this scale, picking a “favorite spot” or “favorite moment” isn’t remotely narrow-downable — no matter how many times we get asked or try.

What we can tell you is that by far the best part of the experience was a year of having nowhere to be, no one to report to, no inbox to attend to and nothing except the day ahead with family to explore a cool new place. 

Here’s a telling excerpt from a day on our blog: 

“Awoke the best way possible: Whenever/however the hell we wanted. This is hands down the best part of the trip. The days when we get up when we’re good and ready to get up. Nowhere to be, no school to scramble out the door for, zero emails waiting for us. Middle of the week, super chill, as if it’s Christmas morning. Teddy worked out, I read the newspaper in bed, the kids drew. When we were damn good and ready, we had breakfast, wearing a mix of PJs and bathing suits. What time was it? Who knows!!”

You seriously can’t just pin down a few top moments?

Ha! Ok. Here you go:

• Dinosaur fossil hunting in Mongolia’s Gobi Desert
• Teaching the kids to ride bikes in South Africa
• Swimming in a waterfall deep in the Amazon rainforest 
• Standing on an empty Great Wall of China before the crowds
• The sound of horses clopping by our window in Cartagena, Colombia
• Rooftop night swims and caipirinhas in Rio 
• Grilling (aka “braai’ing) at our house in Cape Town, drinking g&ts 
• Hiking Robberg Nature Reserve near Plettenberg Bay, South Africa
• Zambezi River sunsets in Zambia
• Playing with local kids everywhere — on the beach in Mozambique, in the street in Vietnam, in our yard in Indonesia, on a hilltop in Mongolia, on Halloween in Tasmania, on the shores of Peru’s Lake Titicaca, etc.
• Willa’s 7th birthday lunch in Madrid
• James’s 5th birthday near Bordeaux, France
• Cavallo Island off Corsica with NYC friends Joanna and Dave
• Riding bikes through Amsterdam and Copenhagen
• Rickshaw bike ride through Hanoi’s old town
• Motorbike rides in Vietnam and Cambodia
• Sheep World in New Zealand
• Milford Sound in New Zealand
• Being surrounded by a pod of hundreds of frolicking dusky dolphins on a boat in Kaikoura, NZ
• Every animal sanctuary we went to in Australia
• The Onigiri at Japan’s 7-11s
• Christmas in Tokyo (seeing Santa at a random hotel, watching “Elf” in a cozy hotel room)
• This one sunset in Flores, Indonesia

And we have a list of about 300 other things like that.  

A few pics from the above list:

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Were there any low points of the year? 

There weren’t many, to be honest. But yeah, we’ll go with these:

• The time the grownups came down with (our only) violent stomach bug of the year. We were in a cramped Beijing hotel room during a heat wave. The bad news was we had to raincheck the Great Wall. The good news was Teddy’s mom was in town visiting and could take care of the kids.
• A particularly harrowing nighttime flight from Vietnam to Cambodia. Our smallish plane violently dropped and veered again and again as passengers shrieked in panic. It totally traumatized Margaret, someone who was never afraid of flying before. Inconvenient considering we had something like 30+ flights still to go in the year.
• The day we discovered our kids had lice. We’d just landed in Berlin after a grim EasyJet flight from Amsterdam, also during a heatwave. We had no AC and no washing machine, and there certainly were no fancy home lice-removal services like Manhattan’s popular “Hair Fairies” (trust me, we looked). So there was a lot of combing, shampooing, squinting, sweating…and bickering.

Where would you not recommend taking kids?

We way overdid it in Egypt with all the temple tours, going to three different tour-heavy cities (Cairo, Aswan, Luxor) in May, when the temp was around 106 F. 

If we’d gone when it was cooler and seen just the Pyramids, it would’ve been a much different experience. Live and learn.

But if you’re talking about danger, we didn’t go anywhere that struck us as a dangerous misstep. We went to a bunch of cities that people consider “unsafe:” Kingston, Bogota, Rio, Joburg, Cairo — and never had a single issue. 

Part of that is that we were all inside, asleep, by 8 pm.

Part of it was that we’re with kids.

Most of it, though, is that the news just makes places sound a lot scarier than they actually are.

To prove this point, we kept a running list of “drama,” for lack of a better word, that happened in places before/during/right after our visit that did not impact us at all.

• A police station bombing in Bogota while we were there
• Another at the Great Pyramids a week after we left
• The two typhoons in Mozambique a month before we arrived
• The Hong Kong protests while we were there
• A 6.8 earthquake in another part of Indonesia while we were there
• A tourist shark attack on the Great Barrier Reef a week after we snorkeled it
• The Australia brush fires
• The volcano eruption in New Zealand while there
• A tourist helicopter crash in Kauai a few days before we wanted to do one

How how how did you maintain your sanity with the kids?

We were very nervous about how this would go. We went from having a full-time nanny for six years, regular weekend night-time babysitters and frequent weekends away without the kids — to no childcare. 

But being with our kids constantly was easier than we thought. Don’t get us wrong, there was pleeeennnnty of exasperation — and lots that we grownups missed out on because we had kids with us (eg, challenging hikes, nightlife, etc.) — yet it worked. 

Part of staying sane was accepting the fact that we signed up for this. Whining, homeschooling woes, feeling trapped by two small balls and chains — none of this could be considered reasonable grounds for parental complaint.

The other part was alcohol!

How did you deal with sickness? Did you prep before leaving?

The state of our health was one of the top things we misjudged about this year. We assumed all the flights, public bathrooms and unfamiliar food would make us ill year-round (and judging by all the questions, you did too). 

But a year of travel turned out to be nothing compared to school classroom germs. We barely got sick.

And when we did, it wasn’t what we thought it would be. It was stuff like altitude sickness and really bad seasonal allergies.

The grownups did catch a nasty 48-hour stomach bug in Beijing (see above). James’s turn for a stomach issue came only once — but with gusto. Inside a packed shuttle bus at the Saigon airport, to be precise. Willa never caught a bug.

As for prep:

1. Before we left we went to this chain called Passport Health. You make an appointment, bring your travel itinerary and they administer all required immunizations. Not cheap, but very easy.

1. We had an excellent medicine bag about the size of a lasagna with pills and creams for every conceivable sickness and injury. We barely touched it, but having it gave us peace of mind. 

Did you follow the news? Was that a good decision, if so?

We did, but in a much more dialed-back way. We checked it twice a day, usually in the morning and before bed. 

Our outlets of choice were the New York Times and Axios. Margaret kept up her New York Post habit and Teddy checked ESPN. Occasionally we’d listen to The Daily podcast.

But yeah, no TV news, no late-night shows and we turned off all breaking news mobile notifications. 

The right call.

Did you develop any new traditions or rituals while adventuring?

Here’s a weird one: We realized early on that any wakeup call earlier than 6 am required some kind of bribe to get the kids out of bed. Somewhere along the way Teddy started broadcasting YouTube videos of old-school Woody Woodpecker cartoons, and it stuck. Whenever the kids knew it’d be an early morning, they’d want to know if it was early, or “Woody Woodpecker early.”

Most adventurous food you ate? 

Pig ovaries, horse tartare, grilled silkworms, fried crickets, fermented camel milk, fried crocodile, reindeer sausage.

Most difficult place to navigate?

China. Very few English-speakers and you have to know how to navigate around state internet restrictions, which block Google, among other things. People were nice, but we relied heavily on guides.

Favorite beach?
Here are three:

• 

• 

Worst bathroom?

A bathroom emergency forced us to stop on the side of the road in remote, rural Egypt. The “bathroom” was an abandoned, crumbling cinderblock outhouse with a well-used hole in the ground. The still air was thick was flies and the temp well over 100 F.

Did anything move you to tears of joy?

Only once that we can recall. It was our last night in the Gobi Desert in Mongolia, and some local musicians, mostly kids, invited James and Willa to sing and dance with them. The sun was setting, the music was beautiful and our children were brave and happy. 

How many beaches did you go to?  

28 beaches. We also calculated that we swam in 115 different bodies of water, including all pools. Notable dips included:

Indian, Pacific and Atlantic Oceans

Mediterranean Sea (via Corsica)

Rio Negro, Amazon rainforest 

Copenhagen River in Denmark

Dead Sea, Jordan

Fjords, Norway

Hot springs in Hakone, Japan

Which location do you think you’ll visit again first? 

Probably new parts of Colombia or Brazil. They were among our favorite countries and they’re close enough and in the same time zone (ish) to make shorter visits possible.

What are the “must return” places?

Besides those above, South Africa and Japan stand out as places we intend to return to again (and again).

If you could recommend one place you went to — for one week, direct flight from NYC — what would it be?

This is a cool question! It depends on the audience and the type of trip you’re after, so we’ll give three. Out of the places we went:

• Bogota
• Rio de Janeiro
• Copenhagen

Three places you’d never go back to again?

There are a lot of reasons we wouldn’t go back to a place:

• Because we didn’t like it: Ha Long Bay, Vietnam (a beautiful bay trashed by tourists – though note we loved other parts of Vietnam!)
• Because it was a once-in-a-lifetime thing, even though it was amazing: Gobi Desert, Mongolia
• Because we checked that box and don’t care to re-live the crowds: Xi’an China to see Terracotta Warriors, Forbidden City/Tiananmen Square in Beijing.

Are you going to burn your travel clothes? 

Ha! We’ve fantasized about this. Not many have lasted the re-entry, that’s for sure. In fact, our suitcases upon return were the lightest they’d been all year.

What’s the first thing you’re going to eat when you’re back? 

We’re most excited to eat food that is not restaurant food.

What about the first thing you’re going to do?

We’ve been shipping back souvenirs all year to our parents’ places. We’re excited to open the packages — a time-capsule’d treasure heap waiting for us.

What did you miss most besides friends and family?

On behalf of our kids, we missed the chance for them to socialize regularly with peers. They really only had us and each other this year. They are so ready to be back among friends and classmates.

How are you feeling about the return? 

Excited and ready — but a little disoriented.

It felt really strange to be back in NYC those first 12 hours, not going to lie. We thought it would feel like home and it felt…foreign.

We read something recently that said the first phase of transition feels like a “confusing nowhere of in-between-ness.” Sounds about right.

But that’s already fading, quickly. We’ve been running into buddies on the street, seeing our close friends, reconnecting with favorite business owners, seeing familiar faces from school, etc.  We’ll get there.

What are you most excited to having back in your day to day life?

A kitchen of our own. 

What are you most nervous about?

Feeling trapped. 

What are your next steps? What will you do for work? Were you job searching toward the end?

We decided to “get okay” with not having a career plan right away. We didn’t spend the end of our trip polishing resumes/reaching out to people/making decisions about next steps. The trip felt so once-in-a-lifetime that we didn’t want to look back and think we squandered weeks/months worrying about the future. So we didn’t.

Now we’re both planning to do some consulting as we figure out our next steps. For Margaret that’ll mean dipping a toe back into content marketing and comms, and for Teddy, entrepreneurship, angel investing, tech and sports. 

Where will the kids go to school?

They’re back at Blue School. On Monday, Willa re-joined her classmates for the second semester of 2nd grade and James did the same for Kindergarten. 

They did not have to repeat as we were homeschooling them all year.

How are the kids feeling about being back? 

They are excited. All went well on the first day back, though both reported feeling “nervous” (read: intimidated/lost) during Spanish class when all the kids belted out songs they didn’t know/understand. Funny, considering they spent a year traveling to places where they didn’t know the local languages.

Day two was a little rougher — probably dawned on them that this school thing is an every. day. thing…

But in general, the idea of going to a place dedicated to kids, kid-friendly activities, and filled with, well, kids — is thrilling.

Watching them try to process re-entry has made us chuckle a few times, too. Like, for instance, when we explained the concept of the library card to them, they lost their minds. You mean we can just walk into a library and take out any 50 books we want, for free??  We even explained that they could have a bookshelf with books of their very own. Willa actually asked, “Wait, seriously, is that true? We can have a bookshelf with our own books?” 

They just haven’t had much stuff for most of their recent memory so this is a huge development to them.

How’d homeschooling go?

If you’d asked us six months in, we’d have said: “Awful.” Kids don’t want to learn from their parents. But after eventually finding our rhythm, we can admit now it was one of the most rewarding parts of the year. 

Margaret taught Willa (2nd grade) and Teddy taught James (K). We spent 90 minutes one-on-one on a regular basis, focusing only on math, reading and writing. Their teachers had sketched out roughly what they needed to be able to know upon return, so we worked backward from that list, using whatever relevant YouTube videos we could find and workbooks we picked up along the way.

Where will you live?

New York City. But that’s as far as we’ve gotten.

We arrived back on Jan 10, and for the time being we’re living out of our suitcases at a random Airbnb in the Financial District. Feels familiar!

We’ve got a broker and we’re on the hunt for a new apartment rental — only real priority is that it be accessible to the Seaport, where the kids go to school. 

What’s been most surprising about your return?

Seeing with fresh eyes just how diverse the US is, especially New York. We didn’t encounter much population diversity at all in the places we visited this year (with the exception of Paris, maybe?).

Our plane from LAX to DC last week looked like the UN General Assembly. Even the kids remarked on it as we walked down the street in New York.

It’s hard to think of another place on the planet with more types of people living together. It’s awesome.

What is something you used to do all the time in NYC that you can’t imagine doing anymore?

Probably buying plastic water bottles. Trite, but true. 1) So many of the places we saw were carpeted in plastic trash and 2) we used an absurd number of plastic water bottles this year (no drinkable tap). All of the above was enough to put us off them.

What haven’t you been able to do that you really need to start doing again when you’re home?

• Getting the kids in bed by 7/7:30 pm 
• Exercising regularly (Margaret)
• Cooking

Are there any habits that you are worried about slipping back into?

One small one is social media. While the @SullivanFamilyAdventure Instagram feed was a blast to maintain and a powerful lifeline to community, we don’t want to spend time on Instagram in 2020. We’d been on a long Instagram hiatus before this trip (Margaret 2 years, Teddy 1), and hope to go back to some form of break. Teddy’s already deleted it from his phone for now.

The bigger one will be trying to keep work at work, and prevent it from infiltrating nights and weekends at home. Easy to make big sweeping resolutions like that when we don’t have jobs yet, but as two former workaholics we don’t want to go back to that behavior.

How do you think you’ll feel about not being with the kids 24/7?

We already miss their company/our tight bond.

How will you keep alive the family bond once you’re back to reality?

Family meals, for one. We ate 21 meals together a week for 52 weeks. We’ll do breakfast and dinner every day to keep the conversations and laughs (and manners policing) going.

We also got good at playing games together, something we frankly just didn’t do a lot of before this year. Our kids know so many games now that it’s easy — and actually pleasant — to sit for 20 minutes and play with them.

What behaviors did you adopt?

• Wearing the same outfit everyday. For most of the year we each had a small wardrobe, but by the end we said screw it, and basically put on the same shirts and pants, day after day. It turned into a big joke but man was the absence of decision-making (or shit-giving) liberating. Margaret went out and bought three of the same black Zara sweater when we got back and has worn her uniform everyday.

• We loved how the Danish and Japanese do things — cozy, orderly, simple, thoughtful, beautiful. The two countries are obviously different but have a lot in common, and in our ongoing pursuit of minimalism and peace, I think we’ll always look to them for inspo.

• Margaret is a pescatarian/borderline-vegetarian and Teddy’s mostly off meat now too. It’s a stark reversal — just two months ago we were eating Quarter Pounders at Macca’s (McDonald’s) in New Zealand. But it all came crashing to an end in December. For Margaret, it was all the farms and markets and caged animals we saw this year that ultimately just….grossed her out. Teddy spent a lot of time reading about health and food, and just decided to veer more plant-based for those reasons. It may not be forever, but it’s sticking for the moment. 

What are you grateful for now, versus before this time last year?

This country (especially New York). The US has big, big problems and an ugly history that still needs to be dealt with, but relatively speaking…it’s 1) free 2) diverse 3) ambitious/driven 4) creative and 5) naturally gorgeous. 

On a lighter note: 

• Tap water you can just….drink! 
• Grocery stores with aisles and aisles of fresh food.
• Walking into a room, turning on the light, and not seeing a half dozen lizards scatter.
• Fast internet.
• The variety of people and foods in New York.

What surprised you about the experience?

A lot. A huge running list, in fact. 

Hands-down the greatest misconception of the year was that we’d have endless free time. It’s a year off without jobs, for Chrissakes! We pictured ourselves enjoying hours of uninterrupted “flow” time every day for writing, reading, drawing, photography, creative endeavors, whatever. 

We didn’t. 

Before we left, Teddy actually worried he’d be bored in the absence “of a challenge.” Ha!!! What a joke. This trip was a full-time job. Our children were around all day in an unstructured, routine-less year, needing meals, schooling and support in new environments — and when they finally went to sleep there was reading up to do, planning, blog writing, photos to edit, etc. That Instagram didn’t update itself!  Oh, and we also had one or two new places to explore and tour too. 

We seemed to have more free time toward the end as our kids became book worms and we found ourselves in more rural landscapes with fewer activities. But still. 

A few other unexpected things:

• We thought we’d be all, “Safety first!” But…in a classic case of “you don’t know what you don’t know,” US-style car safety for kids just can’t be replicated in the developing world. There were limited functioning seatbelts and even fewer booster seats this year. Not to mention motorbike rides, bush planes, open-ocean snorkeling, etc. We just got a lot chiller.

• Somewhere along the way we grew a bit desensitized to the extraordinary. Here’s a quote from our blog post on the day we went to the Great Barrier Reef last month: “As we were driving there, we remarked — as we have about so many big sights this half of the adventure — that under any other circumstances, a day snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef would be the single most exciting thing we’d do all year. We would have plotted and planned and read up and gotten the kids excited and counted down the days, etc. Instead, we were 30% kinda looking forward to it and 70% wishing we could just hang out at the [house] and read. It made me think of this Bill Bryson quote I’d seen: “Which was worse, to lead a life so boring that you are easily enchanted, or a life so full of stimulus that you are easily bored.” Of course, like most things, it turned out to be fabulous and memorable and — I can’t believe I even have to type this — we’re so glad we did it.” 

• The trip forced us to talk to our kids about tough topics. We expected to have to cover pollution, the environment, conservation, food waste, poverty, respecting another’s way of life, etc. — all age-appropriate topics. What we didn’t realize is how in-your-face some other, trickier topics would be, and we’ve had to navigate those:

• Slavery/white supremacy/colonialism when traveling to S. America and Africa.
• Death when visiting ancient Egyptian temples (eg, mummies and the afterlife).
• Religion (we’re not religious – tried to strike neutral tones) when visiting Europe/South America’s Catholic cathedrals and the Middle East (eg, women wearing veils, the call to prayer, Ramadan).
• War (eg, Vietnamese Viet Cong booby traps, Cambodia landmines)

What surprised you about what you saw on your travels?

Most of them were rude awakenings, to be honest:

We thought we knew how polluted the world was, but we were wrong. It’s way worse. Feels pretty shitty to think about how we contributed with our flying footprint.

Most of the places we traveled still consider women second to men. It sucked to experience as a woman (Margaret) and as parents trying to teach both our son to treat women equally as well as our daughter that she’s just as worthy as any dude. Every day there was something–sometimes “harmless” teasing, other times outright misogyny. 

We’ve had a front-row seat to overtourism. It’s real and awful. Most places have not taken the steps needed to protect their most-visited places. Macchu Pichu stands out as an exception. Petra is a complete disaster. When governments are corrupt or uninvolved or both, the tourist sights suffer.

One last negative thing: There are seven billion people on the planet and we’re now pretty convinced that every single one of them is staring at a phone all day long. We’ve seen our planet’s zombie future.

On a lighter note: We noticed that men are universally more likely to be playful, goof off, wrestle, joke around, play sports and games than women. It’s like they’ve been sitting around all day waiting for the slightest excuse to play like a kid again (in this case, our children being present) whereas women really never do. 

What’s an intangible learning you’re taking away from the trip?

In no particular order:

• There’s more than one way to lead a fulfilled life. As long as our kids are moral and competent humans, we’re more okay now with unorthodox futures for them and possibly also for us. 

• Good ideas come during long stretches of doing nothing. Car and train rides, or long walks and swims, are good for those.

• The problems of our times are extraordinary and the planet urgently needs creative problem-solvers. 

• Regularly adding new experiences to your life slows down time. Every day of our trip required being present, learning a new place, understanding a new culture, seeing/smelling/tasting/hearing stuff we’ve never encountered before. As a result, the year passed at a satisfyingly slow pace. We can’t recall another year of our life when we remember each distinct day. Nothing blended together into a blur/fog because there was almost no routine.

• Unless you’re talking about a war zone, the big world out there no longer seems daunting or far away or foreign or “scary.” More important, we doubt our kids will ever think about the world in those terms.

What different choices do you expect to make in your everyday life now vs. prior to your trip?

The year has helped us see what’s actually important. We’ve literally and figuratively cleared the clutter and understand now better than ever what is truly essential for our family: physical and mental health, time with loved ones, creative/progressive learning and the career autonomy to tend to all of those things on our own time.

As a result, we now know we want to remain as flexible as possible to keep those goals alive. We’re more willing to keep our options open and avoid shackling ourselves with permanent and costly decisions. We will not buy a home, for instance. We’ve also given ourselves permission to “pull the chute” on New York if we decide it’s not working for us. 

Will you miss documenting your life every day?

Margaret’s been documenting life every day in a Tumblr blog since Willa was born so it’s muscle memory to some extent. But, yeah, we look forward to dialing back the extreme daily blogging and Instagram regimen.

Are you guys awkwardly writing this Q+A in the third person? Who is actually typing this thing?

Hi, it’s Margaret here. I’m amazed you’re still reading!

Are you going to continue the blog? 

This week and next we’ll be publishing some photo roundup posts, so stayed tuned.

Will there be a book? Are you planning on sharing the adventure with a wider public audience?

Already have a very rough draft of a book, actually. Just a little recap/memoir about the year. Whether it finds an audience beyond Willa and James remains to be seen. 

You readers will be the first people to get an update on this front…

Any advice for families considering something similar?

1. Avoid letting the age of your kids and/or finances scare you off. There are couples out there taking a year off with five kids exploring a single state or region of the US via camper van. 
2. Unless you are the main caretaker for someone at home who depends on you, like an aging parent or sick child, you are probably more mobile than you think. Your home can be rented out or sold. Friends and activities will still be there when you get back (and with technology today, you’ll be closer than ever). Furniture can go in storage. Homeschooling is not that bad. 
3. Pick a goal — six months of travel in 2023, or whatever — and commit to making it happen. Work backwards from that date (we started thinking about our 2019 year in 2017. It took a year to work up the courage to say yes and another 8 months to tie up all the loose ends to be able to leave).
4. Finally, take a hard look at your marriage and ask yourselves: “Are we good?” If not, think twice.

It’s scary, don’t get us wrong. But what got us through the late-night, “this is crazy” conversations was this: How could a year off with our kids during this fleeting period of their lives be a mistake? 

What are you happiest about?

We saved a notebook from fall 2017 that had Margaret’s initial idea for the trip scribbled in it:

“A full year of global travel, with the kids, without jobs, on the move, seeing and learning as much as we could about the rest of the world. Not someday, but now.”

Underneath she’d written: “This would be the scariest thing we’ve ever done.”

So, the thing we’re happiest about — elated and beaming about — is that we actually effing did this trip. We talked about it, we scribbled those notes…and then we made it happen. 

Holy shit. We still can’t believe it.