Episode Transcript
Now, we had an amazing time in Vietnam. We went to lantern festivals. We felt the heat of a fire-breathing bridge, explored rice terraces, cruised Ha Long Bay, found sacred dragons on mountaintops, saw the largest gold Buddha, and even one of the 50 natural wonders of the world. But we were constantly planning, packing, moving, unpacking, finding transportation, and figuring out new places.
It was exhausting!
Discovering Our Travel Rhythm
But we’ve learned since, and now our travels are more like a well-balanced piece of music. We call it our travel rhythm. It’s that steady beat that keeps us on pace, as each part of our journey flows into the next. It keeps us fulfilled, energized, and always ready for more. Now this concept strikes a chord with other travelers that we run into. They don’t necessarily use the same words, but those that find their travel rhythm feel more content, stable, grounded, and they don’t feel like they’re constantly adrift. And this is not about living a life that’s more structured or having a more detailed plan.
The Daily Beat
It’s the daily beat, the weekly pattern that all combines into an overall, beautiful melody for the year. Now I’m gonna share our rhythm, and how it breaks down from years into days. Our daily beat sort of sets the foundation for us and keeps us grounded. For me, I wake up early, make a little ginger tea, take a walk to go find some fresh food.
And you better believe there’s something cheap and tasty nearby, we’re gonna be there for dinner. Or we’ll cook. But it’s that morning footwork that finds those options that we probably would miss if we’re zooming by in a rental car. Just like the time in Peru, where we found, of all things, an amazing sushi restaurant. It’s one of those where they put together a huge bamboo boat, and stuff all these beautifully constructed pieces of sushi, and they filled that bad boy up, and the five of us tore into it like we had never eaten before, and it was only 20 bucks. 20 bucks for sushi. Amazing.
Weekly Patterns
Now, music also has a recurring pattern, and so do our weeks. Monday through Wednesday are our productive cadence. Like we’re hitting the books, working on schoolwork. Parents are helping out if the kids run into any trouble, or we’re doing our own projects. Thursday through Saturday, we’re out exploring, seeing what the local area, what the region has to offer.
Sunday is more of a dramatic pause, where we connect with a local church before we drop the beat for the next week. But we stay flexible to swap days out if we need to keep our Sundays open. For instance, in the Bahamas, it was rainy season. So if we woke up in the morning on a school day, and it was a bright, beautiful day, we’d ditch the books and we’d hit the beach.
Sunday, we keep open, because pretty much everywhere we’ve gone in the world, we found that someone in the church opens their home to us and invites us to play some sports, or to go help out in the community, and we don’t want to miss out on the opportunities to connect. One of the things to us that is the most beautiful about world schooling is that flexibility.
Monthly Tempos
Now, tempo is a measure of speed in the song. For us, it’s the pace of change of location. And we found that if we change to a new country every month, it keeps our travel interesting and dynamic. We don’t get tired of the food or the scenery, but we don’t make it a rigid requirement. We added a week in Peru recently to go check out the Amazon. We could have kept our monthly cadence and moved on to Brazil, but we like Peru. And we found that we can go see the Amazon, see some of the same things for cheaper. That’s why we buy one-way tickets, to have that flexibility, because to us, a life well spent isn’t monotonous, nor is it heavily scheduled. It’s got a little bit of character to it, you know what I mean?
Biannual Phrases
Now, every six months, we start a new phrase, and we visit a new continent, somewhere else to explore, and we visit some of the neighboring countries. The similarities and the differences to some of the nearby countries, to us, is like a remix of a familiar rhythm. Really fun to spot and point out, and talk about the differences.
Annual Rhythm
Now, each year, we also visit grandparents for a couple of months, during the summer and Christmas. It’s our time to reconnect, to rest, and provide a sense of completion and renewal before the rhythm starts again. Because you see, for us, a fulfilling travel rhythm combines the beats, the patterns, the tempos, the phrases, and the cadences, and this has kept us energized and enthusiastic about traveling since 2022.