Slow Travel: Our Adventure of a Lifetime

Post 1 · The Mission

Slow Travel: Our Plan to See the World (Without Rushing Through It)

I'm an old dad.

I'll be retiring in about seven years. When that happens, I'm doing something that sounds ambitious but is really just stubborn planning: slow traveling the world with my two youngest kids.

Right now they're 2 and 4. When we leave, they'll be roughly 9 and 11—old enough to remember it, old enough to participate, and old enough for a life that isn't built around one zip code.

This post is the why and the what. The next one is the how.

The Goal

See the world. But not the way most people mean it.

Not a frantic checklist of landmarks. Not bouncing every few days, living out of suitcases, trying to cram a country into a week.

The goal is to live inside places long enough to understand them—and to do it in a way that works for kids and works for me.

That's what slow travel means.

What That Actually Looks Like

Slow travel is a style, not a destination. It means:

• Staying long enough that a place stops being "a trip" and starts being daily life.
• Having repeatable routines: groceries, laundry, parks, libraries, classes, quiet time, rest.
• Letting kids build real local competence: ordering food, navigating a neighborhood, riding public transport, making friends, joining activities.
• Choosing depth over novelty—because depth is where the real learning happens.

Some travel will be medium speed: shorter stops inside a longer region. But the foundation is always bases, not constant movement.

Why Do This With Kids?

Because childhood is short, and "someday" has a way of getting postponed until it's gone.

The world is the best classroom I can imagine—as long as we treat it like one. The point isn't geography. It's learning to adapt. Learning to talk to strangers and solve problems. Learning that normal life looks different everywhere. Learning to be resilient, curious, and capable.

That doesn't happen from a tour bus. It happens from living somewhere long enough to need a routine.

Education

We'll use LifeEducation.org as the home base for tracking what the kids learn—both the formal stuff (reading, math, writing) and the real-world stuff (language exposure, local history, projects, skills, and experiences that actually stick).

We're not recreating school in a different country. We're building something better for our situation: consistent learning blocks, meaningful projects, lots of reading, local activities (sports, music, martial arts, dance, classes), and museums and nature and daily life as curriculum.

We'll write openly about how it works—what sticks, what fails, and what we change.

Why Seven Years Isn't "Plenty of Time"

Seven years sounds like a long runway until you list the moving parts:

• Financial sustainability
• Family logistics
• Health insurance and contingencies
• Home base decisions (house, marriage logistics, what "leaving" even means)
• Gear and tech
• Where we'll live, when, and why
• How to avoid burnout
• How to keep kids thriving socially
• Visa and residency realities
• What happens when plans change (because they will)

A dream doesn't become a plan by hoping. It becomes a plan by building systems.

So we're building systems.

What We'll Share Here

This blog is the public record of the build—not a fantasy travel diary.

You'll see preparation posts, toolkits and templates, test-run trips and what we learned, destination research and decision frameworks, education tracking through LifeEducation.org, and realistic discussion of constraints: money, energy, seasons, logistics.

The point is to turn "we want to do this" into "this is how we'll do it."

Next: The Constraint System

The next post is where this gets concrete.

We're building a constraint system—a set of rules that define what actually works for our family. Weather limits. Safety and kid-friendliness. Walkability. Healthcare access. Internet reliability. Housing standards. Pacing rules. And more.

Those constraints drive a slow-travel engine that answers questions like:

"Give us 20 places that meet our requirements from May 1 to August 1."

Not generic travel recommendations. Places that actually fit our family—filtered by season, safety, and practicality—with comparable reports so we can decide fast and adjust intelligently.

That's Post 2.

For now, this is the mission: slow travel, long stays, real life, deep learning, the world as our classroom—and seven years to build it right.