LINDA ON ... LIVING AS AN ON-THE-GO FAMILY Q: HOW DOES YOUR DAUGHTER FEEL ABOUT TRAVELING? A: She is a real traveler. If we come back from vacation one day, the next day she’ll ask when we’ll be leaving again. She has some long-standing friends in Holland whom we see regularly. Otherwise she meets a lot of other children on the road – sometimes she’ll keep in touch and sometimes she won’t. Children live in the moment, enjoying the here and now. Q: HOW DOES HOMESCHOOLING WORK? A: Tess is 5, so home education is still easy. She’s learning so much more than she’d be learning in school at this age. Because she’s spent a lot of time playing with children from other countries, for example, she speaks several languages. As a rule of thumb, we stick to what children in her age group would be learning at school and look if we can incorporate this in play. This tends to go well and makes learning fun because she always chooses it for herself. Q: WHAT LESSONS HAVE YOU LEARNED AS AN ON-THE-GO FAMILY? A: That the security we clutched so tightly for years was no security at all. Before we hit road, we nearly went bankrupt because two large customers couldn’t pay us. To me, it was scarier to be dependent on customers to pay our bills than to be on the go. Now, if we want to, we can travel quite cheaply in our camper. We have just as much security as we thought we had back then. And of course there are the lessons you learn about given patterns in your life. Why do we do what we do? Who says it should be that way? In the Netherlands, for example, young children go to bed at 8 p.m. In Spain they’re up until 11 p.m. Yet Spanish children are no less healthy nor less happy. Bedtime depends on the child and the circumstances. Tess turned out to be an evening person. In Holland, she never fell asleep before 10:30 p.m., although she went to bed early. Here she goes to bed later and sleeps longer, and that makes her feel wonderful. “There are so many examples that have made us question things. How did we come up with this as a society and why are we still doing it?” Q: WHERE DO YOU SEE YOURSELF IN TEN YEARS? A: Happily healthy as a close-knit family. Probably still traveling but with a home base with a beautiful vegetable garden near the sea. ● Linda, Ted and Tess ● From the Netherlands ● www.wijdoenhetanders.com ● Online entrepreneur ● On the road since April 2018 ● Now in Portugal ✈ ✈ ✈ HOW WE GOT STARTED ... 1. Budgeting and saving 2. Brainstorming (on the wall as visual inspiration) 3. Putting the house on the market, moving the furniture into storage and setting off in our camper ✈ ✈ ✈ PLAN AHEAD BY ... • Setting up a mailing address • Registering your exemption from compulsory schooling due to home/world schooling • Making a budget • Planning your route ✈ ✈ ✈ WAY OF LIFE “We live in the here and now and make global plans, which actually rarely go exactly as planned.” 6
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