Family Travel Tips for Living Abroad
After living in Costa Rica for a month, we are on our way to live in Mexico for a month…
We’ve been asked how we do it, and I’m happy to share.
We have remote jobs, a kid who’s not in school yet, and no mortgage, so that’s huge. Also, we are willing to live with a lot of uncertainty and discomfort in order to have these experiences.
Our standard for quality food and for safety in lodging is high, for instance, but other than that, we are willing to live in small, inexpensive places with ants and outdated furniture (with everything that we DO own stuffed into a storage unit) while navigating communication in another language.
(Truth be told, if I had a beautiful home I worked hard to buy, remodel, decorate, and build a community around, I likely wouldn’t want to leave it very often, and especially not for a slightly rundown rental with a toad living under the bottom patio step, but since I don’t right now, it that makes traveling easier.)
We are willing to walk a couple miles a day and/or ride a clunky used bike with a chain that falls off, in order to get around.
The beach shots on social media look glamorous, of course, and an evening near the ocean IS priceless. We are also, however, using toilets that cannot flush toilet paper and wearing the same few outfits over and over. (So…not so glamorous.)
Living abroad is not a life we planned, and it’s not what we’ll do forever, but after Tim had cancer seven years ago, we look at our time on Earth a bit differently, with the mindset of filling our days to the brim, “making every day as good as possible,” as the pura vida philosophy of Costa Rica encourages, and that, for us three, includes travel experiences.
Not owning a home right now means we’ll be renting all winter anyway, so we figure why not rent in a warm, new place, if we can? (If you rent a place in Latin America for a month, you generally get a large enough discount on Air BnB that the nightly rate falls below the rental cost in a city like Seattle or Boulder, without the year-long lease commitment.)
Traveling to new countries, taking in mother nature’s beauty with wonder, while attempting to connect with people from different cultures – curious what we can learn from them – while knowing we have incredible friends/family back home that we miss and are reminded when away to never to take for granted? Not to mention boxes of clothing and toys in our storage unit that feel like Christmas to open when we return?
It’s not a lifestyle that works for everyone, of course, with most people having various job, financial, and family obligations that make living abroad unfeasible and/or undesirable, but for us right now, in this season of our lives, most days it feels like we are living the best of both worlds, and I feel completely grateful for it.
It’s totally worth a couple cucarachas in our kitchen.
Tags: Costa Rica, family travel, goals, life, living, living abroad, Mexico, mindset, travel, travel tips