We are a family of eight – Katie, Matt, and six kids – who over six years visited all seven continents together. We’re not wealthy. We’re not influencers. We didn’t sell the house or quit our jobs. We’re a middle-class family from a small city in the American Southwest with full work schedules, school calendars, and church and community commitments, who somewhat intentionally and somewhat accidentally became a family who travels. This blog is where we share how – so your family can chase its own travel dreams.
This whole thing is her fault. I want to get that on the record up front.
Katie is the mother of our six children. She is also the one who “accidentally” pressed the button. One afternoon, while I was in a parking lot about to get into my car, Katie called and said she had found the deal for the two of us to go to Europe for our anniversary. A few minutes later, after I made an offhand joke about how cheap the fare was and how for that price we could take the whole family, there was a small pause on the line and then the word that would eventually take us to every continent on Earth.
“Whoops.”
“What do you mean, whoops?”
“I just bought them.”
Eight tickets to Europe. Three weeks. Six children. A two-year-old still in diapers. It was the most Katie thing she has ever done, and none of this happens without it.
Here is what you need to know about Katie. She is one of the most unassumingly capable people you will ever meet. She is a mother, a homemaker, and she can pack eight people into carry-ons and make it work for a month on the other side of the world. She researches every destination meticulously before anyone else thinks to. When a plan suddenly collapses due to an airport announcement or a closed airspace, she is the one on the phone finding a better alternative. She has a personality that allows her to make friends with Uber drivers in cities all over the world who do not speak her language. The language barrier has never once slowed her down – her smile and charm get us wherever we need to go.
What Katie has, and what she would want every mother who makes their way here to find, is the courage to take six young children into places she has never been, in languages she does not speak, and trust that we can figure it out. She is not a fearless person. She is something better – a person who decided that the dream is worth the discomfort and worries of the first step.
Katie’s message is this: If you are a mother reading this and wondering whether your family could ever do something like this, the answer is yes, you could! Start smaller than you think you need to. Say yes a little before you feel ready. The first trip is the hardest because it requires the most imagination.After that, the dream just keeps getting closer.
I met Matt in high school. I had recently moved into town and we fell in love before we fully knew why, which is how the good ones always seem to happen. We were teenagers. He was, to be completely honest, a little wild. Not in a concerning way. In the way of a seventeen-year-old boy who had not quite finished growing up yet and was in no particular hurry to. We laughed constantly. That part has not changed. The growing up came later, and we did most of it together.
When we were nineteen, he left to serve a mission in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Two years is a long time to hang around for a boy you think you are going to marry. We wrote lots of letters, and I finished my college education and had all of the good fun one should have in college. Matt was on the other side of the world, walking through favelas and apartment buildings and streets in a city he had never pictured being in. He was learning that the world was much larger than the one we had grown up in – and that the people in it were much more recognizable than he had thought.
The first night after he came home, we sat on the swing in a gazebo and talked until very late. I remember the specific quality of that conversation. Things had permanently shifted in both of us, but in ways that brought us closer, rather than dividing us. It felt as if we had never been apart. We talked about what we wanted. Marriage. Children. And travel. Real travel, the kind where you actually take your family somewhere far away and let them see and experience the world and its people. We could picture it so clearly that night, sitting on that swing in a small desert city with our whole lives ahead of us.
So we got married. I worked to put Matt through school. Matt became an estate planner. I built a home. We built a life. We had Lydia. Then Emma. Then Rachel. Then James. Then Clara. Then Ben. The family we had imagined on the gazebo swing was, eventually, the family we had.
But the travel part of the dream – that part kept receding.
For years, the dream sat in the back of our minds.
Six children were running around our house. Bills had to be paid. School schedules had to be managed. Sports commitments filled weekends and summers. Our days were full. Katie spent much of the day driving children around town and taking care of endless logistics of running a family of eight, and Matt spent the days, and often the nights, building an estate planning practice. The ages of our children sprawled from two to fourteen. One was still in diapers.
How could we ever do it?
Sometimes, lying in bed after a long day, or sitting across from each other on a date night, we would resurrect the gazebo dream. We would dream about taking our family to Italy, to Peru, and talk about the map on the wall we kept meaning to fill with pins of places we would go. And then we would list the reasons it wasn’t possible yet.
The babies are too young.
It costs too much.
Work is too busy.
The kids will miss too much school.
The timing isn’t right.
Next year. Maybe next year.
We were doing what almost everyone does when a dream gets too big: we were filing it under “someday” and hoping someday would arrive on its own.
Here is something we want to be straightforward about, because it matters.
We had never been great at keeping up with the Joneses, which turned out to be a gift. When other people traded up to bigger, fancier houses, we stayed in our first house and let our growing family fill it. We decided there was nothing wrong with kids sharing rooms – in fact, we are advocates of it. When others bought the nice truck and the fancy car, we chose a minivan and a used sedan. Instead of the boats and the toys and the things, we saved.
We were not saving for anything specific at first. We were saving because we had been raised to, and because we knew, even then, that having options in the future required sacrifices in the present.
We did not know that one day those savings would become plane tickets to every corner of the world.
We did not know we would stand as a family on the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica, our children taking in the view of Rome.
We did not know our four-year-old would hike the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu under his own power – six miles uphill at altitude – or that a guide with decades of experience would tell us he was the youngest he had ever seen do it without being carried.
We did not know we would float in a hot air balloon over the Serengeti at sunrise, watching lions, giraffes, and gazelles move across a landscape that has looked the same for a million years.
We did not know our eight-year-old would jump out of an airplane over New Zealand, writing the word BRAVE across her knuckles in permanent marker before she boarded.
We did not know we would eat grubs in the Amazon, ride a camel through the Australian outback, kayak among humpback whales off the Antarctic Peninsula, and stand inside a chamber cut deep beneath a pyramid on the Giza Plateau thousands of years ago.
We did not know that one day all eight of us would step off a Zodiac boat onto Antarctica in matching blue parkas, the seventh continent under our feet.
We did not know any of it.
All we knew, at the start, was the phone call in a parking lot. The pause on the line. The word that changed everything.
“Whoops!”
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