If you had told me in 2019 that in the following six years, our family of eight would visit every continent on Earth, I would have laughed. Politely. And then changed the subject.
We were not a travel family. We were a family with six children, a minivan with a lot of miles on it, and the kind of schedule that fills up a wall calendar two months before the month actually arrives. One of our kids was still in diapers. The oldest was fourteen and about to start high school. Matt was building an estate planning practice. I was running a household that required, on any given Tuesday, the logistical coordination of a small military operation.
We were not influencers. We did not sell a business or sell all our belongings and decide to live on the road. We did not pull our kids out of school and become vagabonds. We are, and have always been, an average working family from a small city in the American Southwest — the kind of family that eats dinner together, drives the affordable car, shares bedrooms without complaint, and files things under “someday” when they feel too big to think about on a Wednesday night.
Travel was one of those things.
Matt had served a service mission in Rio de Janeiro as a nineteen-year-old and come home permanently changed by the world outside our city. On his first night back, we sat on a gazebo swing until late and talked about the life we wanted: marriage, children, and — someday — taking our family to far-off places. We could picture it so clearly that night. We filed it under someday and went on with life.
That was 1999. Someday took a while.
For years, the conversation went like this:
“We should go to Italy.”
“We should. Next year, maybe.”
Then the babies came. Then school. Then sports commitments and work deadlines and the entirely reasonable reality of raising six children on one income. The map on our wall stayed mostly empty. Someday kept moving.
And then one afternoon in 2019, while Matt was standing in a parking lot about to get into his car, I called him with what I thought was a very exciting piece of news.
I had found a deal for our 15th anniversary trip.
Las Vegas to Paris. Round-trip tickets. The price was remarkable. I told him. He made a joke about how cheap it was and how we could take the whole family for what we had budgeted for just us.
There was a pause.
And then I did something I had not entirely planned to do.
“Whoops,” I said. “I just bought them.”
Want the full story of how it all began? Read more on our About Us page.
That was how it started.
Eight tickets to Europe. Three weeks. Six children ranging from two to fourteen years old. A two-year-old still in diapers. It was, objectively, a lot. What followed was three weeks that changed how we saw the world, how we saw our family, and what we believed was actually possible.
We climbed to the top of the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica. We watched the Eiffel Tower erupt into light at midnight from the banks of the Seine. We rode a water taxi through Venice in January with six bundled-up children. We ate frog legs in Paris and stood at the Leaning Tower of Pisa and watched Hamilton on the West End and sat in seats that had belonged to Roman senators two thousand years before our minivan was built.
And then we came home and started planning the next one.
What followed, over the next six years, surprised even us.
We went back to Europe. We took all eight of us into the Amazon rainforest, where we fished for piranhas with a reed and a piece of raw meat and ate them for dinner. We hiked the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu — our four-year-old, Ben, completing every step under his own power, becoming, according to a guide with thirty years of experience on that trail, the youngest child he had ever seen do it without being carried.
We floated over the Serengeti in a hot air balloon at sunrise. We entered a burial chamber beneath one of the queen’s pyramids at Giza. We watched herds of wild elephants move through Tarangire National Park and sat with Buddhist monks at dawn in Luang Prabang and kayaked among humpback whales in Antarctica.
Our eight-year-old, Clara, wrote the word BRAVE across her knuckles in permanent marker and jumped out of an airplane over New Zealand.
Our youngest, Ben — the same boy who hiked the Inca Trail at four — did a belly flop into the Southern Ocean at one degree Celsius and came up grinning.
All eight of us stepped off a Zodiac boat onto the shore of Antarctica together. The seventh continent. Six years after the parking lot phone call. Six years after “whoops.”
Seven continents. Six years. Six kids. Zero regrets.
Over the coming months, we are going to tell you all of it.
Not just the highlights. The whole story — the planning and the panicking, the airports and the disagreements, the moments that didn’t go as planned and the moments that went better than we could have imagined.
The customs agents in Buenos Aires who chastised us for twenty solid minutes at four in the morning for reasons we still do not entirely understand, thanks to the language barrier. Ben stepping on a rusty nail in the Amazon barefoot, with only a shaman in the vicinity. The sprint through the Ethiopian airport to catch a connecting flight with seconds to spare, Ben’s bag over Emma’s shoulder, everyone running. The two-year-old who wandered off in the Lego Store in London and what AirTags actually do when that happens.
And the practical side too — how we funded it, how we packed eight people into carry-ons, how we kept the kids in school, how we negotiated the time from work and other obligations, how we made it work on a budget that did not include a windfall or an inheritance or a particularly magical financial situation.
Because here is what we want you to know:
We are not special. We are not extraordinarily brave, or wealthy, or free from the obligations that keep most families earthbound. We are a family that made a series of small decisions that added up to something large.
We chose the first house over the bigger one. The minivan over the truck. The savings over the boat. And one afternoon in a parking lot, one of us accidentally bought eight plane tickets to Europe and said whoops, and the rest of it followed from there.
There are always reasons to wait. Next year. When work settles down. When the kids are older. When the timing is right. We know. We said all of it.
The problem is that someday will not arrive on its own. The thirteen-year-old becomes eighteen faster than you think possible. The window that is open right now will not always be this size.
Start today. Pick a destination. Make a budget. Put a pin in the map.
We’ll show you how the rest of it works.
— Katie & Matt
Over the coming months we’ll be publishing the full story, trip by trip, decision by decision. Here’s what’s on the way:
The story of our first accidental adventure — eight tickets to Paris, a two-year-old in diapers, and what happened when we actually got there.
Peru, the Inca Trail, Ben at four years old, and what it looks like to go all in on a continent most families never consider.
A hot air balloon over the Serengeti, herds of elephants in Tarangire, the queen’s pyramid at Giza, and what it takes to do East Africa with children.
A skydive, a glowworm cave, Hobbiton, the Milford Sound, penguin parades, a jet boat, bungee jumping, and a camel at Uluru. The trip that produced more ‘I can’t believe we just did that’ moments per mile than any other.
Antarctica, the polar plunge, and what it felt like to step off a Zodiac boat and know we had done what we said we would do on a gazebo swing twenty-two years earlier.
The credit card points system, the packing strategy, the school negotiations, the budget breakdown — everything you actually need to know to make this happen for your family.
