Image credit: Tony Miller
I was born and raised as Location Independent by parents who had adopted the lifestyle before it became “cool.” Gestated in the highlands of Guatemala and gasping my first breaths on the back side of a lake in northern Ontario, Canada, it was not unusual to find myself in the back of a van, living in a log cabin with no electricity or living on an idyllic island in the St. Lawrence River.
My childhood was an epic adventure which unfolded across four countries and two continents in such a quiet way that I was in my mid-twenties with a bachelor’s degree before I even realized how unusual my upbringing had been, or appreciated what a gift it was.
“Normal” Life Was A Challenge
For me, adjusting to life in one place and a 9-5 job became my adventure. I moved to the USA to attend university, married an American and never went home. I’m a teacher by profession who has transitioned to educational consulting and curriculum design within the home education market. I’ve been working with families to design customized individual educational plans for their children for about ten years.
I am also a freelance writer for the home-school and travel markets. We have four kids, aged 7-13; between managing their educational needs and keeping up with my business, I have a full time job!
A Return To My Roots… And Hitting The Road!
We spent a decade living and working in cities as diverse as Indianapolis, Chicago, Boston, and New York, doing “the next thing,” having babies, changing diapers and trying to live like everyone else before giving up entirely and returning to my nomadic roots…
My husband quit his posh job with a major computer company. I delegated the details of my educational consulting business to an assistant. We sold our house as well as most of our possessions, traded our motorcycle in for a set of touring bicycles, packed up the children and left it all behind.
Our first year was all about learning to live on the road as we cycled from London, UK, to Africa and back, wintering in Tunisia. In our second year we finally mastered the career aspect of location independent living and are now foot loose and fancy free, with funding to match!
We’ve worked from:
- an apartment in Prague
- a tent atop the highest sea cliff on the Adriatic coast of Italy
- a town on the Mediterranean coast of north Africa
- hammocks in Oaxaca, Mexico
- in the purple shadow of the volcanoes surrounding Lago de Atitlan in Guatemala
- a five acre caye off the coast of Belize, to name a few.
As I write this, my man is barefoot, under a pine tree, designing a database for a major healthcare company from our summer base near Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
Dreaming Big Dreams
The greatest gift my parents gave me was the belief that anything is possible if we have the courage to dream big dreams and pursue them with all of our hearts.
Each of us is gifted with one life, one great spin around the sun and we can spend it any way we choose but we can only spend it once.
It is my passion in life to encourage others who want to break out of the box and live life on a grand scale to accept that anything really IS possible. If you dream it you really CAN do it, and the sky really IS the limit. After all, “Life is what you make it!”
