Life Outside The Bubble

In my most recent post, I talked about life inside our bubble, particularly about our vacations. Up till 2013, we thought everything we did was great… and at the time it was. But during that year, necessity, novelty and nostalgia took us to three places that we hadn’t regularly visited in previous years. Little did I know then, but it stirred up a ravenous desire to see the world. In this post, I’ll describe how we pushed the sides of our bubble until it eventually popped – and we left our bubble!

After 2013, here is what our vacations have looked like:

2014

• Visited Disney World for Spring Break
• Noccalula Falls in Gadsden, Alabama as my parents live there
• Drove to San Antonio, Texas to see my other stepson graduate from Air Force bootcamp, visited the city, and on the drive home stopped in Austin and Dallas for sightseeing
• Visited Seattle to see Mt. Rainier, tour the city and spent a night in Vancouver, B.C. (first ever international border crossing!), went to Granville Island, really went whale watching and saw lots of killer whales, and visited the Capilano Suspension Bridge
• Went to Universal Studios Florida
• Drove to Charleston, South Carolina
• Disney World again for Christmas (great but crowded)

2015

• Washington D.C. for Spring Break (it was so unexpectedly COLD!)
• Took a 4 day, three night Disney cruise, went to Disney World before the cruise then added one day to our trip so we could go to Hollywood Studios. We found out that it was Star Wars weekend, and it happened to be the last one that Disney hosted because the event was cancelled the next year (PS – Sci-Fi Dine-In Theater was fantastic!)
• Visited Costa Rica for 7 days, spending the night in San Jose, Tortuguero, and La Fortuna, hiking rainforests, ziplining in the clouds, scaling volcanoes and experiencing exotic wildlife
• Went to Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, Holiday World in Santa Claus, Indiana and Abe Lincoln’s boyhood home

2016

• Went to Tampa on Spring Break to sail on Royal Caribbean to Belize, Honduras, Costa Maya and Cozumel
• Crossed our first ocean on our Europe trip to London, Paris, Rome and Pompeii
• Went to Arlington, Texas to a football game then drove to Galveston where we boarded a cruise on Royal Caribbean to Grand Cayman, Jamaica and Cozumel
• Went to Disney World for Disney Halloween

2017

• Went on a one-month adventure to Sidney, Australia; Cairns, Australia; Bali, Indonesia; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Doha, Qatar; Singapore, Singapore; and Bangkok, Thailand
• Took an Alaskan cruise on Royal Caribbean
• Planning a three-week trip in October to either Europe, South America or the Far East

You might be asking yourself… how can they afford all of that? It’s true, travel is not a pocket-change venture. Yet while we may spend more than most on travel, we make up for that in other areas of our lives. We don’t have a boat, a lake house or condo at the beach, four-wheelers in the shed out back, membership at the hunting club or country club. We don’t spend money on gym memberships, magazine subscriptions, cigarettes or alcohol. We economize where we can – we recently cut off our cable TV and got rid of our home phone line – and honestly haven’t missed either not one bit. My car is nine years old and my husband’s truck is thirteen years old, both are in great shape, and for all of our married life we’ve not paid a single car payment. And all of these avoided costs, large and small, add up to a significant amount that we choose to spend traveling every year.

Again, these are just our choices. It’s not that ours are any better or worse than anyone else’s choices, it’s just what we do. They aren’t sacrifices for us because we could easily trade off some of the travel to afford almost anything on this list.

The other precious resource that we have to address is time. My daughter is fourteen so she is just entering high school. Our trans-oceanic trips in 2016 and 2017 were done during the school year, but we are able to travel because of homeschool. She and I have partnered in the homeschool journey for the last eighteen months. While sometimes it is a struggle, we’ve decided as a family that the time flexibility is too important for us to pass up. My husband still works full-time and gets six weeks of vacation per year plus holidays, so if we strategically plan our trips we’re able to squeeze another four or five days in just by leveraging the weekends at the beginning and the end of his vacations.

Our family’s sole desire now is just to keep traveling. We don’t like to call traveling a goal because goals are meant to be completed, accomplished, checked off the list. It is truly about the journey for us, savoring each stop and destination along the way. We’re planning to make it our lifestyle. It’s so reinforcing when someone likes, comments or shares our posts or social media entry, then when we get back they want to talk all about our adventures.

Will we ever become full-time travelers? Someday perhaps. We’ll keep a home base for now because my parents are still here in Alabama and I want to be able to get to them if they need me. I also want my daughter to grow up close to them, and to my husband’s family who also lives in Alabama. But as long as we’re able to physically keep going, this is going to be our new lifestyle.

So maybe we haven’t really left the bubble at all… maybe we just expanded it to include all of the Earth and the wonders within.

Question – Are you happy with your lifestyle choices? Or does something need to change? Tell us about it below!