I have been asked several times in the past few months IF I work. Now I understand it seems to the outside viewer that we are on permanent vacation and one of the first things they wonder is HOW we can afford it, but they are actually asking me this question THROUGH my website. I wonder how exactly they think it runs?

Sometimes travel blogging is this peaceful......but not usually....it IS work!

It made me realize that people love reading and following blogs but very few know exactly what it takes to make it successful. There are a lot, and I mean millions, of travel related blogs out there. Some are simply to keep their friends and family abreast of what they are doing, some are purely for profit, and most, like mine, are sort of a mix of both.

I started this blog to let people know what we are doing and to motivate people to know that this lifestyle is possible. I also wanted to share the knowledge that I have gained over the past decade to help people plan vacations. When I started it was a whirlwind of designing the blog, putting it together, adding and subtracting things we liked and didn’t like, and trying to learn the ins and outs of the travel blogging world.

After the first 6 months of researching, learning, reading, and connecting on social media sites I finally felt like I understood how it all works. At that point, as the blog gained a following, we decided to monetize it. We realized that we could still maintain a useful blog while at the same time making a little extra money.

I spend most of my time on day-to-day things like writing, social media, and emails. And, of course, the actual traveling bit so I have something to write about.

Research
Many hours are spent on research for travel.  Where to head to next, trying to find the cheapest flights, searching for the best place to stay within our budget, things to do while we are there, etc.  This is all part of blogging, as what we do we blog about!

If I were asked what the toughest part of constant travel was or what the toughest component to blogging is, I would answer research to both questions.  I have a love hate relationship with it but at the end of the day it is a true necessity!  I don't plan a lot as I think that hinders travel in a sense, but with 3 children and a limited budget we need to have a general idea of what we are doing!

Weekly time spent: On average 5-7 hours!  (this varies depending on what we are doing)

Actual articles
Of course the main piece of work that goes into blogging is writing. If you want your blog to gain readers you will need good content that people can relate to and you should be posting several times a week. With 3 kids and constant moving I only post 1-2 times per week, but it should be slightly more in my opinion.  I'm working on it..

Taking and editing photos is another part of writing articles that takes a lot of time!

Each post also takes more than just the time to write, which varies depending on the topic, at least for me. I always include photos, so there is the choosing and editing of each photo in order to give my readers the best I can. Then there is the tagging, editing, labelling, posting, sharing, etc. It is not uncommon for one article to take several hours spread out over multiple days.

Weekly time spent: On average 12 hours a week!

The money making bit
Making money is really my tertiary concern, but once we figured it out and started to make some it was certainly a welcome benefit. To make money I spent several hours a week emailing, contacting clients, drafting up posts, placing ads, and general organizational tasks to keep it all in order.

We also realized that we are helping advertise for free when we visit someplace and then blog about it. So I now contact a venue before we go, like Universal Studios in Singapore, and request tickets in exchange for online exposure. This also takes quite a bit of time as I need to draft up formal pitches explaining how and what I will offer and how exactly our visit can benefit them. Then I have to write, edit and add images to the post after we visit. But these “freebies” have been an unexpected benefit of writing about our adventures.

Weekly time spent: On average 8 hours a week!

Getting and keeping social followers
Social media is the bane of my travel blogging existence...there I said it! A huge part of gaining and keeping readers is of course through honest content, but after that it is social media engagement. Some will argue and rail against the entire thing but in my experience it matters!

Facebook and Twitter are where I have networked with fellow bloggers and learned so much. On top of that, the constant changes to Facebook and need to update and “post” keep me busy multiple times per day. To keep followers you need to keep active to hold their attention. It is more time consuming than you may think.

Weekly time spent: On average 8-12 hours per week!


There are many more little things that go into running a travel blog. I am not complaining at all, I love writing, taking pictures, sharing our adventures, inspiring others to step outside their comfort zones, and most of all traveling, but there is a lot of work to it. I make my own schedule and even though I typically spend 25-40 hours a week on the blog it is my choice to make and my timeframe to follow. I wouldn’t have it any other way…most days!

For those of you out there thinking of becoming a travel blogger, I say go for it!  But keep in mind all the time that goes into it, you really need to love traveling and writing to make it work!

Traveling around the world can be lonely from time to time.  Sure, because of the Internet we can stay in touch with friends and family back home.  Yet, there's nothing like sitting around a dinner table with friends who speak your language and that you have something in common with.

Having each other is amazing but meeting new friends is even better!

We've been lucky enough in our travels to encounter some terrific people; from extended acquaintances to interesting fellow travelers.  It's rare, however, to meet up with families that are enjoying the same lifestyle of full-time travel like we are.  It takes a certain sense of adventure and willingness to live outside the mainstream paradigm to travel with kids.  For that, we feel immediate kinship with the brave families that attempt this lifestyle.

After four months of bouncing around different parts of Thailand and Laos, our plans were to check out Cambodia and Vietnam.  However, because of business needs we were drawn to Malaysia.  Isn't it interesting how circumstance and intuition lead the path you were probably supposed to take all along?

Just before heading to Malaysia, we tapped into the family travel blogger community to seek more information about what to expect.  To our pleasant surprise, one of the most active members of travel bloggers had a home base in Penang and encouraged us to visit their area.  Knowing that local knowledge is always better than winging it, and encouraged that our kids could have playmates, we obliged.

We did not expect the level of generous hospitality that followed.  Tracy and Colin Burns, who run a family travel blog and a travel community website, treated us as nothing less than family.  They took us to many local restaurants that we would have never found on our own.  They taxied us to the mall on several occasions.  And they gave us crucial business tips about local banking and travel blogging.

We immediately felt comfortable with the Burns.  Being from Australia, they spoke English, albeit with an excellently exotic accent to us Americans.  After a few days palling around with them in Penang, they invited us to join them in the Perhentian islands.  We jumped at the chance and crammed into their minivan for a 6-hour drive to the speedboat pier to visit these remote islands.

The islands were something out of a movie.  Crystal clear water, lively coral reef with brightly-colored fish, sea turtles and sharks, white sand beaches, good food and great company.  The trip to Perhentians epitomized the full-time family vacation we envisioned for our world tour.  Experiencing it with the Burns family made it that much better.

The beach is so much more fun with friends

When it was time to return to Penang, we discovered that our previous guest house was fully booked.  Without hesitation, the Burns offered for us to stay at their house. Despite our immediate appreciation, we were nervous that we bring too much chaos with three rambunctious boys to accept.  Yet, they insisted.

They made us feel right at home giving us two of their bedrooms to bunk in.  Tracy made a gourmet dinner our first night in their home.  We continued our enlightening discussions about homeschooling and travel philosophy while the kids jumped on the trampoline and played extensively with almost no tears.  They truly went above and beyond to help us and make us feel comfortable.  For that, we can't even begin to express the proper level of gratitude to them.

The immediate kinship of sharing the same lifestyle is an obvious attraction to family travel bloggers.  But the unbelievably generous hospitality was something that was unexpected.  Thank you Burns family from the bottom of our hearts.  Your friendship means a lot to us.

The whole Burns family

If you're planning on traveling with your family to South East Asia or anywhere for that matter, you will not find many better websites and people to contact than the Burns.  Please visit their websites below:

http://www.ourtravellifestyle.com/
http://www.vagabondfamily.org/
http://www.nunomad.com/

Since I am the one that does most of the writing and you usually see the perspective of this trip from my eyes, I thought for our 3 months anniversary (Bloody hell, I can't believe 3 months have gone by already) it would be fun to see our family travel trip through the eyes of my actual family!  To be clear, these were their words exactly, except what you see in parenthesis.

Yeah, I don't have homework tonight! Or ever!

Unschooling is a term that John Holt coined in the 70’s, after years of extensive research regarding how children learn and what was causing them to fail. What he discovered was that school pushes many children to fail via a fear inducing sub society and actually seemed to slow the learning process in most.

One of Holt's strongest beliefs was that children did not need to be forced into learning and anything that resembled school at all was counterproductive to their success. Unschooling, child led life learning, was born.

When I first heard about unschooling 8 years ago I thought it seemed crazy. I thought all the things that some of you are thinking right now. What about socialization, grades, college? My children need to go to school to be “on track” with everyone else. I thought it seemed lazy and neglectful and couldn’t imagine going against the grain in such an “extreme” way.

Flash forward to today and you see a very different philosophy in my home. I have spent the past 6 years homeschooling my oldest son. I have since had 2 more children, traveled with them extensively, moved to a foreign countries, and experimented with almost every type of homeschooling you can imagine. Then I discovered the mind opening experience that is unschooling and now I can’t imagine living my life in anything but this “extreme” way.

My oldest son started out life in a mainstream fashion. He attended 2 years of preschool and then went on to half-day Kindergarten. We lived in a wonderful small town with an excellent school system and were lucky enough to get an award-winning teacher for his Kindergarten experience. She was fantastic but through her own admission she could not provide the experience that she felt all the students deserved. It wasn’t a bad experience but we wanted more for our son. What more did we want? That is easy; room for independent thought, creativity, an ability to question things without being in “trouble” - and the freedom to run our household without the demands of the school system intruding.

The nagging question that remained was what could I, as a parent, do? After talking to that very same teacher and a lot of soul searching I decided to withdraw my son from school. She not only encouraged this, she was almost as enthusiastic as I was about the idea. I found that there were many philosophies to choose from within the realm of homeschooling. Since I was still caught up in the “school” mentality, we started by doing a canned curriculum at home. We tried this in many different ways for 3 years until I realized that we solved some of the issues but not all of them. Simply put, we were not enjoying it as much as we thought we should.

At this point I opened up my mind to the thoughts of unschooling and started reading book after book about it. I realized that I needed to throw away conventional thinking and open my mind up to the possibility that what I thought of as learning may not be the only path to knowledge. My discovery took place because of pioneers that came before me, Holt, Gatto, Kohn, and Sandra Dodd. They all showed me, through their writings, a new reality that I will forever be grateful for.

Reading books and opening my mind were the first steps in the process of de-schooling that Wikipedia defines as “the mental process a person goes through after being removed from a formal schooling environment, where the school mindset is eroded over time”. This step is vital for the entire family but for the parent it can be very difficult. We have far more baggage in regards to school and the added feeling and stress that we are responsible for our childrens’ education and, ultimately, their future. I struggled with what seemed like an ingrained need to follow the norm.

I did go to public school after all, and in his book Dumbing Us Down, John Taylor Gatto says “we are schooling children to merely obey orders…” Although I was a bit rebellious in school, I was still conditioned by societal norms and allowing myself to beak out of the box is where I struggled most on my journey to unschooling.

Ivan Illich first coined the term de-schooling in a controversial book called Deschooling Society, published in 1971. In this book he enlightens his readers to the fact that “universal education through schooling is not feasible”. He goes on to explain that the institutionalization of education means an institutionalization of society as a whole. And that it isn’t until we change the way we view education that we can change the way all institutions function. There is a corrupting impact at the institutional level but it is particularly damaging to society when this happens in schools, and it is happening in schools as we speak.

Another big hurdle for me was in understanding that authentic learning happens all the time. I realized over the past few years that you really can’t stop someone from learning no matter what you do or don’t do. My middle child has never been to school or even attempted anything remotely resembling school, yet at 7 he can read because he wanted to. Through simply living our lives he has learned numbers, adding, subtracting, percentage, fractions etc. How? We play war, poker, exchange money, let him do some shopping and all of those things are necessary for him so he has learned it. School puts our children in a box and real life cannot be found within it. I would prefer my children spend their time outside of that box, learning in the real world.

Everything my kids do shares an equal value because they are always learning, whether it is a walk in the jungle, playing video games, or reading a book. I love that my children have a say in what they want to discover. We offer them ideas and show them various paths to knowledge and support their enthusiasm, but ultimately it is what interests them that's most important to us.  And don’t we all learn better when it is something pertinent in our lives? I know I do and I know my kids do as well.

De-schooling is an ongoing process and something I will be actively doing for many years to come. It has profoundly changed me as a person and there is no going back ever. It reaches beyond schooling and into our lives on every level. There is a new intensity of respect, equality and unconditional love for all members of the family. We all know now what authentic learning is, it looks nothing like school and we are all happier for it.

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