by Angus Nelson

When my wife and I met, we had dreams of seeing the world and taking adventures. We exchanged vows and adventured together in tandem! How would we work together? Would we get along? Do we have similar planning and strategy? That would remain to be seen...

Our oldest daughter was about 12 years old at this time, old enough to come along without requiring a lot of caretaking… this was going to be easy!

Then we had another child… now what???

And that’s the thing, people falsely believe they can’t travel with children. We were determined to prove this falsehood untrue. We made our family values include travel, adventuring to see the world, experiencing new sights, eating new food, and walking in other cultures.

By the time our second child was 4 months, we were already on a plane to Hawaii. In fact, it was around that time we found out we were going to be expecting our THIRD child, too! Do you think this would slow us down?

We ARE those crazy Nelsons, right?

If you’re new around here, you have to know that we took off a year in 2014 to travel full-time with a 3 and 4 year old. We were homeless vagabonds staying at Airbnb’s and VRBO’s all the way from San Diego to Aruba. Thus begun this entire blog and story line - “we sold our house to travel full-time”... people responding with “you guys are crazy!”

The adventures have continued to stretch us, challenge us, and best of all, enlighten us. We’ve learned to be flexible and generous with our time, stuff, and affections - place value on our experiences more than material “things”.

BE PRESENT

And I believe the biggest lesson we’ve learned was this - be present in the moment.

When you discover the power of a moment, you become engaged with life - noticing the smells, the wind, the sounds, the people, and the tastes. And as such, I’ve also noticed my family. That’s not something I expected when this all began.

Ironically, every attempt to experience something new has always brought be back to appreciating something I already possessed, the people I love.

FOCUS ON MOMENTS

Another discovery were the moments themselves. You never know how a specific fraction of time leaves an impressionable, tangible, and never-forgotten mark in your life--that point of significance that alters reality or shifts understanding. Sometimes, it’s an instant connection you make to a person, place, or emotion.

These are some of the most extraordinary points of gratitude in my life.

The older I get, the more I realize that the only thing that matters are those closest to me.

And as Father’s Day is upon us, instead of celebrating “me”, I find myself wanting to celebrate “us”. To the woman who altogether approaches planning WAY differently than I… whose strategies are far more contrarian than my mind’s process…

We are so opposite when it comes to how we actually DO travel! Yet, we’ve found a way to make it all work… and I LOVE IT! Because it’s those very differences that actually keep us spinning on the correct axis.

We prefer to gamble on the dream rather than dream on the gamble.

This family… my family, they are my favorite friends and adventurers. May we always explore, be curious, and invent our own rules together.

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