Welcome to the Voyager Family blog! We are a dual-nationality family (American and naturalized British) who have a love of travel and exploring the world. So we’ve taken on the ultimate challenge of travel, a round-the-world trip for one year!

Mom and I hiking the Fox Glacier, New Zealand 1993

I have been talking up the trip and the blog to everyone I meet for the last several months. What I found very interesting was that everyone we have spoken with has been very excited and supportive of our goals. I have been asked many times however, why or how we decided to undertake this trip. My best explanation is that I was raised to embrace travel, to appreciate it and celebrate the amazing diversity of our world. My mother traveled around the world twice. Once on her own and later after she remarried, with her husband William. She was the consummate traveler, always checking magazines, newspapers, catalogs and later the internet for deals and exciting adventures. As a university professor, my mother’s values were centered around education and travel presented a beautiful way to extend learning fully into the day to day.

Now, it is our turn to pass along this love for learning through experience. The time for broadening our own minds by embracing what our world can teach us and even more importantly, our two boys. Our sons, Liam (9) and Declan (6 – soon to be 7) , are already well traveled kids. Born in the south of England, they each got their first passport and took their first long-haul flight back to the US at 4 months of age. They have been to Portugal, Spain, Costa Rica and Iceland just to name a few!  They are resilient, confident and independent kids – Montessori educated kids who embrace learning through experience.

Costa Rica Family Trip 2015

Maria Montessori said it best when talking about children this age, “Education between the ages of six to twelve is not a direct continuation of that which has gone before, though it is built upon that basis.  Psychologically there is a decided change in personality, and we recognize that nature has made this a period for the acquisition of culture, just as the former was for the absorption of the environment.”

There are less than 10 days now until we begin this mad and wonderful adventure. All of our focus has been on getting out of the house, which has been a herculean effort. But as we continue to focus on the tasks of wrapping up our lives, putting pretty bows on the current norms and tidying them away into storage for a year, we also look excitedly forward to this adventure in learning that the world is waiting to offer us!