Where Do I Start?
“Where do I start?”
It’s a question that I encounter almost daily in the plethora of worldschooling, family travel, and expat internet groups I have been frequenting since late 2024. In the vastness of time and space, it can feel like an overwhelming task, the decision of where to begin when you are thinking of leaving your known home indefinitely. Figuring out where to go, how to get there, what you need to travel internationally, how long you want to go, what you do with all your STUFF- it’ll keep you up at night. Still, I suppose the very question “where do I start?” is, itself, a beginning.
Now having walked the steps to launch our family’s extended period of exploration, I once again find myself asking the question “where do I start?” Only this time, in regard to where do I start this blog? Two days ago we sold our house in a lovely neighborhood in Hoover, Alabama and moved into an AirBnb in the Highland Park neighborhood of Birmingham, AL. While we’re only 20 miles from our home of the past two years, this certainly feels like a beginning- like we’ve cut our tether to the earth and are now adrift, free to find our own path, but also a little nervous about venturing outside the social norms of being borderline (ok, reeealllllly borderline…like, pretty much on the border….ok, ok, maybe we’ve crossed that border) middle-aged parents of four kids in the suburbs with a house and a yard in a good school district (not that we ever fit into that mold particularly well).
But the beginning could go back farther than that, to when we first started daydreaming about taking extended trips to other countries or traveling around in an RV after the big kids (D and F) graduated high school. Or when the six of us spent a mildly harrowing two and a half hours in the library the Monday before Thanksgiving to get all four kids their first passports. I suppose that my point is that the beginning is a bit nebulous. It can be many things all at once. It may be chaotic. Not necessarily linear. Much like this blog post…
And hopefully, like figuring out how to launch my family of six on a minimum year long, multicountry adventure, I will figure out this blog thing, too, if you’ll bear with me.
Moving Day Reality Check
For those interested, though, here’s a rundown of how moving out of our 4 bedroom/3.5bathroom house and into a 1 bed/1bath AirBnb looked IRL:
We had to be out by April 30th, but booked our AirBnb to start the day prior just to be sure and for the flexibility of not needing to keep our king sized mattress another night. We finished packing up the UHaul Ubox on the 28th then either loaded up anything left in our car and our van or took it to the street. We would have donated the things left that we didn’t want to pack up or take with us, but time was starting to feel very short.
To spice things up, Ellum, ever the opportunist, noticed that our magnesium gummies were within easy reach while awaiting being loaded into a vehicle. He popped that childproof (resistant?) top and ate about 10-15 gummies. I found this out when he had explosive diarrhea and then I noticed the gummy container hidden by the toilet. Thank goodness for that 150k graduate education and feeling confident in keeping him hydrated and monitoring for more concerning symptoms of hypermagnesemia at home. 🤦
We finally left the house around 5:30pm. Beadle took the dogs to his mom’s house, where they will be happily residing during our travels, but we weren’t able to take the cats. The little boys and I grabbed some quick dinner and headed to the AirBnb where we were greeted by NO AC and an 85 degree condo. Luckily, the property management team was quickly responsive and- after a brief interlude for me to clean Ellum up after some more gummy induced diarrhea-walked me through a fix without needing to call in emergency maintenance. We got the boys to bed then collapsed ourselves pretty soon after.
The next morning, Ellum woke up, chipper and happy and ready for some breakfast at 6:30 am. We didn’t bring any of our food with us the day before because we ran out of time (and space) so he and I snuck out of bed and walked through Highland Park to O’Henry’s, a local coffee shop. While not my top Birmingham coffee pick, it was THERE, only a 10 minute walk away. The city was still quiet. The morning breeze was divine. Ellum was pleasantly and hilariously chatty. They had five kinds of muffins. It was a great start.
