We Sold the House. Now We're Backpacking Italy, France, Spain and Portugal With a 2- and 7-Year-Old.

The last time I wrote here, we'd just gotten back from two weeks in Vietnam with nineteen people, celebrating Dani's parents' 50th anniversary. If you missed it, the full Vietnam itinerary is here. A lot has happened since then.

We sold the house. After almost seven years in the US, Dani and I decided to move back to Australia, and getting there meant untangling everything we'd built here first. In its place, we bought a cabin in the north Georgia mountains — partly a home base for the in-between, partly an Airbnb. Email me if you want to book a stay before we're back stateside to run it ourselves.

Somewhere in the middle of packing boxes, we also finished rebuilding this site. If it looks different than the last time you were here, that's why — same posts, hopefully a lot easier to actually find things.

Why now

Moving countries, selling a house, and figuring out the next chapter all at once is its own kind of chaos, but it also opened up something we don't usually get: a real gap. No jobs to give notice at yet on the other side, no school year already in motion, no lease pinning us to a date. Career, school and cost of living all lined up into the same window at the same time, and we decided not to waste it.

This is the part of our "live bold" thing that's easy to say and harder to actually do: you make the decision first, and you figure out the rest as it comes. We know we want to be closer to Dani's family on the South Coast, and are starting some remote house-hunting. We still don't know exactly what work looks like for either of us once we're there, but hoping to explore more consulting and create our own path. We talk about that openly with the kids — not as something to worry about, but as the next thing to figure out — and it's been interesting watching them pick up the language, and hopefully the mindset, of embracing change as part of life with positive upsides.

The plan: Italy, France, Spain and Portugal

We're backpacking — actual backpacks, no rolling suitcases besides what the kids carry — through four countries, starting in Italy. A few things I'm genuinely looking forward to:

• Catching up with friends based in Milan for some group exploration of Cinque Terra
• A Pompeii tour built specifically for kids, so Remi gets the history without four hours of standing around adult-paced ruins.
• Glamping in Andalusia, in southern Spain — proper beds and a real bathroom in safari-style tents on a sprawling campground with room for kids to run.
• A stretch in the Algarve in Portugal at what would be our first worldschooling hub — a handful of traveling families based in one place for a few weeks, kids learning alongside each other, other parents to socialize with.

Follow along

I'll be posting real itineraries and what actually worked as we go, same as I did for Vietnam and Iceland. If you've got recommendations for Italy, France, Spain or Portugal from your own trips with kids, I'd love to hear them.