Imagine driving from Ottawa, Canada to the bottom of South America and back again with six young children.
It was a crazy thing our family accomplished when Ed and I grew restless during mid-life, but we needed to do something different and wanted to spend more time with our kids while they still wanted to be with us. Travelling as such wasn’t the easiest learning to overcome the challenges we faced, but it was the force that turned our family into a group of good friends. In my youngest daughter’s words, “Out of all my friends and people I know, no one gets along with their brothers and sisters like we do.”
Contrary to popular belief, South America isn’t near as dangerous as we are led to believe by the media. In general, South American people value and deeply respect the family unit and when a “gringo” family travels to a South American destination, it is amazing the sincere, friendly and almost overly helpful reception they receive.
Our nomad years were incomparable in terms of education for our kids. They learned geography first hand, history through exploration, a third and forth language through emersion, math skills through currency conversion and budgeting and social skills by being a minority, constantly meeting new people and experiencing different cultures.
A list of their favorite places visited:
Gold Museum, Bogota, Colombia
Inca Ruins of Ecuador and Peru
Cable car rides to the top of mountains, Merida, Venezuela, Santiago, Chile and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Hiking in various locations of the Andes
Camping in Chile’s Torres Del Paine National Park, with grandparents
Porito Moreno Glacier, Argentina
Iguaçu Falls, Argentina and Brazil
Brazilian beaches
Everyone needs a bag for their own things
Don’t take too many clothes, lots are nice but we didn’t wear most of we brought and we wanted to buy new stuff from where we were.
Don’t travel too much in one day.
Sometimes the best thing to do is just spend a few days on a beach.
Because we roughed it on our journey, we didn’t have tech toys and our computer, well… another story. We weeded it down to some real play value articles that packed easily into a box: A travel Chess set, Battleship and Connect Four; a tangram, some puzzles and word games, several decks of cards and a box of Lego.
Recommendations from a parent’s perspective:
Kids and parents need separate sleeping arrangements as much as possible.
If the kids aren’t interested in visiting somewhere, don’t bother. Dragging them to a place they don’t want to go, stimulates conflict and wastes time, money and energy.
Have family meetings regularly to gain cooperation and compromises that work for everyone.
Be open to just go with what ever happens.
Anytime I’m asked about travelling anywhere with children, I say, “Just do it! It’s a great way to get to know the world, your children and yourself.”
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