Under the Influence (with Jo Piazza) - Sunday Nice Things： The Family That Travels Together

00:00:00.580 Hey all, Jo here and you are listening to Sunday Nice Things. The episode I'm dropping

00:00:07.160 in your feed today is actually another one of mine, another one of my podcasts. It's

00:00:12.340 called Committed and it's a podcast that I've been doing for a very, very long time, nearly

00:00:18.000 eight years at this point, and we've recently changed it to be a little bit different. In

00:00:25.580 past seasons of Committed, we were hyper-focused on commitment within a marriage. We did hundreds

00:00:31.660 of episodes like that. But this season, we're doing something a little different. This season,

00:00:37.060 we're talking about commitment in all of its forms. It can be commitment between two siblings.

00:00:43.380 We've done an interview with two sisters-in-law. It can also be commitment between two business

00:00:49.200 partners. I love that we're doing this, that we're branching out into all of these other ways

00:00:54.300 that human beings can be committed to each other, because I truly believe that in our culture,

00:00:59.920 we focus a little bit too heavily on commitment within romantic love. And there's so many other

00:01:07.400 ways that we can be committed. Today's episode is one that I think you guys in particular are

00:01:13.580 going to enjoy, because this one is about commitment between a mother and her teenage

00:01:19.060 son. This interview was so long that I actually did two episodes with it, but the first part

00:01:26.020 is about a family choosing to uproot themselves and travel around the world together. Now,

00:01:33.080 this is something that I think about doing with my own family all the time, and I think it is

00:01:37.980 fascinating to hear about. What we really dive into in this first part is how travel has

00:01:44.760 completely changed their family dynamic. And I think you're going to love this one. If you do,

00:01:50.600 you can listen to all of the other committed episodes wherever you get your podcasts. There's

00:01:55.520 so much bingeable content on there, including part two of this interview, where Jessica and

00:02:02.220 her son Largo actually decide to hike the entire Appalachian Trail together.

00:02:06.020 today's duo is a 17 year old boy and his mother and we're talking about something that I think

00:02:20.820 a lot about as a parent how do you transcend the regular run-of-the-mill parent relationship

00:02:28.860 and turn your bond into a real friendship.

00:02:33.680 I ended up talking to Jessica and Largo for so long

00:02:37.620 that we're going to divide this interview into two episodes.

00:02:42.180 The first one talks about how Jessica and her partner

00:02:45.300 laid the foundation for a family who travels together.

00:02:50.460 When Jessica's two kids were young,

00:02:52.460 she pulled them out of traditional school,

00:02:54.700 began homeschooling them, and started traveling abroad.

00:02:58.640 They left the U.S. a decade ago in search of a more authentic path.

00:03:03.360 And since then, they've lived in an RV in Europe for three years, learned to sail, and crossed the Atlantic during COVID.

00:03:12.340 This has been challenging and insane and delightful and wonderful and sometimes miserable and all of the things.

00:03:21.080 But Jessica and Largo truly believe that it has brought their family so much closer together.

00:03:25.740 And that's evidenced by the fact that last year, Jessica and Largo, who was then 16, decided to spend six months of Largo's high school years hiking the entire Appalachian Trail together.

00:03:42.120 Yep, just a teenage boy and his mom hiking the entire Appalachian Trail.

00:03:49.440 So for the first episode, we're going to get into the family's foundation of travel.

00:03:53.920 In the second episode, we're going to talk about how a teenage boy actually chose to hike the trail with his mom.

00:04:18.140 All right, so let's start out.

00:04:19.860 I'm just going to ask you straight up, tell me your story from the beginning, and then

00:04:23.860 I'll interrupt and ask questions.

00:04:25.480 We are Americans, and in 2014, we were living in Boston.

00:04:30.340 We lived all over the U.S., and we decided to change our life, and we left the U.S. for

00:04:34.660 full-time travel.

00:04:36.720 It was seven years in the making.

00:04:38.500 We were corporate people, running the rat race, overscheduled, burning the midnight

00:04:45.720 oil, you know, in the red at the end of almost every month, kids in private school, it was $50,000

00:04:51.300 a year because we wanted an international dynamic community. And we just said, the heck with it.

00:04:56.880 We sold everything and started traveling. And so we spent a year in Costa Rica, a year in Ecuador,

00:05:03.700 almost a year in the South of France. And we bought an RV and we RVed all around Europe for

00:05:08.380 three years. Then we were going to go explore Asia and we got as far as Japan and COVID happened.

00:05:13.180 So we did five, five years, five months in Japan.

00:05:16.720 And then we said our daughter, we have a 20 year old daughter who's in university.

00:05:21.540 And then on the podcast with me is our son, Largo, also known as Captain, who is 17.

00:05:26.680 And then my husband, Will, I'm 50, hold on, 52, dad's 54.

00:05:32.580 Anyway, our daughter at the time who was still with us said, we can't possibly go back to

00:05:37.280 France.

00:05:37.660 We have French visas.

00:05:38.440 So we're going to go back to France to kind of wait out COVID.

00:05:41.200 and she said we can't go there and just like live in an apartment and be you know locked down we're

00:05:45.840 gonna lose our minds and she was right so we said okay we'll do a project we'll buy a house we'll

00:05:49.800 fix it up there we had done that kind of as hobbyists before we left the U.S. on the weekends

00:05:54.360 and whatnot we got to France we looked at two houses a boat came across my Facebook feed we

00:06:00.100 always wanted to learn to sail we bought the boat instead learned to sail and sailed for the next

00:06:05.180 three years from France to Spain to Canary Islands across the Atlantic Martinique a couple of

00:06:11.080 Caribbean islands, Columbia, through the Panama Canal, up Central America, and the boat is sitting

00:06:14.800 in Mexico right now. Yeah. And the boat was always kind of the end goal for us. We always knew that

00:06:20.140 eventually we were going to buy a boat. And this opportunity just kind of came up. And we said,

00:06:25.880 why not? Because we realized that the limited time that we still had left as just the four of us,

00:06:31.320 we didn't kind of want to use it just living in an apartment. So we just decided, yeah,

00:06:38.520 that it was now or never and we didn't sell the boat this was this is like a year and a half ago

00:06:44.300 a year and a half ago we left the boat in mexico we decided we want to do more land travel because

00:06:48.760 um the boat takes a lot of time it takes a lot of money and maintenance and why we started

00:06:53.700 traveling was because of our kids and getting more time with them and learning about people

00:06:57.620 out in the world and strengthening our bonds and you know memories over stuff and all that kind of

00:07:02.240 stuff and we weren't really doing that anymore because a boat is just all encompassing and we

00:07:06.320 were moving fast and we sailed a ton of miles so we put the boat on what's called the hard and it's

00:07:10.500 taking a little break and then we went to southeast asia for four months um france and spain for

00:07:16.680 another six months and you are caught up to almost present day was that like three minutes or under

00:07:21.560 oh my gosh all right i have so many questions so many questions before before we get into where

00:07:26.720 we're at right now so how old were the kids when you first started traveling i was around

00:07:33.380 turned seven. I turned seven a couple months into our first kind of trip. And my sister was,

00:07:41.680 I think, what, 10? She had just turned 10 and he was almost seven. Yeah. Okay. Costa Rica.

00:07:47.880 I love this. Love it. So what, cause seven is the age of my, my oldest. And then I have a five

00:07:53.640 and a two. So as a seven year old, what was that like to leave school and be like, okay,

00:07:58.720 we're just going to travel now. It was interesting. I'm going to be honest. I didn't really have that

00:08:03.320 much of an opposition to it because I was seven. I didn't really, I mean, I found, oh yeah, we're

00:08:09.800 just going to a new country. That'll be cool. Finding maybe new friends, a new language,

00:08:15.020 all that sort of stuff. And being that I already sort of spoke the language with experience in

00:08:20.860 Spanish, I kind of wasn't too opposed to it as opposed to just going to a completely foreign

00:08:26.440 country. But it was a very interesting experience because being that I still had friends in the US

00:08:34.100 and that the parents pitched it as a one year travel experience before deciding to kind of go

00:08:41.380 full time, it was less looked at as kind of, oh, we're going on this wonderful adventure that's

00:08:48.060 going to be forever. And kind of having that mindset about it was very important because

00:08:53.940 Otherwise, I would have observed, oh, yeah, we're leaving everything a bit too harshly.

00:09:00.060 I think, too.

00:09:02.520 I think they thought this was just what everyone did, because ever since he was in my belly,

00:09:07.440 we had been trying to be expats abroad through my husband's company, and it kept falling

00:09:11.040 through.

00:09:11.740 So ever since the only language he's ever heard in our house is, we're going to go travel.

00:09:15.740 We're going to go travel.

00:09:16.600 We're going to go travel.

00:09:17.680 And so I think he just thought it was like, well, you know, a lot of people do soccer.

00:09:22.200 A lot of people do travel.

00:09:23.420 Like they didn't know this wasn't kind of normal, either one of them, because we had talked about it so much.

00:09:28.200 Exactly. And doing long term travel like this wasn't completely foreign to me.

00:09:33.100 I think it was at age five or six that we went to spend a month in India.

00:09:38.440 And then we spent a summer in Paris as well, just kind of to experience the world as it was.

00:09:47.280 But yeah, that made it so that this didn't feel too crazy.

00:09:51.100 of an experience. Let's take a quick break here. We'll be right back.

00:10:05.260 How do you think, how do you think it brought your family closer together, being on the road

00:10:10.640 all the time and constantly having new experiences that are not always easy, right? I mean, I know

00:10:16.180 I was a travel editor for a long time and it looks beautiful from the outside and it is,

00:10:21.940 but it's also hard and challenging. It is. Um, it's a lot, yeah, it's a lot harder and challenging

00:10:28.380 people, especially if you're a travel editor, right? Cause you're, you're probably sharing

00:10:32.860 the most beautiful parts of it. Right. I mean, not like the, oh, we're stuck in the airport for

00:10:36.800 two days. Um, we only had each other. There was no calling the grandparents. There was no dropping

00:10:43.220 the kids off at a friend's house we had to survive and that alone made us get so incredibly close

00:10:51.060 we only had each other to count on and they only had each other as the children of the family to

00:10:55.860 count on that was it now i don't make it sound like we were kind of this island for 10 years of

00:11:00.920 this full-time travel life we made friends of course wherever we went we have friends that

00:11:05.420 we've had since our first year of travel but at our core unit where most people have extended

00:11:10.000 family or they have babysitters or stuff like that we didn't have any of that exactly and that

00:11:15.100 grew us so strong and when we left some of our critics were saying you know their your kids

00:11:21.280 aren't going to learn teamwork they're not going to learn all these things that they learn at school

00:11:24.980 or on team sports and you know i mean this was so brand new to us we were scared i was like what if

00:11:30.120 they don't learn this stuff how you know you don't know there weren't like tons of people had done

00:11:34.640 this before us there wasn't the social media presence we were just like okay i hope this works

00:11:39.000 but what if it doesn't you know and one of the best things to come out of it was how we

00:11:44.240 had to learn to be a team and be strong together we had to learn each other's emotions each other's

00:11:50.000 triggers it's very easy when your ship's passing in the night like if you have a fight with your

00:11:53.780 sibling or your family fights to just be like okay we're gonna have dinner go to bed and it's

00:11:57.880 over the next day right and everyone goes to school and everyone goes to work we could never

00:12:02.100 do that everything had to be dealt with at the moment we had to learn each other's personalities

00:12:06.380 even better. We had no choice but to work as a team or we would not have survived.

00:12:12.380 Of course. And that's not to say there wasn't a massive learning curve to that. Pretty much

00:12:18.020 the entire first year was a learning curve. It was awful.

00:12:22.040 And it was definitely a transition period. But once you get to that point and you have

00:12:27.840 kind of that dynamic set up, it definitely makes for a good experience. But there is absolutely

00:12:34.660 a very big adjustment period for that it's huge and sometimes when we talk with people because

00:12:40.840 one of the parts of our business is we coach people on the logistics of full-time travel

00:12:44.080 and we kind of prepare them like I try to prepare them for the worst case scenario

00:12:48.280 and it makes me so happy when they come back and say it wasn't as bad as you said that transition

00:12:52.860 wasn't as bad I'm like yes because it was so awful for us the first I would say seven months were

00:12:58.140 awful I mean we never said oh let's go back why did we do this but it was just like one thing

00:13:02.120 after another. And I'm like, I don't know, this is really, really hard. And luckily it worked out

00:13:06.800 and it kind of like any lifestyle you choose, we've had these ups and downs and transitions

00:13:12.080 that were really tough. When we moved from a stationary traveling life to an RV, there was

00:13:16.420 a huge transition. When we moved from an RV to a boat, another huge transition. And now we're back

00:13:21.820 in the US and we had another transition because we're back here for a year, six months, we were

00:13:27.140 hiking on the Appalachian trail. And then another six months for him to realize a goal of becoming

00:13:31.720 a private pilot before he goes to university and there's another transition like you have you know

00:13:36.280 they're all there we just have to kind of work together and be like okay we're going to get

00:13:39.440 through this we can do this let's let's go on what we've um the tools we've used in the past

00:13:44.780 to make it through will work again what were some of those challenges early on and what tools did

00:13:50.240 you develop okay i'll give you that's a good question i do i very much i remember the experiences

00:13:56.260 but specific details. That was like 10 years ago. Okay. This, this is the biggest one. I had

00:14:07.060 worked from home for, well, I've been working remotely for 21 years now. So when we left,

00:14:13.560 and what do you, what do you do? So when I started out, I had a graphic design business.

00:14:17.620 Okay. And my husband was working remotely as an accountant when we first left. We've since,

00:14:23.600 He still dabbles in the remote accounting. He goes on and off. We developed a business together where we host group travel trips around the world. We have the logistic business of coaching, coaching full-time potential full-time travelers. And then we have rental property.

00:14:39.700 So we have, we have a pocket, there's some other little streams of income, but those are the, those are the three major ones. And we heavily encourage different streams of income because there have been times where some have gone away. Obviously during COVID, the hosting the group travel trips completely went away.

00:14:55.520 We had to refund a ton. We would schedule a trip and then cancel it and then have to refund again

00:15:00.980 because this went on forever. So some of the tools. Since I was working from home for a decade,

00:15:08.220 the kids were already in school. They weren't home. I worked from home. I had part-time nannies

00:15:13.060 helping. Once they went to school, I was used to working home alone all day. They would go off to

00:15:18.860 school. He would go off to the office. All of a sudden, and I was pretty independent as well,

00:15:24.400 go to whatever doctors work pick the kids up whatever needed to be done we moved to costa

00:15:29.380 rica i don't speak the language i am now homeschooling a kid which i had never done in

00:15:34.200 my life this he was going to school but his sister was being homeschooled and at the time

00:15:39.660 my partner was there as well but he had never worked with me remotely so i usually do like a

00:15:46.120 reenactment of this but just get the idea i'm sitting there in my nice little bubble trying

00:15:50.640 to focus on the homeschooling thing, trying to work at the same time. I'm a quiet worker. I don't

00:15:55.320 like a lot of noise. My husband is singing, tapping his fingers, jumping around in his chair

00:15:59.740 working. And I'm like, how are we going to make this happen? This is not possible. Like I went

00:16:06.300 from having, you know, control of my environment to now I have to, we all have to make this work

00:16:10.900 together. And, and basically what it was is we, we set boundaries. We, we, we, so we got a lady

00:16:17.480 who came in and cooked for us a couple of days a week, our daughter went to tutoring in Spanish 0.99

00:16:23.600 several hours a day. So we kind of carved out pockets where my partner would take our daughter

00:16:29.100 to this and go away for a couple hours so I could hyper-focus or the cook would come in and cook our 0.71

00:16:34.020 meals so one of us could work through a meal time. We basically had to learn to work as a partnership

00:16:41.420 in parenting work and um full-time travel very very quickly and of course being dropped into

00:16:49.560 the deep end of an area where you didn't know the language of course so i was super dependent

00:16:54.660 on my husband speaking spanish coming to the doctor's appointments with me you know all the

00:16:58.540 things like going to the gynecologist with me like he's only gone to see like the babies on

00:17:02.480 the ultrasound and all of a sudden he's translating to me and all of a sudden he's like put your legs

00:17:07.720 up higher in the stirrups yes well yeah exactly you know actually that that's one of my funniest

00:17:12.360 stories because he's sitting there talking with the doctor and the doctor's got the things in me

00:17:16.640 and he goes do you want to look and my husband's like i don't want to look absolutely did he look

00:17:21.420 no he didn't and then they started discussing the uh the soccer game and i'm like hello i'm up here

00:17:28.040 in the stirrups and then my favorite experience from that and he was really happy when i got

00:17:34.360 enough of a grasp of the language was that it's, it's, it's Latin and people kiss. So I had my

00:17:41.200 gynecologist appointment and the gynecologist kissed me on the way out on the cheek, you know?

00:17:46.700 And I was like, this is weird. And he was like, this is weird. I mean, we traveled enough. The

00:17:51.140 kids were in a French school in the U S we knew all the kissing culture, but it's weird when your 1.00

00:17:54.960 gynecologist is just looking in your vagina. Now, all of a sudden you're giving them a kiss, right? 1.00

00:17:58.960 you're giving a kiss you're giving a kiss i um we took my now seven-year-old uh to sicily when he

00:18:05.400 was three months old and he he just got lip kissed all the time oh wow by by like male chefs like

00:18:12.540 people would pick him up and then just like you know squeeze him real hard and then just like

00:18:16.720 smooch him uh and i'm just like all right yeah this is just this is this is how you say hello

00:18:22.280 another tool that we use or another, I don't know, a resource is that we, we, we, um,

00:18:30.660 loved going out and just taking a break. Yeah. Leaving the kids, whatever. Um, that was nice

00:18:35.720 too. But we, um, we asked people who had already been doing this before us and been doing it for

00:18:41.120 a while. What they did, we found a community. How do you deal with this? How do you deal with

00:18:45.620 babysitters? You know, what happens with this and that it really helped. Um, and that, and we help

00:18:51.800 a lot of people now, not just coaching clients, but people email me all the time and ask me a

00:18:55.120 question and I respond or they message me on, on social media. Um, there was a lot of value

00:19:01.020 in listening to the people that were already doing what we wanted to do when we were barely

00:19:04.560 getting our toes wet and they offered great advice. Um, we joined a lot of, um, expats of

00:19:11.780 different areas. We were in the expat community, even though we weren't kind of expats, these were

00:19:16.380 usually corporate expats, but we would ask questions there for help. What else did we do

00:19:22.620 as a family? You were so little. I'm trying to think 10 years ago. Yeah, definitely kind of

00:19:25.980 taking a break from everything and kind of, I don't know, evaluating our circumstances. Like

00:19:31.020 we took a lot of walks around just to kind of clear your head. It was definitely key to kind

00:19:37.940 of separate yourself from the chaos. We also didn't hold ourselves to any standards. Like

00:19:42.740 when we lived in the US, we've never went to McDonald's. Now we're going to McDonald's all

00:19:46.740 the time. Like we, we gave ourself that grace of breaking our rules and patting ourselves on the

00:19:53.000 back and saying, you know, it's going to be okay. Tomorrow's a new day. Just, just really giving

00:19:58.380 ourselves kind of, and the kids ability to absorb what was happening and the transition, because

00:20:04.780 it's profound. I mean, you're, you're, oh, and a lot of, a lot of conversations, even to this day,

00:20:10.320 We still have conversations continually. Is this lifestyle still working? We had, we, I mean,

00:20:15.700 we have them all the time, but the most recent like big one was when his sister went to university,

00:20:20.200 we sat down and we said, do you want to stop full-time traveling? We started because of them.

00:20:25.000 Of course we love the lifestyle, but we started because of them. They were our why. And we wanted

00:20:29.820 to make sure he still wanted to do it because his best friend was leaving. And although we

00:20:33.620 communicate with other people and meet up with people and accommodate our travels so we can see

00:20:38.160 friends out in the world that we know that are traveling as well as our stationary friends coming

00:20:42.260 to visit he still didn't have that day-to-day contact with another young person constantly

00:20:47.440 and his response he had he had two demands two demands two demands all right let me all right

00:20:52.960 being able being able to travel uh to go see my sister uh every once in a while and then to have

00:20:59.480 a gym and that was basically it i i of course there's more than that i have more needs but

00:21:05.220 those were kind of the necessary ones to meet. Yeah. And we do our best to, he's flown from all

00:21:11.740 over the world in the last two and a half years to visit his sister. He'll go to university and

00:21:17.500 hang out with her. And then the other, obviously the gym membership, wherever we are for there,

00:21:22.200 more than a couple of weeks, we'll get a gym membership for him for a month. And then another

00:21:27.260 thing that he had, which is, which has always kind of been there, but it's just really manifesting

00:21:32.520 now is that he wanted to get his private pilot's license he wants to be a commercial pilot

00:21:36.900 and he wanted to get it before he went goes to university so he's in his junior year high school

00:21:41.980 um and so he wanted to do that in the united states so that is actually one of the two reasons

00:21:47.920 that we're back in the u.s which will end up being a total of a year okay he could realize that goal

00:21:53.380 and i know this wasn't really the question you asked but i think it's very very important is that

00:21:57.600 people always say to us why how did you get your kids to travel for so long because we always

00:22:01.780 assumed we would come back when they hit high school that they'd want to come back right right

00:22:05.020 and they didn't want to and i truly think it's not that we're magical parents and we've done anything

00:22:09.900 you know that well close close right close thank you i remember i told you to say that

00:22:14.760 yeah definitely is that we gave them a voice right um and everything we did from a very young age a

00:22:22.560 very young age it was like do you want to go out to this place or this place to eat and then it

00:22:26.380 progressed to when we were leaving ecuador after a year there do you want to live in france or spain

00:22:31.020 And we had them do research and we let them pick on my partner and I wanted Spain.

00:22:35.440 They picked France.

00:22:36.440 We went to France and then it just kind of grew from there.

00:22:39.200 And then once they started getting goals and kind of had an idea of something they might

00:22:43.720 want to pursue as a career in the future, then we would accommodate so that they could

00:22:48.960 explore that.

00:22:50.080 And we always knew we would be back in the U S for at least six months, probably for

00:22:54.020 like the last five years, because he wanted to get his private pilot's license.

00:22:56.880 Yeah. So we, I, I, I, I'm not super excited about being out back here. I lived here 40 years. We've

00:23:03.000 had a lot of fun out in the world, but I am super excited about embracing a goal that he has. And we

00:23:09.160 make the best of wherever we are in the world. Right. And so I think that's really been a key

00:23:13.380 to our success is that they get a voice in what we're doing. It's not just we're on this mission

00:23:17.280 and you're going, you know, right, right, right here, here, here you go. Here we go. All right,

00:23:21.800 Let's take, let's take a quick break.

00:23:23.700 And then first I want to talk about how do you make the best of where, wherever you are

00:23:28.680 in the world?

00:23:29.340 How do you make anywhere that you are feel like home?

00:23:32.660 And then we're going to talk about, about the IT.

00:23:43.400 Okay, we are back.

00:23:44.660 Now, I love the question of how do you make anywhere in the world feel like home?

00:23:52.700 How do you make the best of wherever you are at any given moment?

00:23:57.340 I personally operate with the glass is half full attitude.

00:24:00.720 That doesn't mean I don't get pissed or have bad days or have negative moments, but I truly

00:24:05.740 feel really freaking grateful that we get to live the way we do.

00:24:10.140 It is a privilege.

00:24:11.400 It's just reality.

00:24:12.460 We have American passports.

00:24:13.940 we're able to work remotely online we're lucky and I never ever forget that so it's very easy

00:24:20.360 for me to make a shitty situation kind of feel better when I take when I look back and I say

00:24:25.820 look what life we're living look at the choices we have not everyone gets to live like this you

00:24:31.280 know be grateful you know if I'm playing kind of a pity party um the way we we kind of make it so

00:24:37.600 So people have this idea that home is, you know, four walls and a roof and it doesn't

00:24:42.720 move.

00:24:43.800 We're kind of like the Wizard of Oz, you know, our house moves.

00:24:48.080 And there was this great, this great quote, and I never remember it, but it was, I think

00:24:52.760 it was after the war in Japan and a reporter said to a girl, you know, what are you going

00:25:00.720 to do now that you don't have a home, you don't have a home anymore.

00:25:03.460 And she says, I have a home.

00:25:04.600 I just don't have a house to put it in.

00:25:06.200 hmm and that's how we've kind of always operated um the four of us are home we yes we care we do 0.89

00:25:14.020 some crazy crazy shit we carry around traditions when anyone comes to visit us a lot of countries 0.76

00:25:19.240 you can't get hershey's kisses in someone comes to visit us during christmas we have a craft we 0.97

00:25:23.620 do with hershey kisses we ask them to bring them we we gather traditions from other countries and

00:25:28.700 then we take them with us wherever we go in the world we've created our own holiday called dream

00:25:33.560 day which we celebrate every October 6th was which was the day that we launched for full-time

00:25:38.100 travel back in 2014 we create home is more of a like a mindset and a way of living with the four

00:25:46.560 of us together than it is a physical location there was no way we're going to create home with

00:25:50.140 a physical location the way we're living that's right yeah and with the four of us we've kind of

00:25:54.080 developed this sensation that anywhere where all of us are together um is more of a home than

00:26:00.340 anything else because we've had situations where we have just been in i don't know an airbnb for a

00:26:06.200 month or maybe a boat that we just bought and even then it doesn't feel like home but all the four of

00:26:12.820 us being there makes that so it is a home i mean we have been in some crazy situations but it is

00:26:21.160 kind of just the our bond our our kind of unit that has kept it uh feeling very homely and if

00:26:28.060 anything else now that we have um my sister who was in college uh not here anymore it's not that

00:26:34.280 it feels less like a home it was just very much an adjustment period to that and and a very big

00:26:39.620 kind of change of mindset um which has kind of helped us through that because it was definitely

00:26:44.880 we felt like there was a uh a gap to stuff yeah exactly like it took us like nine months

00:26:51.480 and we've just we've just learned to live without her um with us all the time um the last thing we

00:26:57.520 would want is her to come back and be able to 24 seven, not go off and have her own dreams unless 0.99

00:27:01.580 she wanted to come live with us. Right. But because we spend so much time together, we had to kind of 1.00

00:27:06.260 readjust and evaluate and kind of order everything. And that was why we asked him, you know, do you

00:27:11.800 want to live closer to her? So you can visit more often, like, do we need to kind of adjust this

00:27:17.380 plan? And, and overall, I don't know, we, we just all try to make the best of any situation. And,

00:27:24.680 And we all need, you know, we all, another part of something feeling that kind of home feel or that comfort you feel is friends, you know, community.

00:27:35.480 And that was one of the things that people really feared or when there were critics, when we left, that our kids wouldn't know how to socialize and they wouldn't have any friends and all this stuff.

00:27:44.300 And like I said before, we were so new at this.

00:27:46.600 I was afraid of that too, you know?

00:27:48.940 And so for the first, I think it was probably the first three or four years, they were still little.

00:27:53.380 so we were social coordinators my my partner and i and we were in a country for a year at a time and

00:27:59.060 he actually went to traditional school for the first three years of our travel and so we just

00:28:03.820 we hosted parties he sent him to school with a bunch of handmade invitations and said we're

00:28:08.260 doing a traditional american halloween party we're doing a traditional american thanksgiving

00:28:13.700 do you want to come participate and learn about our culture and share your culture

00:28:17.180 and it opened up so many doors some people would come and go this is a weird family this

00:28:22.340 homeschooling thing. What are they doing? And other people would be like, I want to be your

00:28:25.920 friend. And we just formed community that way, which connected us to the local culture. It

00:28:30.760 helped us make friends who a lot of them were still friends with today and they have friends

00:28:35.140 all over the world. So it created that thing that we call home is, you know, it's the house,

00:28:40.080 it's the mindset, it's the familiar restaurant, it's the friends. We just kind of created all of

00:28:44.860 that virtually out in the world, if that makes sense. Yeah, no, it makes a lot of sense. And

00:28:49.880 How do you think that your relationship, your bond and commitment, how is it different maybe than other families now?

00:28:58.080 I mean, do you do you think you communicate better?

00:29:01.740 Do you think your family is closer because of this? 0.99

00:29:04.220 I think the key to it is that we've seen some shit. 0.97

00:29:08.920 I think not not to say like, oh, we've been through stuff, but I think the experiences we've shared, be it good, be it bad. 0.93

00:29:17.780 um they've kind of helped us connect better um so that we can kind of i don't know feel more free

00:29:24.780 and and and talk to each other more as as peers than as a kind of parent kid relationship better

00:29:31.980 than other parents i'd i'd hesitate to say that because every family is so different totally

00:29:36.140 totally and better is a weird word anyway right yeah you know what i'm not trying to say oh that

00:29:40.260 was a bad word i'm just saying i don't want people to think that we think that there's already a lot

00:29:44.320 of judgment of this lifestyle and and people tend will tend to think you know well you know

00:29:48.860 they must be rich or they don't work we do work by the way a lot um and so I I I don't I think

00:29:55.220 we just made a different path a different choice and we owned it and we went with it and

00:30:02.180 I think yeah no what did you ask again I'm so sorry I got lost no just like how do you think

00:30:10.680 that your relationship might be different because you guys. Okay. So I think I don't never really

00:30:17.540 thought about how the lifestyle has impacted this, but we have a very, very open communication

00:30:24.200 relationship with the kids. And I honestly, I don't know if it was conscious or it just happened

00:30:30.160 the way we live, but they're able to talk to us about everything from a very young age. They asked

00:30:36.440 how babies were made. We talked about it. Um, we talk about, we have a lot of big topics in our

00:30:41.260 house and they have the freedom to disagree with us on topics without judgment. Um, and that's,

00:30:48.020 that's really impacted the relationship, the communication. Um, and we operate from a

00:30:54.560 standpoint of from age 14 on, we think of them as adults, young people practicing being adults

00:31:03.380 in our in our home on our bank account if that makes sense that doesn't mean they go out and

00:31:09.400 buy a house on our bank account yeah it means that they make we we give them the liberty to

00:31:14.100 try things to make mistakes um to dust themselves off try again and we give them an enormous amount

00:31:20.920 of freedom for example when our daughter was studying for one of her APs we were in a marina

00:31:26.940 on the boat um it wasn't a really good environment for her to study and our boat is not that big

00:31:31.880 so we rented her an airbnb in the town and she lived there for a month uh they've been able to

00:31:37.820 travel on their own i mean when you're younger you have to do the um unaccompanied minor

00:31:42.780 but as you when you turn 16 you have the availability to just travel as your own and

00:31:50.000 they've done that we've put a lot of trust in them but we've let them practice at all of this

00:31:54.460 it's not like all of a sudden she had never stayed on her own and we sent her out to live

00:31:58.100 in an apartment in the city where in where the marina was by herself there's been these gradual

00:32:02.480 things you know when they were two years two years old we would have them navigate an airport

00:32:06.920 on a very very simplistic term ways because they couldn't read you know just super super small

00:32:11.900 things like we're going to gate 10 and we're at gate 8 where do you think 10 is lead us there

00:32:17.000 so there's there's been a lot of practicing at grown-up stuff so when we sent our daughter

00:32:23.620 we weren't living in the U S back to the U S to go to university. She hadn't lived here in eight

00:32:28.000 years and she had just turned 18. I didn't have any worries in the world. We were like, she'll

00:32:33.300 figure it out. She's going to be okay. We don't micromanage. And the craziest thing that we don't

00:32:38.440 do that people think is insane is we don't give any advice, particularly if they're, if they're

00:32:45.120 over 18. So our daughter jokes about it because she, she's at university. It's very typical of

00:32:52.360 American parents to helicopter parent and tell their kids what to do and always give advice.

00:32:57.940 We don't do it. And so one day she messaged me and she said, I need your advice on this. I said,

00:33:02.300 I'm not going to give you advice, but you can call me and talk to me and talk it through

00:33:06.120 and I'll listen. And she said, I really need your advice on this. And I said, okay,

00:33:11.860 tell me it. And then I'll give my advice, but I want to hear what you think first.

00:33:15.800 But it's very, very rare that we give any advice or any opinion. Um, when they're younger,

00:33:20.960 obviously but but once they're older we just let we just let them figure it out if it's going to

00:33:25.240 be something dangerous or something like that you know obviously we would intervene but we want them

00:33:29.720 to be able to make mistakes um dust themselves off and get back on it and this started from a

00:33:35.240 very young age when we were living in boston um our daughter avalon wanted to go out once without

00:33:40.020 a coat uh it was cold she had just a sweater on i said okay fine we walked to the car we got in the

00:33:47.080 car. She put her belt on. She was like, I think I need my coat. I said, okay, go back in and get

00:33:52.960 your coat. It was that easy. She was self-regulating and that has been so important for us. It has also

00:33:59.560 given them a great amount of what I call street smarts of being able to recognize if something

00:34:04.840 doesn't feel right, which was really interesting to kind of see it come to fruition on our hike

00:34:09.480 because there were probably about a handful, maybe five people through the whole six months

00:34:13.800 that gave us kind of the heebie-jeebies and just kind of creepiness and half of the time he said

00:34:19.040 to me that person didn't feel right and I said me neither yeah so they're learning kind of this

00:34:23.520 they're learning how to trust their own voice um and and understand situations without us giving

00:34:30.720 commentary on the side of what we think yeah and I definitely think that has kind of helped our

00:34:34.860 family bond in essence because we aren't looking at it just as oh you guys are the parents you're

00:34:40.300 here to parents. Um, I think, I mean, it definitely differentiates us from, from other

00:34:45.600 kind of family bonds in a sense. Yeah. I don't think I know better than them. There are certain

00:34:52.480 things, of course I do maybe because I have more experience, not because I'm older and I don't

00:34:56.940 always know what's right for them at this age, having teenagers, I really feel like they know

00:35:01.800 what's best for them. They're going to make mistakes. I mean, we still make mistakes, you

00:35:04.640 know but I feel like they have a good judge of what works for them and what doesn't and I want

00:35:10.380 to honor that and and I it's we've had a lot of fun parenting teenagers I know you're not there

00:35:16.000 yet but I know you this it feels like it's a thousand years away right and yeah it definitely

00:35:20.680 is and you but it goes fast and you've probably had people tell you parenting teenagers is awful

00:35:26.980 you probably have people telling you it's it's it's awesome you know I mean you're in you're in

00:35:31.200 a unique area because you're talking about this parenting stuff, right? Um, I, I, it has been

00:35:36.980 really joyful for us. The questions are bigger. They're harder. Obviously teenagers have a

00:35:41.520 question at nine o'clock at night and it's something very big. And I'm like, uh, my brain

00:35:46.180 shut down at eight 59. Yeah. Yeah. We've switched schedules and stuff. Um, but it's, it really has,

00:35:54.620 listen, nothing's perfect. I mean, we fight, we've had fights, we've had disagreements. Um,

00:35:59.840 we, we learned to apologize. Um, I'm wrong eight times a day and I apologized. I mean, that's,

00:36:05.360 that's been really crucial to our relationship. You know, like he said, it's not, I am not parent

00:36:10.640 and boss and in charge. We are, we are, we are a family of humans and I don't subscribe and

00:36:17.580 neither is my partner to the, um, we're the authority. Yeah. And I think the key, the key

00:36:22.960 to all of this is that when we do have fights, we can't walk away from each other because we're all

00:36:27.180 in a boat so so so it's kind of weird if we're if we don't figure it out but it's definitely been a

00:36:33.580 a case of we need to kind of um understand each other and understand viewpoints uh to kind of

00:36:40.440 get through that and that's definitely strengthened our bond no one's storming off the boat no the

00:36:44.560 atlantic nobody's jumping off just saying oh screw you i'm gonna swing away i'm going to starbucks 0.93

00:36:49.340 peace out peace out exactly

00:36:57.180 and that is all we have for today next week we're hitting the trail the appalachian trail

00:37:12.860 and i promise you it's gonna be an adventure committed is produced hosted and created by me

00:37:20.220 joe piazza our executive producer is ramsey yunt if you have ideas for the show please email us

00:37:27.100 We'd love to have you on.

00:37:29.260 Our email is joe at influentialmedia.biz.

00:37:34.460 Have a wonderful day.

00:37:36.520 You deserve all of the incredible things.

Under the Influence (with Jo Piazza) - November 24, 2024

Sunday Nice Things： The Family That Travels Together

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