Hi, we’re the Smiths!
We’re seasoned world travellers and lifetime nomads who have lived and worked across Canada, the UK, and Ireland, though we somehow always seem to have gravitated back to our hometown of Toronto in the in-between times.
However, our nomadic lifestyle came mostly to a halt when we had kids — we settled into life in the inner suburbs of the city and got caught up in the everyday grind of balancing demanding jobs while taking care of our little ones. But that life never quite seemed to fit, and our feet started to get itchy for the nomad life once more.
We had always dreamed of taking time off to travel and explore the world together as a family. This dream helped us get through some pretty tough times, especially when the pandemic hit and we were left raising two young kids during what seemed like never-ending lockdowns and border closures (fun fact: the city of Toronto had the longest period of continuous lockdowns in the world!).
Over time, the dream started to turn into a feasible idea as we thought through the various ways that we could actually make this work for our family. We would need to have sufficient funds — travelling with two young kids is expensive.
So we saved and we devised strategies to limit our spending.
We would need to continue to educate our kids on the road. So we put on our teacher hats and found resources to educate our kids (now 5 and 7) in math, reading, and writing.
We would need periods of time with limited movement to allow us all to rest and recover. To have a sense of “home.” So we planned to intersperse months of movement with more static month-long stays.
We would need to have sufficient space to spread out in our accommodations, and a private area to work and take Zoom calls after the kids were in bed — we couldn’t spend a whole year sharing hotel rooms. So we would focus on Airbnbs with at least two bedrooms.
And in time, we built this idea up in our minds until it became an actual achievable plan.
In September 2023, we took the plunge! We knew that if we didn’t do this now, we’d miss our window. Our kids would start missing school that’s harder to teach. They would miss their friends more. They would mutiny. And it would be too tough to extract ourselves from our lives.
So now here we are, on the trip of a lifetime, sharing our experiences and hoping to inspire others to take the leap into the digital nomad life.
We hope you’ll follow along with us as we explore Bali, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Australia, New Zealand, Portugal, Spain, France, Ireland, the UK, and wherever else life takes us on our trip of a lifetime.
We’ll share tips for long-term travel, destination guides for our favourite spots, and resources on how to make your travel dreams a reality.