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Visiting your home country as a full-time traveler is not always as easy as home sweet home... It sometimes becomes a race against time from the moment we hit ground....
Objective: to see as many people as possible before leaving again… at least that was the idea when we came home to visit while living abroad as expats the first times being back visiting Denmark.
Now, after 10 years of living abroad we should be wiser, but each time we still find ourselves dealing with the same dilemma. Who do we see in the limited amount of time we have before we leave? This time we are spending one month in Denmark, which is the longest amount of time, we have spent in Denmark in 10 years, but even now there are a million things to do and lots of people to see.
Whats the routine?
This is our first country to visit as fulltime travelers. We no longer have a home anywhere, only our luggage, as the rest is packed up in a container in storage. We want to show the boys more of Denmark, we want to see family and friends, and we have big birthday parties, a wedding etc. to attend. Now, with this much time in Denmark, everyone is expecting us to see everyone, and we want to see everyone, but this time we also want to experience the country – we are traveling after all… and finally we have to work on building our blog. But it’s one great puzzle and there always seem to be missing a piece.
It’s quite difficult to find a routine between seeing people, traveling the country and working.
Is this due to the expectations of others or our own expectations? I personally want to do it all, and I especially don’t want to let anyone down, especially not the people that I don’t see that often (about once a year), and now won’t see for at least another year since we’ll be off travelling. I’m really struggling to find a balance. When I’m spending time with friends and family, I feel like I should be somewhere else or be working. I do prioritize our family and friends – they are after all what means the most to us.
Then comes the work… which includes producing content to our website, keeping our social media up to speed and building on our business ideas among other things, so we have a way of financing our travels and life when we return to Denmark in about a year’s time, and finally there’s all the planning of our travels to do – as all fulltime travelers know, this takes time and can be challenging at times. It constantly feels like we are behind…
What about homeschooling?
We set out as fulltime travelers 3 weeks ago, we have seen lots of friends and family already, but still there is still people we want to see and spend time with. Oh, and there is home schooling… the boys would usually not be starting school for another few weeks, but here in Denmark where we are now, all kids have already started school after the summer, so it seemed natural for us to start as well.
Being completely new to home schooling, there are obviously also a lot of things and routines to get into. How do the different programs work, how much time should we spend every day, what works for us and the kids? We don’t have the answers yet – we are simply working by trial and error now. As we are for everything else at the moment.
So, the key takeaway is...:
After a couple of weeks as fulltime travelers we are certainly in a stage where it seems a bit overwhelming – not all the time – but at times. We want to see our family, all of our friends, all of our friends’ newborns, see people we haven’t seen in years, attend parties, start a business, travel, explore, start a business, produces content to our website, make podcasts, prepare for our travels and much more. I guess, this is a stage we’ll only be going through here in Denmark, as we have a social network here, but I think it all comes down to getting some kind of routine and then working by trial and error for the rest. There will continue to be challenges, after all, we have only just started our adventure, and right now we are figuring out what works for us and what doesn’t. I certainly still have some things to figure out…
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