Suzy: Hola, I'm Suzy and welcome to the Wander Worldschool and Slow Family Travel podcast, where we discuss the stories, logistics and finances of long-term traveling families and the multitude of ways to learn and educate along the way. Today, I'm joined by Erin Riska, A mom who turned a gap year into five years of exploring the globe with her husband, two boys and two cats. We uncover how her family has mastered the art of slow travel with pets, homeschooling with intentional curriculum use, self-employment to fund their travel and creating a dream tween community. 

Erin: Thanks for having me, Suzy. As you said, I'm Erin, and I am a nomadic mama, part of a family that has been living a location-independent life for exactly five years at this point. We set out five years ago in the summer of 2020 for what we thought would be a family gap year in the midst of all of the upheaval of the pandemic. And here we are, five years later, we are still going strong. So I am a mother to two boys. They're nine and 12 now. They were four and seven when we started. And together with my husband, John, we have just been thoroughly enjoying showing them the world and seeing it through their eyes.

Suzy: How exciting. And my two boys are five and eight. So about in the age of when you left for your kids. And you were from Colorado. Which part of Colorado?

Erin: Our home base in the US was in Fort Collins, Colorado, so just about an hour north of Denver.

Suzy: We have family in Fort Collins. So I do love the Northern Colorado area.

Erin: That's amazing. We moved to Fort Collins in 2018. So really only a couple of years before we started traveling.

Suzy: When you moved in 2018, was the intention to travel a couple years later?

Erin: When we moved to Fort Collins, we had no intention whatsoever of setting out on a family gap year or traveling the way that we have. It was just prior to when our older son was going to start school and it just felt like such a lovely community. And I think the pandemic led to a lot of upheaval for a lot of people and certainly for both my husband and I, both of our careers were impacted, we really kind of viewed that as an opportunity to just be a little bit wild and crazy and here we are.

Suzy: I have so much compassion for families that experience a pandemic with older kids or school-aged kids. And I will say even especially younger school-aged kids where I just cannot imagine what it would have been like to do home Zoom. Mine were like five months and two in 2020, early 2020. It wasn't terrible for us to just be hunkered down at home.

Erin: The funny part is that if you had asked me in 2018 or 2019 or the first two and a half months of 2020, if we would ever be a homeschooling family, I would have laughed in your face. That is not something I ever envisioned for myself. I am a huge proponent of and supporter of public education. I thoroughly enjoyed the school that our older son went to for kindergarten and first grade, but life happens. We have been essentially homeschooling our kids for five years. I've really come to love it. And at this point, with my older son being 12 and kind of at that in between sixth and seventh grade point, my younger son is nine and in fourth grade now. I find it very, very difficult to even imagine sending them to a conventional school at this point.

Suzy: Wow, what a transition. We'll definitely get into more of the education piece of it. Before we talk about that, as well as your hubs and your offerings, I'd like to hear more about your personal travel origin story,

Erin: So it's a little ironic because I did not grow up in a family that traveled. I grew up in Michigan, and I never even left the state of Michigan until I was an adult. And then I was 25 before I ever left the country. So the kind of travel that my family and I did when we were, I was growing up was camping. I did not have the kind of experience that my own children are having. And I really didn't discover an interest in travel or a love for travel. Until I was in my early twenties, I moved to Washington, D.C. I found myself meeting and making friends with people from other parts of the country, who'd traveled internationally a lot as children, who'd maybe studied abroad while in college, who'd maybe done a stint with the Peace Corps and had come back to the US So just a wildly different experience and perspective than my own frame of reference. And it really piqued my interest. So when I was 25 years old, I made the decision to leave my job and to go abroad, I went to the Czech Republic, which is where my own paternal ancestry is from. And so I felt called to go to that part of the world in order to learn about and just sort of discover my roots. And I enrolled in a TEFL certification course so that I could become certified to teach English as a foreign language in order to financially support myself without completely obliterating my savings. And I spent a year there and I did exactly that. I taught English and I traveled a lot. I traveled to 27 countries across Europe during that year. Primarily fast travel, shoestring budget backpacker style, Occasionally a friend from the US would come visit and I certainly met people everywhere I went, but I basically solo traveled for about a year.

Suzy: What was that like to open your eyes to all these different countries and different experiences?

Erin: Yeah, it was amazing. This was an incredibly formative time of my own life. And it really, I think changed the course of my life in many ways in terms of the things that I'm interested in, the things I've come to value, the extent to which I really value experience rather than things. So it was really incredible. I spent so much of my time during that year traveling in Eastern Europe rather than Western Europe. I really explored Eastern and Central Europe and down into the Balkans. And this was back in 2003 and 2004. And so that was a very different part of the world then than it is today. I just repeatedly learned some really interesting lessons that were really consistent. And I've continued to learn these same lessons in the course of subsequent travel, even kind of travel that my family does today, which is that some of the places that I've been most excited to visit those wind up being some of the most underwhelming and sometimes even disappointing experiences. Whereas places that maybe in my mind I have thought of as a little dodgier, less nice, less to do, that sort of thing, those places really took me by surprise and continue to take me by surprise in really positive ways. Those are lessons that I first started learning in the Balkans in particular. It's a part of the world that I knew only in the context of the war that took place in the 90s with the dissolution of Yugoslavia. And I really came to just adore that part of the world. And it's continued to play a really important role in my family and I's travels over the last five years.

Suzy: We spent the summer, well, a little bit of the summer in Sarajevo with the pop-up. Yeah. Little bit time in Albania. And I really appreciated how recent a lot of that history was. Obviously even the early 2000s, it was even more recent. I can't imagine what it was like then. Let's talk about your family travels as well.

Erin: We started traveling in the summer of 2020 and it was our first time going international with our kids up until that point. And so over the course of these last five years, we've really just kind of lived our life in this very location independent way where we slow travel, we spend months out of time typically everywhere that we go. With some exceptions, there have been periods of time where we travel a little more quickly, a month at a time and a place, and we find that that's especially sustainable for us for a number of reasons. But we've primarily split our time between Europe and Mexico. Big reason for that is because our family is not comprised only of my husband and myself and our two children. It's also comprised of two cats who travel with us as well. And that just adds an entirely different, more complex element to international travel that we have to navigate. And we know how to do it really well in Europe and we know how to do it really well in Mexico. and we know how to go between those places. And so that's really been a huge factor in how we've structured our travels because these other two members of our family that we just could not give up have been with us as well.

Suzy: It's great to hear from people that have pets and are like, wait, I want to travel, but I also want to bring, you know, my pet with that it is possible.

Erin: Cats and small dogs are the most straightforward as far as traveling with them. Because you have the option of having them travel in the cabin with you, larger dogs need to be checked as cargo. And then there are some breeds like snub-nosed dogs that you cannot travel with by air at all. But with our cats, it's been very straightforward. Yes, there are some complications and complexities administratively, logistically. It adds expense for sure. It adds paperwork. We have to be incredibly mindful of which airlines allow pets in the cabin, which airlines do not, what countries require when entering, exiting and that sort of thing. So there's just more research to do. But at this point, we've been doing it long enough. We know what the deal is. And we long ago just got our heads right with the fact that it does make things more expensive, but it's the price that we pay to have gone ahead and started living this lifestyle now rather than like delaying this dream until some point in the future when we don't have pets. Or, you know, rehoming them or something, which also did not feel like a good or viable option for us.

Suzy: I can see how once you've learned the ropes of navigating travel between certain destinations, that could be quite the appeal to continue with some of those similar destinations. It's still new, but there's some comfort too. And Pat's probably really like that too.

Erin: Yes, that is absolutely true. And that's one thing that I've found has emerged as a pattern for us over the years. I really love new novel places and experiences. However, my family, they're more nostalgic overall than I am, right? And so they really become attached to a place and they love to revisit it. And so over the years, we've kind of fallen into a pattern where we typically visit six or seven places per year. And usually four or five of those are places we've been before and two of them are new to our family. And I've really even come to enjoy and appreciate going back to a place that we've already been because there's an element of that that feels very familiar and a little bit like going home, even though these places are not actually our home. Just the fact that we've been there, we know it well, we already know where the good grocery store is, and those sorts of things, it really is quite nice. But I do still love having a couple of new locations that we discover each year.

Suzy: I'm right with you. I could certainly go to many, many new places and don't need to always go back. But as a family, there's definitely some benefits. And then the comfort level is actually quite nice. It helps you save some of your energy for when you do go to the new locations and you show up and you need to invest all that mental energy into where are we going to stay or what are we going to do and how do we exchange money and different things. And so you don't have to think so hard in those places that you feel really comfortable with. What does this year look like in terms of those locations?

Erin: The last, starting from about a year ago, we were in the Netherlands and the Netherlands is one of those places that we returned to over and over. We've also spent time in Denmark, which was a new to us location that we absolutely fell in love with. We spent some time in Turkey and funnily enough this is a great example of a place that had been high on our list of places to visit for years. And we went and we had a very different experience. In Turkey's defense, I will say we went there at the end of a period of fast travel. We'd been traveling much faster than is typical for us and we were exhausted. And I think that that is 95 % of why we didn't enjoy it the way we always expected to. We talked a lot about why we were feeling the way that we did and the fact that we were not done with Turkey. We will absolutely go back to Turkey at some point, but it wasn't the right place for us at that specific time. And when we left there, as a matter of fact, we were so exhausted, we decided to go back to our home base in Colorado. And we intended to be there for about three months and it turned into eight. We stayed a lot longer than we'd anticipated. It was the longest we spent anywhere over the last five years. And then now here we are in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, which is another place we've been before. We are happy to be back and organizing a world schooling hub here for the fall. So that's kind of what the last year has looked like for us.

Suzy: What an adventure. And it will be great to go back to Turkey someday and you just have a whole different experience because you and your kids will be different people at those ages and stages of your life. Yeah, things just sometimes resonate more with us at certain times than others. What do your kids think about traveling?

Erin: The short answer is that the way they feel about traveling has just changed as they've changed growing up. As I said, we started when they were four and seven and now they are nine and 12. And I actually had a realization somewhat recently that my younger son has now traveled for half of his life. They love meeting new people, having new experiences, discovering new places, but they also do experience homesickness sometimes. They don't necessarily talk about it as homesickness now, but they did when they were younger. Now though, I think they also have been living this life long enough that they know that we always do go home for some period of time. The part of this lifestyle that is difficult for them, it's certainly the most difficult part for me has to do with friendships, right? And the fact that it can make it difficult for them to maintain really meaningful friendships, not to form them. It's very, very easy to meet other kids and make friends and have frankly really deep and meaningful connections with kids very quickly because of the intentionality of this lifestyle. But having to ask my kids to say goodbye to friends, over and over is by far the hardest part of this lifestyle for me, and I think it's the hardest part for them as well.

Suzy: You're right. I'm getting to that point with my eight year old. He's kept in touch with a friend here from Colorado that we see when we're back. And it's like they never left. And right now we have it where like his friend texts us on his mom's phone to my phone and I'll hand it to him. Yeah. And so it's like I'm willing to maybe be more open to some ways to let the kids keep in touch than I maybe would have if we weren't traveling, just because I do think it's important. But also I know in the grand scheme that traveling has its own benefits, even if there are hard parts to it too. How has that relationship between your sons evolved? Because with two boys, sometimes they're the best of friends and sometimes they are at each other's throats.

Erin: I think my kids have a very typical brotherly relationship with one another. They have a lot of shared interests, but then at times They can't stand each other. They fight because even though they have a lot of shared interests, they have extremely different personalities. And so sometimes they clash. Even before we began traveling, my husband and I tried to be really cognizant of that dynamic and to create opportunities for our kids to experience life both together and apart and in different combinations within our family, right? So all of that to say, we've always tried to do a really good job of having one-on-one time with each of our kids, my husband and I individually, and then even having time where it's my husband and I with one of the boys so that they have sort of many different relational combinations that they enjoy. And so we also just recognize sometimes when they need that. And so the joke my husband and I have is, it's gonna have to be a separation Saturday, right? Like you take the 12 year old, I'll take the nine year old. We're gonna do our own thing on this day. and just let them have some time and space apart from one another.

Suzy: Especially useful when they are spending so much time together. It is so great to have one-on-one time with each kid and just mix up those dynamics Like it's really easy to be like, I made you a sibling, I made you a friend, go play together.

Erin: I will say when my kids do spend time apart, they absolutely do miss each other and they talk about one another constantly when they're not together. So I'm sure that the experience your kiddos have will be really similar.

Suzy: Yes, that's good to hear, especially as yours are little older that that friendship can continue. You mentioned that you've been on a homeschooling journey, which was not part of your original plans. And I'm really curious to see how that's evolved over the last five years. Anything that you want to share that's been helpful on your schooling and traveling journey.

Erin: Like many, many parents, our hand was dealt to us in March of 2020 and remote learning was sort of foisted upon us we essentially took the liberty and the license to travel and embark on this family gap year the way that we did precisely because we knew that our school district was going to remain remote in that 2020. 2021 school year. And we knew from the experience that we'd had in spring of that year that that was not going to work for us. So my thinking, I convinced my husband of this, was that that whole school year was going to be weird for everybody. And so to me that actually was comforting because I didn't feel like I was taking my kids away from a really wonderful educational experience and taking our chances with world schooling. The alternative was to stay in Colorado and do remote learning which we hated. So it felt like, okay, well, like, what we have to lose here? That first year when we first hit the road, I remember feeling like I needed to really pour myself into it in such a way that like I was going to help my kids hit all the marks in terms of their developmental milestones, their academic milestones. You know, I was trying to introduce my four-year-old to numeracy and literacy and teach my second-grader second-grade curriculum like I was trying to do school on the road. And I realized pretty quickly within just maybe the first eight to 10 weeks that that was not going to work for us. It was stressful. It was taking the joy out of the travel. It was diminishing and damaging. our relationship with our kids. So then I leaned even further into this idea that like, well, I mean, this whole school year is gonna be weird for everybody. So why don't we just actually world school and let our travels lead our teaching? And so we did that and we didn't really do any more formal curriculum with the kids for the remainder of that school year, right? We read and we learned a lot about the places that we visited and that sort of thing, but we were not sitting down and doing lessons or anything of the sort. And by the end of that year, I definitely had a little bit of self-consciousness and just kind of concerned that maybe my kids weren't where they needed to be academically. But they were really young, you know, at that point they were five and eight-ish and you know, we had some evaluations done and they were fine. And then that following year we actually did happen in something like a little bit more structured educational environment and it wound up really not being a very good fit. We opted for that because we felt like my younger son, especially, needed that sort of foundation that kindergarten can provide. And in many ways that school year is maybe the one thing I regret most over the course of the last five years. I would start doing what we've been doing for the past couple of years now, which is kind of a combination of an unschooling approach with structure around core subjects, namely math and literacy. letting the other things be a bit more child-laden interest-based. So that's what we do now. I will say we have also in the course of the last several years regularly spent time with world schooling hubs where they have sort of a capsule experience. Those are almost never academic in nature though, they're always either place-based or in some cases maybe like nature-based programs. And so while they've been really good, those are not doing anything to advance their knowledge or their understanding of core academic concepts in math and literature and that sort of thing. But they're still experientially really rich, wonderful additions to how they learn. And we have also participated in, one cohort of Found This Life, which is, an attempt to create something that resembles a more conventional school for families that travel for long periods of time, like my own. And so we've really tried many things. We have leveraged a lot of web-based resources. But I really do feel like we are in a terrific groove right now, particularly with math education. They know how we approach it. We don't have any of the arguments that we used to have about the fact that it was time to focus on our studies. That it, you know, it took some time, but boy, we got here.

Suzy: Thanks for bringing up how certain subjects lend itself to more of a structured curriculum, whereas other things you can do in more of that world schooling or unschooling approach. My oldest really likes math. So it is fun to let him explore with that. and see where he takes it. And then of course, reading, you can always incorporate. But some of those are things that maybe kids actually do better when they get a little more one-on-one attention and some support with. I think that's a great way to incorporate important curriculum, as well as allowing some freedom in other areas where if you're in a certain country, you read and learn about that history instead of just some okay, it's fourth grade, we need to learn about US history or something. Yeah, we'll get there. When we can make it more real.

Erin: Absolutely. You know, my kids will pursue an interest in things that relate to history or science or social studies, right? They generally, both of my kids are perfectly good at math, but they're not kids who love math in a way that they're going to seek it out. There are many, many, many families out there who take a pretty solidly unschooling approach to all subjects. Frankly, I don't trust my children to take the interest. And I also don't trust myself to capitalize on those everyday opportunities to incorporate math education the way that you need to when you're taking that genuinely unschooling approach to it. It really does just work much better for us to have a curriculum that we use that they're familiar with. They know that it never takes that much time. And honestly, the longer that we're at this and the more that we kind of advance their math education, the more clear it becomes to me just how important it is for math curriculum to spiral, right? Be in the sort of the sequence in which the concepts are introduced and then revisited and built upon, I just cannot even wrap my head around how I would do that on my own without the support of a curriculum.

Suzy: Really good points as people are thinking of which method may work well for them. If everything is child-led, I don't know if some things would be covered as much, if it was just up to me to facilitate that, especially the younger kids are. great way to find a balance that works for you all. That's what's most important. Behind the scenes of every traveling family is the financial and the logistical side of the adventure. How are you all funding your long-term travel?

Erin: If you can recall that March of 2020, there was something like 18 million layoffs in the United States in a two-week span of time. We were included in that. I was laid off first and it was gut-wrenching. because I absolutely loved my job. Initially I was placed on a furlough, right? I was in talent acquisition and they went into a hiring freeze and the last thing you need when you have a hiring freeze is somebody whose job is hiring. I think everybody thought that this whole pandemic thing was going to be pretty short-lived. Well, it didn't turn out to be that way. And so my furlough turned into an actual layoff. My husband had been with his company for 15 years. And to be perfectly honest, never particularly loved it. He's an incredibly loyal guy though. I used to joke that the only way he was going to leave his company was if they made him. Well, then they made him, right? What's funny, Suzy, is I actually remember standing outside the door while he was on the phone with his boss. And he texted me and told me that he'd been laid off. And I think for a lot of people that would have been a really harrowing message to get, right? And I actually experienced something that felt a little bit like euphoria. I immediately understood what we were experiencing to be an opportunity. So that really was the foundation for all of the choices that we made afterward. So here we are today, five years later, I am still a human resources and talent acquisition professional. I just happen to be self-employed now. My company is called Search and Rescue and I partner with client companies to support their talent acquisition needs on a fractional basis. I have multiple different clients who I recruit for and because I run my own business and I'm an outsourced partner to my clients, I have all of the autonomy in the world to sort of structure my life and my work and my day and how I spend my time according to my own wishes. And so that's what I've been able to do and that is what provides for our family. My husband has continued to be, as we called him, an amo de casa over the last five years.

Suzy: You took me back to March of 2020 with your descriptions, but the mindset that you have, I'm sure comes in handy with traveling, where there are sometimes a lot of ups and downs.

Erin: Absolutely. You know what's really funny about that is I'm really, really good in a crisis, right? Like, both parents have been laid off. That seems like a bit of a disaster. No problem, right? But you give me like a minor inconvenience. That, that I could not find the silver lining in. That I will fly off the handle over, right? But like you give me an actual disaster and I'm like, no problem.

Suzy: It's good to know how we are our personality types and how we get through things. And especially with our partners, sometimes that's even more important to know how they get through difficult times. That's great that you've been able to make that work and it's self-employed offers a lot of flexibility. What financial advice would you have for families wanting to travel more or some tips and tricks that you found to save money while traveling?

Erin: It's really powerful to avoid the high season in any given place, especially in Europe. We have always tried to aim for shoulder season or complete off season when choosing destinations. The other consideration though is that it's not even about the money exclusively. For us, it's also just plain a lot more enjoyable. Because it's not as hot. It's not as crowded. We've just really found that the high season for everybody else is the low season for us. We are not interested. The other one, just has to do with the fact that we have found. Many of the places that we expected to be expensive have proven to be really cost effective and places that we had expected to be really affordable have proven to be more expensive than the places that we expected to be expensive. And one example I will offer here is back in 2023. We spent about three months in Mexico in Playa del Carmen, right? So at the beach and after that we went immediately to the Netherlands for three months. One of those countries is typically thought of as being really cost effective and one of those countries has a reputation for being really expensive. But in our experience, spending three months in each of them, it was the exact opposite. We spent on average significantly more each of those three months in Mexico than we did each of those three months in the Netherlands. One of the reasons that that happens is that places like Mexico, Croatia, Spain, to a somewhat lesser extent, but I think it still happens there, and some others, they have very, very wild seasonal swings, right? There's a real cyclicality. And there are major price differentials in the high season, as I said before. Places like the Netherlands, and another place where this happened to us was in Denmark, those are not places that have wild swings in their seasonality. And they're not places that people will typically go and spend months at a time. They're expensive to visit for vacation. But when you're spending months there, and you're just living in an apartment, it's very, very different. The food in the Netherlands was priced much better than the food in Mexico. The transportation in the Netherlands priced much better. Activities for families with kids priced much better in the Netherlands than in Mexico. Leave the preconceived notions and presumptions that you might have about relative affordability of different places, leave it to the side and like look at places that you think are meant to be expensive because you will probably find they're actually very accessible and very affordable.

Suzy: You realize how much difference there can be between countries and seasons and how long you spend somewhere and that can all make a more significant price difference than just the country itself. Thank you for bringing up that point about looking at it a little more holistically. And you mentioned early on that you have a, hub with RoamBase?

Erin: Gosh, it's been a seed that's been germinating in my mind for years, right? The idea that there was something for me to build with and for world schoolers really came to me in early 2022. I went ahead and I established it as a business and I bought the domain and I just knew there was something there and I needed to let it reveal itself to me. And we continued to travel. And in the summer of 2023, we spent about six weeks on Gran Canaria in the Canary Islands. And we were in a part of Gran Canaria that is not touristed. We were up on the Northwest coast in this little local Canarian town. We went very specifically for a conference for digital nomads. And while we were there, we fell in love with this little town and we found a local summer camp for our kids. Was a surf camp. And we signed our kids up and they spent the whole summer learning to surf, making friends with Canarian kids, had a great time. And it was just one of the best experiences that we had had to date. And I knew immediately that it was a place that would be an incredible location to bring world schooling families together because it was super cost effective, because it had this really awesome culture about it as well. The following year, the following summer, summer of 2024, we decided to go back and this time to invite other world schooling families to join us. And it was an incredibly casual, completely unfacilitated fee free bringing together of world schooling families. It was literally me saying, we went there last year. It was amazing. You should think about coming. Here's the information that you need if you want to join us. And so we had 15 families who joined us. We were there for six weeks and it was such a great time. And it was just the right kind of world schooling community for my own family. Was something that I felt at that point in time was kind of missing from the landscape of world schooling projects and programs and hubs. Because I was at a point where I didn't want or need things that were really formal and facilitated. Our kids were literally just going to a local summer camp. It felt very, very much like a co-op. And we had such a great time that another one of the moms there who I've known for years, was letting me know that that winter her family really wanted to ski because they're snow sports enthusiasts. And even though we're from Colorado, we are not, right? Like we have spent most of the last five years chasing the sun. I like to joke, we are solar powered. But they really wanted to ski and they were having a hard time finding a place that felt really cost effective to go and just be based in a ski town for a whole, you know, season. Well, I'm really, really, really good at research and finding these kind of hidden gems or unexpected places. And so I found us a lovely little place in the French Alps. And it was really, really cost effective so thus was born the second Rome based project. And so in January, 15 families gathered in Toulouse-Bissons, France in the French Alps for five weeks of skiing and snowboarding at great times. And hilariously, here I am having organized the entire thing. Well, my own family didn't even go. We had a few things that came up around family health and some other things that kept us in the States longer than we anticipated. We did not go to France. But the beauty of having created these experiences the way that I did is that it was completely unnecessary for me to be there, right? These other 15 families, they showed up. They had a great time. It was a wonderful hub by all accounts. And the really funny part about this, Susie, is that one of the families who participated, they loved it so much that they bought a condo. They live there now and they're going to continue that hub going forward. there will be a hub there again this January and they're going to do it actually for the entire ski season this time. And I think at this point, they've already got 22 families planning to be there. And it again, there are no fees for families who are participating in that hub, which I think is wonderful. And now here we are, it is fall of or almost fall of 2025 and we have our third RoamBase project. It is here in San Miguel de Allende. We kick off on September 7th. This is our largest and our most ambitious undertaking so far because it is 11 weeks. It does have much more structure to it in terms of how we will spend our time. And so this is our first fee-based hub because there's really quite a lot involved. And so I really had to kind of get my own head right with that after organizing two hubs that were completely free to participate in, getting myself okay with the idea of asking people to make a financial contribution. But I've done that. And so we have a total of 13 families who will be a part of this project. there's really so many different kinds of hubs in terms of where they take place, how they're organized, what they provide, who they serve, what they cost, right? How people spend their time. Like there's literally something for everyone out there in the world's schooling hub community, which I have really just thoroughly enjoyed seeing evolve over the years, because there was a time where there was Nothing. So I've loved seeing this. This will be our, our third one, our first time having a financial component involved, but it is a family based contribution to the community. It's not based on the number of children. It's just a fee for the family. And it's almost, it's world schooling done my way, by which I mean, operates a little bit like a homeschool co-op. And it's very specifically for families who have tweens. They have to have at least one tween in their family in order to participate. And this is for selfish reasons, right? I have two tweens and a lot of this is about ensuring that my kids get a nice long extended period of time, 11 weeks with a group of peers, right? They get a full three months with some friends who are similarly aged. Of course, we welcome younger siblings and older siblings and that sort of thing, but you take a look at the 29 kids who are signed up to be here. The vast majority of them are in that age nine to 14-ish range. And in the course of our 11 weeks here, we really will be combining both the ongoing homeschooling efforts that each family already has in place, right? Like whatever they do to meet their kids' core academic needs, they'll continue to do that if they want to. And what we will be doing together as a community is going through an 11-week program that is designed to really explore and experience and immerse ourselves in Mexican culture. and in Mexican history and Mexican present, right? It really is a sort of past, present and future look at Mexico as a country and as a culture. And so we have a theme for each week and it begins with Mexican Independence Day, which happens right after we kick off in early September. And then takes us through multiple really important holidays and cultural celebrations that happen in the course of fall, like La Alborada and Dia de la Raza, Dia de Muertos and And then culminating with Mexican Revolution Day on November 20th. So it has these kind of two bookends of Mexican Independence Day and Revolution Day. Lots of sort of cultural and educational field trips. Every Tuesday we do one of those. And then also a lot of social and recreational opportunities. You know, another field trip that is purely about fun on Fridays. And we've got all these great enrichments for the kids to opt into. if they want to, right? They're all interest-based. So some kids, they'll have a weekly rock climbing class. Some kids will have twice weekly soccer training. Some kids will have a weekly equestrian and ceramics class that they're doing. We've got language learning. But everything is very customizable to each family. rather than being this very formal facilitated program Instead, this is about being together, doing life together, but really, really intentionally.

Suzy: I don't know if I've ever said I want to be a tween again, but I want to be a tween again now just so I can join you all. It sounds like so much fun, What about San Miguel de Allende was the draw?

Erin: So we spent about three months here in 2023 and 2024. It has a little bit of a reputation as just an incredibly beautiful place in Mexico. It's very distinct and different from what most people experience when they do visit Mexico, right? We are nowhere near the coast. There is no beach here. We are up at 6,200 feet of elevation in the central highlands, right? So it's already well known that there is a large and very, very active, highly engaged community of families here, many of whom are former world foolers who have settled. This is a great place if you need something that feels a little bit plug and play and you're at a phase of life where your kids really need ready access to peers and lots of activities that are engaging and interesting and that sort of thing. So similar to the experience that I had when we went to Ron Pinaria for the first time, within just the first few days of arriving here back in 2023, I thought this would be an incredible place. to host a world schooling hub. This is where the war for Mexican independence started and where it was won. This is the part of Mexico that gained independence from Spain first. And so, we are beginning this hub with Mexican Independence Day with a trip to Dolores Hidalgo, which is literally where the work for independence started. And so it is just incredibly rich from a cultural perspective. It has so much to offer to families. Accommodations can be really, really affordable if you do it the way that we are. All of these families are in one particular neighborhood, staying in just a couple of condos where, you know, the kids will have ready access to lots of outdoor space. They can walk to and from one another's houses and to playground and to the recreation center and the pool and can really just have what I hope will end up feeling a little bit like that kind of so-called 90s summer that everybody's been talking about recently, right? Because of the age and stage of life that they're at. Right? Like there are many parts of the world where we simply can not give our kids the kind of like freedom and autonomy that we might like to at this age because they're dealing with things like not knowing the geography of a place, not knowing how to get around on their own, not knowing the language, right? Whereas here in San Miguel, you can actually really provide that to kids in a really age appropriate way. that feels like it's meeting a real developmental need for tweens. It is a really, really terrific place to experience this whole fall season that's full of these holidays and cultural celebrations that are gonna like allow us to immerse ourselves in understanding Mexico as a country and a culture.

Suzy: I've learned so much I can't wait to continue to follow along on your journey. If people want to learn more about you and RoamBase, where can they find you?

Erin: The best place to find me is on LinkedIn. Probably comes as no surprise simply because I'm an HR professional, right? And so I do a lot of content creation there about job search and supporting job seekers, about the work I do as a recruiter, as well as about my vocation, independent family life. You can find me on Instagram at RoamBase. I'm trying to get back in the habit of posting there regularly as this hub gets up and running. And then of course, Facebook really has been the platform that has been RoamBase's home because of the Facebook groups there. So you could join the RoamBase Facebook group if you want to learn about this hub or future hubs that we might organize.

Suzy: I'll make sure to link all that in the show notes. Is there anything else you'd like to share with us?

Erin: I think the best advice that I could give to any family who's been thinking about this particular lifestyle is to just go for it, right? And that sounds really easy to say and maybe a little scary to do, but the fact of the matter is if you start and you find that it's not the right fit, You can change gears, you can change directions. You don't have to continue with this life or any other life that you've been building for yourself. You can continue to just redirect when and where you want to and you need to. So I'm a big believer in the idea that you could just do things. Just go do it.

Suzy: Just get out there. And not that any of us want to go back to March of 2020, but that mentality of like, this year is just going to be whatever it is. You know, we can always pivot or change later and look where it's got you guys. I can't wait to follow along with more of your adventures. So thank you so much.