About Our Family

Navigating world-class museums with a teenage art history buff while keeping a spirited 10-year-old (who’d rather be anywhere else) engaged. Planning coursework between mountain hikes, surf lessons, and city adventures. This is our world as we explore worldschooling and real-world learning as we travel.



I’m Laurel, aspiring historical fiction author, avid consumer of audiobooks, and an enthusiastic–if not particularly talented–art student. My husband, Calvin, has recently become addicted to pickleball and philosophy.

Originally from the Washington, D.C. area, we now call the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains home — when we’re not traveling with our kids for their international education.

We didn’t always have the freedom to explore together. For more than two decades, we endured daily commutes to our jobs as, respectively, an international attorney and a software developer. After far more than eight hours at a desk, we’d rush home, crossing our fingers that we would get to daycare and afterschool programs in time to avoid late fees. Then came the nightly marathon of dinner, homework, baths, reading…the list went on and on until we fell on the couch, exhausted. Only to repeat the next day.

Now, we’re discovering new possibilities for learning through travel with our high school freshman and fourth grader. We’ve found that real-world experiences—whether it’s calculating how much to pay in an Argentinian mercado or studying Renaissance art in Vienna—create lasting lessons that no textbook can match.

Why Travel Makes an Amazing Classroom

As we’ve traveled more, we’ve discovered that some of the best learning happens outside traditional classroom walls. Here’s what we’ve found:

🎨 Arts & Culture

  • Art history comes alive (even for our art-averse youngest!)
  • Museums, galleries, street art — even dinner performances — become our visual textbooks
  • You can’t find a better source for local history or cultural exposure to a country’s stories of its past and present

📐 Practical Skills

  • Paying in local currency is always a real-world math lesson
  • Problems are solved differently in every country we visit
  • Geography jumps off the map and into real life

🍳 Food & Culture

  • Local food culture offers an abundance of learning opportunities…
    • Local cuisine introduces food science, math, chemistry and new cooking skills
    • Ingredients tell a story of geography and trade
    • Food traditions reveal cultural connections and history

Natural Sciences

  • Nature becomes our science laboratory
  • Local ecosystems reveal themselves in real time
  • Weather patterns affect our daily planning and learning

What We Cover Here

Destination Guides + Itineraries

Tips for Travel with Teens + Tweens

Worldschooling Resources + Activities

Why We’re Sharing Our Story

Like many families, COVID upended our lives. At the time, we weren’t dreaming of long-term travel—we were just trying to keep everything from unraveling. I was working 15- to 18-hour days as a General Counsel of a company rocked by all the implications of a global shutdown. My husband was working to help adjust code to adapt to the boom in remote work. And, over night, both of us were also suddenly trying to homeschool a kindergartener and a fourth grader.

But when the dust settled a couple of years later, we started asking ourselves: Is this really the life we want back?

Even as we pretended we were content with the way things had been, events at home started pushing us in a new direction.

Our oldest—an art-and-music-loving, theater kid who lights up every room she is in—was being bullied so badly that she was physically sick every morning before school. Anxiety took over her life. The confidence she once carried so effortlessly was gone, and she fell into an acute depression. Her teachers cared, but had no real solutions to help her (or us) as we tried anything we could think of to try to stop her spark—the thing that made her her—from fading.
Then, one afternoon, our youngest came home from second grade with a plea: “Can I go back to homeschooling? At home, I don’t hate learning.

My husband and I had always intended for our kids to go through public school the way we did But the more we tried to “wait it out,” the more it became clear: this wasn’t just a bad year.

Small steps that unknowingly started a long journey

There was no grand plan for fixing these issues, no moment where we both dramatically quit our jobs and booked one-way tickets somewhere far away.  The changes happened in pieces–small decisions that, over time, led us to (many) somewhere(s) we never expected.

First, Calvin quit his job to homeschool our youngest. It wasn’t long before he started saying he should have made that move a decade earlier because of how miserable he had been in his position.

He found a forest school for our youngest that she attended a couple of days a week. There, she spent her time outside, learning emotional regulation and conflict resolution in ways that most adults (including me!) struggle to master. She fell in love with learning again, and became more confident in her leadership and interpersonal skills. 

As soon as a new school year began, we enrolled our oldest in an online school.  We weren’t convinced it was a perfect solution, but we felt sure it was the next right thing. Thankfully, the school we found provided a nurturing environment that met her where she was, and slowly—through a lot of patience and support—she started to thrive again.

Not just carrying the bucket, but filling it

As we settled into this new way of doing things, we started to realize that we were stuck in the chop wood, carry water stage of life — doing the necessary, practical things and making safe choices to keep things moving. And that work matters. But we were no longer taking the time to consider what else our buckets could hold, and how we could fill them.

So, we started small. Long weekend road trips.  Arrangements with my company to telework over the summers so we could travel across the United States and find new experiences that gave our kids (and us) the space to breathe. 

We found the time to shape our days with intention—finding meaning in both the extraordinary and the ordinary. Some moments are big—traveling, seeing new places, stepping outside our comfort zone. But just as often, they’re small—slow mornings, deep conversations, and the simple joy of being present.

And then, as we saw how we were able to fill our time with things that truly mattered to us, we realized that responsibility and adventure weren’t opposites. We could create a life that made space for both.



Through our travels, we’ve learned how to balance adventure with downtime, structure with spontaneity, and a strong emphasis on education with real-world experiences. 

The Benefits We’ve Seen from Mixing Travel Experiences With Learning

In 2022, just before Calvin quit his job to homeschool, our oldest was close to being held back a grade because she was refusing to turn in homework (that we had ensured she completed at home!). Our youngest would cry whenever we’d ask her to read a book she’d shown interest in, because it would inevitably be rated above “grade-level,” and she was not allowed to read anything but grade-level material in class.

Now, our fourteen-year old has completed enough classes to be equivalent to a High School Junior, and has the flexibility to build independet study courses that meld learning with the things that she loves. At the moment, she is working on a course she built that looks at the political aims and impact of street art in Argentina through a historical and cultural lens, and also includes a visual demonstration of the physics of motion and force through the mechanics of spray painting.

And our ten year old is working on her second “book” – a collection of short stories written by looking at a different picture from our travels every day. She coordinates with children from around the world in a group writing class and gets real-time feedback, reader critiques, collaborative input, and the chance to work with other kids in an art program to design illustrations for her works.