In 2017, we started a tradition to define a theme to our year in one simple word. That year was our “Year of the Pivot,” since that’s when we decided that we’d be quitting our jobs to spend more time together and travel the world. 2018 became our “Year of Bold,” where we sold most of our stuff, rented out our house, and departed on our full-time travels. We then termed 2019 our “Year of Grit,” because we worked our butts off to chase dreams and new adventures. We turned up our travel pace, traveling to more than 30 countries. We slept in 71 different beds. We launched our very own online course. We produced the second season of our family travel podcast. We posted on Instagram almost every day. We worked with dozens of product, travel and hospitality brands. And we loved it!
But now, the question is: how do you follow-up to a “Year of Grit?” With more grit? We admittedly started off 2020 with hardly any gas in our tanks, so we’ve been spending the month resting up, strategizing, and formulating our plan for the year. We also realized that grit alone just wasn’t going to push us to reach our goals. So, a new word started to drift through my brain. And then, another similar, yet different word followed. Merged together, these two words represent a singular transition that our family intends to pursue for the year. With that said, here is our “One-ish Word Theme” to 2020:
Revolution
Even though we’ve traveled to dozens of countries during our full-time adventures, we still haven’t completed a full “round-the-world” lap yet. Our travels have typically consisted of leaving the US for another continent, spending a few months there, then returning. Well, that’s finally going to change! Which brings us to selecting this word (revolution) for its most literal definition of “a circular movement.” In 2020, we will finally complete our first full revolution around Earth! This really started back in September, when we left Seattle for Europe. Since then we’ve traveled across Europe, through the Suez Canal to Dubai, then flew to Asia. We are in Southeast Asia right now, and will make our way to New Zealand, then across the Pacific and finally back to the mainland US to complete our revolution.
Another definition for “revolution” has to deal with making changes, which brings us to the next stage of our journey. This coming summer, we will be celebrating two full years of full-time travel. As you probably know, we are enormous fans of this kind of lifestyle, but to be fully transparent with you, it has been quite draining on our bodies and minds. While we feel blessed to experience so many new destinations as a family, there travel is an added benefit to something we treasure even more. Freedom. Having the flexibility to choose how we spend our days is the ultimate reason why we do what we do.
This brings us to our revolution this year, and that is to make a transition back to a more “stable” lifestyle. And by stable, to us that means having a home base and a physical community that we can be a part of. The kids (especially Santi) yearn for more long-term friendships, so they are looking forward to being back at a school and neighborhood where they can meet other kids and not have to constantly say goodbye. Does this mean that our travels are over? Absolutely NOT! Admittedly, we will be slowing down the pace of our adventures, but we still have big plans to continue exploring both near and far. We are committed to working hard to maintain this flexible, location-independent lifestyle while still providing resources to help you travel more together.
Evolution
This brings us to our second word of the year: evolution. We don’t talk about it much, but when we first started The Jetsetting Family, we established our four core values as: family, freedom, learning, and sharing. Throughout our adventures, we’ve spent our days as a family, worked to have the freedom to have a location-independent lifestyle, learned a ton along the way, and shared as much as we could. However, I feel that we could be contributing and sharing a whole lot more than we currently are. We primarily focus our content on our family experiencing a destination, but feel a responsibility to do more.
Our current pace makes it difficult to create the content and resources to help you plan your next adventure. This is why when we set up our home base, we plan to spend a lot more time evolving our content to become a bigger and better resource for you! You’ve already seen that we’ve been posting more regularly on our blog, and one of our goals for this year is to put up more guides, tips, courses and other types of helpful family travel content.
Ultimately, this year is all about revolutionizing our lifestyle and evolving our content to serve you better! We have some specific goals that will help us make this happen, and will share those in an upcoming post as well. Thank you for supporting our family throughout these past few years; we can’t wait to find more ways to give back to this amazing community of ours!
