Profiles of vagabonders
The wonderful website Traveling For The Young, Fabulous, and Broke has an article entitled “The Motivation for Long Term Travel.” This interview series profiles 11 long-term travelers, and is packed full of useful, inspirational, or interesting links.
The most interesting part for me was the inclusion of children in this vagabonding lifestyle; when I was a kid, I was a kid with a single mom, and all my other friends were kids with single moms, and so it never occurred to me that other people might actually have TWO parents. Similarly, with all this talk of vagabonding for solo travelers or vagabonding for couples, we forget that kids can go vagabonding too…or that vagabonders can conceive and give birth abroad! While it might open you up to some interesting legal issues (where is your child a citizen of? where do you get their birth certificate or passport issued from? what about places where home schooling is illegal, like france? what about health insurance?), it’s still out there.
Obviously I know there are some well-known vagabonding families, but it’s just nice to see more. And obviously, nice to see more websites, resources, and profiles of totally nice, friendly, normal people to keep us happy in our vagabonding path.
March 30th, 2010 at 8:55 am
Good point about kids going vagabonding. Sometimes long-term travel can be difficult for children because they miss their friends. It probably never occurred to people (U.S. citizens) about giving birth in a foreign country. I’d be curious to know what happens when you’re a U.S. citizen and you give birth in another country. What is your child’s country of origin? Sounds like a great blog post!
March 30th, 2010 at 10:57 am
Hey… careful there calling us normal 😉
March 31st, 2010 at 9:01 am
Rebecca: Your child is automatically a US citizen, but you need to report the birth to the State Department. Note that “rights of the soil” are not universal, so being born in an other coutry does not automatically make one a citizen of that country.
May 24th, 2010 at 1:56 am
Hi
We travelled and still do with our kids. Just a little note on what you said though. Home schooling is not illegal in France. We lived there for 3 years and home schooled our girls. It’s a little stricter than the UK or US (home schooled there too!) but definitely not illegal.
Georgia