When Travelling Kids Hit Their Teens

I’d heard that something happened to travelling kids when they hit their teens – that they became averse to longterm travel, unwilling to make new friends and desirous of (eek!) settling down.

It happened to the Vogel family, who cycled from Alaska to Argentina. It appears to be happening now to my online friend Talon and his son. It’s a topic of fervent discussion among the small and sometimes fractious community of travelling families.

Because of this law, I’d thought we’d stop when Zac turned 13. But he agreed to carry on another year, so I hoped we’d beaten the jinx.

In fact, as Zac signed up less willingly for a voyage down and along the Blue Nile, and willingly for a year exploring South America, I was fairly sure we could extend the travel lifestyle for just one more year.

And yet, in Egypt….

My friend, the Whore of Babylon (henceforth, for brevity’s sake, simply The Whore), is in town, and cutting a swathe through both denizens and visitors with awe-inspiring energy.

Dahab sucks us in, as it always does. Fresh seafood and cold beer on the waterfront, pearlescent Red Sea sunsets, dazzling diving, tricks in the underwater playground, and….. freedom. Children can run insanely free in Dahab – riding bikes along the front, chasing kittens, ATV-ing, snorkelling, racking up restaurant bills across town – and that makes it, frankly, quite addictive.

My friend, the Whore of Babylon (henceforth, for brevity’s sake, simply The Whore), is in town, and cutting a swathe through both denizens and visitors with awe-inspiring energy. Like Margaret Thatcher, she only needs four hours sleep…

Zac and The Whore’s daughter are getting on great. We have our old house back, and our old rooms too. I’m rebuilding our funds after the decimation that was Eataly. Sudan, admittedly, is looking, even by Sudanese standards, especially ropy – rather like that fall of Jerusalem scene in World War Z – but we’re still geared up to go.

And yet… Zac and I are sitting, chatting in a restaurant one evening, and I say, “Why haven’t you looked up L? You got on so well last time you were here.”

Zac looks at me, instantly, agonisingly full of sorrow, and replies, “I just don’t want to make new friends and leave them all the time, that’s all.”

Ulp. I can spit out whatever platitudes about Skype and Steam I want, but the boy has a point.

“You know, we can always stop travelling if you want to,” I say, weakly.
“No, Mum,” he lies. “It’s fine. We can do another year.”

This is, for the record, something new. You’d think, from the outside, that travelling children would miss fixed friendships, and find the moving-on process tough. Historically, Zac hasn’t – though leaving Harbin was more of a wrench for both of us than expected.

But now he does. I’m at a loss for what to say.

“You know, we can always stop travelling if you want to,” I say, weakly.

“No, Mum,” he lies. “It’s fine. We can do another year.”

But I realise, in my heart, that it isn’t fine. What my son wants and what I want, and, more importantly, what is best for my son and what I want, are different.

This is the stage at which a good and dutiful mother would unselfishly leap into the void and abandon travel, stat. I’m afraid I’m not that good a mother. Soz.

I let the situation brew and sit for a while. Zac doesn’t seem unhappy, day in, day out. He hooks up with L. We’re not travelling, but we’re not not travelling, either.

“You know,” I say. “I’m starting to worry a bit about exams, and high school. Because we’re not really doing very much school stuff, are we?”

We are ambling back from the lovely Doctor Sadek, who has diagnosed and prescribed for Zac’s diving ear problem in under 60 seconds, when the subject of school raises its ugly head.

World schooling worked wonderfully for us at primary level. But, as I’ve observed, it’s working less well as he approaches his teens. He’s keeping up his Chinese, he’s doing a little desultory maths, albeit only under pressure, he’s learning from what’s around him, but he’s been “working” on his current English project (comparing Fahrenheit 451 and 1984) for a short geological era.

And he’s almost 13. So secondary school age.

“You know,” I say. “I’m starting to worry a bit about exams. Because we’re not really doing very much school stuff, are we?”

“Mm,” he says, a concerned frown shading his freckles. “Yeah, I was thinking about that as well.”

“You’ll need good grades at GCSE if you want to go to a good university,” I say. “You know that, right?”

“Mm,” he says again.

Neither of us are, it appears, worried enough about Zac’s education to do anything concrete about it – I do the odd bit of yelling, he does the odd bit of maths, he learns to make sand art and takes some pictures, and starts a YouTube channel. But even with an able child, the academic clock is ticking, and I know it. Teens are high school years, and they are almost upon us.

And I’m worrying about all sorts of other stuff, too. Primarily the internal question: “Am I being selfish in continuing to travel?” To which the internal answer echoes back: “Yes.”

You can, quite literally, wake up in the morning and decide that you’re moving to X country or Y spot that sounds nice today, or find a place you like and stop there for weeks.

Nomading, or vagabonding, or whatever you want to call it, is a lifestyle that’s hard to give up. It’s difficult to express the sheer freedom that is going where you want, when you want. You can, quite literally, wake up in the morning and decide that you’re moving to X country or Y spot that sounds nice today, or find a place you like and stop there for weeks.

You have no fixed costs, no home, no commitments other than the moment that you’re in – typically not even a flight to catch. If you’ve got wheels, you can just get on the bike, or in the car, and go. And go wherever!

There’s no need to get up on time, though I tend to. No need to cook unless you feel like it. No school commute. No morning alarm. Notwithstanding the odd mishap and ropy hotel, it’s a fan-fucking-tastic way to live.

Deadlines, of course, impinge (one of the things anyone should know about being a freelance writer is that it’s not as easy an option as it sounds). But, fundamentally, we’ve been doing this rising four years, and, although our stops are getting progressively longer, I continue to love it.

And it’s also a vast part of my identity – less so, I think, of Zac’s, who self-defines as nerd, as gamer, and only thirdly as adventurer.

I’m a travelling mother. We have adventures. I write about them. That’s been my schtick, my life, my modus operandi, a great swathe of who I am, for almost four years.

After the year from hell, I took a year out to do something we’d always talked about doing, and work out what to do next, set up a blog on the fly, and that year out became what I did next.

I figured out I could work on the road, and there was no reason to stop, and I became that thing I’d never heard of, a location independent digital nomad (though I loathe both terms).

I’m a travelling mother. We have adventures. I write about them. That’s been my schtick, my life, my modus operandi, a great swathe of who I am, for almost four years. Although the person that you are is, as Heraclitus observed about the river, always changing yet always the same, when people ask me what I live, or where I do, travelling is in the answer.

“I don’t live anywhere – we’re travelling. But I’m originally from London.”

“Well, we’re travelling, really. I work as a writer as we go along, and Zac learns from what’s around him.”

And when we stop travelling, I have to build a whole new identity. I’m no longer someone who’s travelling and writes about it. I’ll have to be someone else, something else, have a whole new set of answers to those questions.

I’ll have to settle, build a life, be a grownup that meets commitments like rent and school fees, and stays in one place much of the time – goddam it, LIVES SOMEWHERE — and likely owns more than the contents of two backpacks and a ‘puter bag.

Being a grownup, as I see it, is hugely over-rated. I did it before and have no desire to do it again.

But it’s what Zac needs. And I know that what I should do as a good parent, is to probe deeper into his discontent, and get the answer I know is lurking there. But I don’t, immediately.

I let things drift, and niggle. I go with the flow. When he lobbies to stay in Dahab longer, I extend another month, though when he pushes to spend his thirteenth birthday here, I hum and ha and maybe.

And then… Oh sweet Jesus… THIS happens.