Designing Your Worldschooling Itinerary

A great first step toward creating your worldschooling adventure is to talk as a family and figure out guiding principles for the journey. Together you can identify your overarching goals and the values you want to incorporate into your travels.

Finding Your Compass Heading

To help you get started, here are some questions:

Do you have family goals such as exploring your heritage, maximizing your time in nature, or better understanding traditional farming methods? Do you want to learn Spanish together or take that ski bum season you’ve always longed for?
Do individual family members have pursuits or things they wish to learn or accomplish while traveling? How do you hope to spend your time together? How will you balance together time with need for time alone?
Where is your comfort zone, and what experiences might reasonably push the edge for your family?
How much do you want to plan ahead versus leave space for spontaneity? (The ages of your kids might inform how much flexibility you’ll have in the moment.)
What is your planning horizon? How much time do you have to prepare before your Wonder Year launch, and once on the road, how far in advance do you want to sort out your plans?
How do you feel about the environmental footprint of your travels? How do you want to manage it?
Do you want to learn to live with less? Do you want to pare down or find a comfy home base where you can have more gear and spread out a bit?
Will you be incorporating paid work into your travels? Would you like to volunteer, and if so, what contributions do you hope to offer?
How will you measure success and know the experience is worth the effort? What will make your worldschooling journey feel complete?

Some of these aspects might become the scaffolding around which you build your trip, or they might simply be fodder to get you excited and motivated. They certainly can inform your itinerary, which we’ll explore next.

Where Will You Go?

So, how do you choose where to go when the possibilities seem endless? Here are a few ideas to get you thinking about the kind of adventure you’d like to take.

Wish-List Destinations

What have you always wanted to see and experience? Do you have inspirational travel photos posted on your computer or fridge? Are there places that are just calling your name? Spin the globe. Choosing your destinations is a great time to involve the whole family. Being curious about a place will make your kids all the more engaged once you’re there.

Multilingualism

You might plan some or all of your itinerary in order to learn a new language or reinforce a second or third one. Are your kids taking language classes at school and you’d love for them to converse with native speakers? Adults, too, may see great value in language immersion.

Preferred Activities

Think about how you like spending time as a family. Do you prefer being outdoors? Camping, biking, or trekking can drive an itinerary. Are you drawn to water? You might build your trip around kayaking, surfing, or diving hot spots. Maybe you are more of a big-city crew, with a love of museums and restaurants. Building in some of your family’s favorite activities can help keep everyone engaged.

Seasonal Considerations

Research the best time of year to visit your high-priority destinations. Some places will work any time of the year; others might have peak times for desirable weather conditions or seasonal flora or fauna: wet or dry salt flats in Bolivia, butterflies returning to San Juan Capistrano, monsoon seasons in Southeast Asia, or the fall foliage in New England. Or there might be festivals, events, or cultural celebrations you want to attend, such as the Thai New Year celebration water fights or Day of the Dead happenings in Oaxaca. Prioritize key events and anchor your trip around their locations.

Sustainable Travel

The choices we make about travel—destinations, transportation, accommodations, and even souvenirs—have an impact on the local environment and people. Asking questions and being aware of how our presence in a place affects the local community is a responsibility we can all embrace. And it’s not just about doing the right thing; many travelers we interviewed noted that their most memorable experiences had a strong local flavor.

Finding Community

More worldschooling families are arranging their itineraries so they can connect with other traveling families at schools, summits, hubs, pop-ups, and informal gatherings. Sparks fly when worldschooling kids connect with each other!

Other Lenses

Here are some other ways you might create your itinerary:

Around homestays, home swaps, or volunteerism.
Via around-the-world air travel, which often requires that you travel in only one direction: east or west.
Off-season all the way to maximize easier bookings, lower costs, and fewer crowds. One downside: you may find accommodations, sites, restaurants, and tours closed for the season, or you may encounter construction and repairs underway.
Country collecting: some travelers want to visit as many countries as possible. Just make sure you keep it meaningful by taking time to really appreciate the local people, places, and culture.
By theme: you may wish to choose a worldschooling theme as you go. Co-author Angela’s family studied World War II while in Europe and selected some of their destinations, including Berlin and Normandy, in order to visit battlefields and museums. We know another family who goes in search of animals in the wild.
Educational programs: alternative schools, experiential programs, and immersive experiences geared toward worldschoolers are rapidly proliferating, offering families the opportunity to enroll their children and build itineraries around their attendance.
Personal history or connection: some families like to visit their ancestral homes or retrace their forebears’ migration paths.
Friends and family: extended travel can offer the chance to visit those you might not often see, or to stay with them for longer periods of time than is usually possible. This can also provide a nice break from being alone on the road, give the kids friends or cousins to play with, and save some money, too.
Convenience: sometimes you just have to choose what is easy and makes sense—a good stop between two of your favored destinations, or somewhere inexpensive to spend a few nights. If you have the right attitude, you can almost always turn these sojourns into wonderful opportunities.

Additional Itinerary Considerations

Travel Advisories

Before finalizing your plans, check current safety conditions, travel advisories, and warnings for the places you are interested in visiting. The US Department of State website is an excellent place to start, with tour companies and travel blogs providing additional insight about real-time safety considerations.

Seeing the Sites

When you first commit to extended travel, six, twelve, or eighteen months might seem like a long time. Once you fill it with your planned itinerary, you might realize that there will never be enough time to see everything you want. In the places you visit, please try to let go of the notion of covering everything. No matter where you are or how long you’re there, you’ll still have to choose the things you most want to do. For example, don’t try to see every temple in Siem Reap, and don’t regret it if you missed a certain one that your cousin mentions later on Facebook. Savor what you are fortunate to experience, and release the rest.

For those places you don’t want to miss, be aware that booking lead times for hot destinations and activities are picking up. As our society has become increasingly mobile and more travelers are hitting the road each year, some national parks, museums, tours, top-rated campgrounds, and other popular attractions are newly requiring advance bookings, and reservation lead times have gotten much longer. Nearby accommodations and transportation may also be affected, so monitor what you’ll need to book in advance versus on the ground.

Planning versus Winging It

Try to find balance between planning before you depart and figuring things out while you are on the road. While you can identify highlights from guidebooks and online research, being “on site” will help you discover many more things to experience in your chosen destinations. Leave room for some spontaneity and changes of plans, while of course keeping in mind the cost of adjusting or canceling reservations.

Annika’s family left their last month open. In the end, they decided to spend it in California reconnecting with family, and each kid did two weeks of summer camp! They were excited to be with their peer group again while Will and Annika had some precious couple time to end the year. The month also helped the family become slowly reacquainted with the United States before they headed home to Colorado.

Scheduling Downtime

One of the most important pieces of advice we can offer is to leave downtime in your itinerary. As much as you think you want to cover a lot of ground and see as much as you can, travel fatigue is a very real thing. When you are traveling full time, occasionally it can start to feel more like work than play, and sometimes you’ll need a vacation from the traveling. In addition, you’ll likely need days set aside for future travel planning, laundry, cooking at “home,” and catching up on worldschooling lessons.

Angela’s family didn’t include enough downtime as they traveled throughout Europe, and after three months, everyone was exhausted. They had to seriously regroup back in the US, and on their next leg to Australia and New Zealand, they were sure to include periods of time when they had absolutely nothing planned besides catching up on math lessons and playing card games.

As you build your journey, keep in mind there’s no single “right” way to travel and worldschool. Your itinerary doesn’t need to follow someone else’s map—it only needs to work for your family, your needs, your values, and your goals. Whether you’re driven by curiosity, connection, flexibility, or a deep desire to learn, your priorities will shape not only your route but your experiences along the way.