Gap Year Preparations

There have been few experiences in our life that have required this type of extensive planning. Our abundance of spreadsheets and lists would make all you other Type A’s out there proud! Here is a breakdown. These are some of the major items we had to check off our list to make this year a reality.

Vaccinations

Our first step was to start getting the vaccines necessary for the countries we plan to visit. This process was started in February. We went to Passport Health, which was truly a one stop shop. They had all the vaccines we needed and supplied us with the entry/exit requirements for each country. While in the waiting room we challenged the kids to locate some of the countries on the giant wall map. We’re hoping this year of travel improves their knowledge of geography. Although Passport Health was easy and informative, it was also expensive! After getting our first round of vaccines, we scheduled our next appointment at The Little Clinic. The prices there were cheaper. Lesson learned – shop around!

Renting Our House

Next, we had to decide what we would do with our house for the year. We considered keeping it as a home base and shortening the length of our travels. During moments when we were freaking out about upending our entire lives, this felt like a good option. We also considered making our house a VRBO. However, our HOA does not allow short term rentals less than 30 days. Ultimately, we decided renting was the best options. Some friends couldn’t fathom the idea of moving everything out of our house for just a year. We live a pretty minimal life though, and I love to de-clutter. This was the ultimate purge!

We hired a property manager to help with renting our house. Julia from J Properties has been amazing! We had a small list of things we needed to fix/change, but overall this was a pretty smooth process. Our house rented quickly and J Properties will manage everything while we are gone.

Where To Go and What Is The Best Route

The world is a big place and there is so much we want to see! We spent endless hours working through scenarios of possible routes. A lot of different factors needed to be considered.

We want to be in each location when the weather is fairly warm. We also needed to consider the most economical route. We balanced expensive locations with ones where our dollar would go further. Dave analyzed the monthly cost for 27 different countries. There were so many options we considered!

Home-schooling

We needed to file an intent to home-school for the kids with our current school district. The state of Colorado requires 172 days of instruction with 4 hours/day and records for this must be kept. We will utilize a simple spreadsheet to keep record of this.

In the state of Colorado you are not required to follow a specific curriculum. One of my good friends has home-schooled her 4 children for over 10 years. She has been a fabulous resource. We plan to incorporate most subjects through unit studies based on our current location. We will use Khan Academy for math. We downloaded the Colorado standards for grades 5th and 8th. This ensures the kids learn everything they will miss in traditional school. Another fantastic resource was the book The World Is Their Oyster: A Practical Guide for World Schooling Families by Taryn Ash.

Packing and Picking a Backpack

The question of what to pack produced an abundance of decision fatigue for Alexis and I. We are traveling with one backpack each, so we had to be very intentional about everything we decided to take. The boys were easy, as are most wardrobe decisions for them. I spent WAY too many hours researching backpacks. We did a couple rounds of mock packing to ensure everything would fit!

An Abundance of Additional Questions

There were also a lot of additional and sometimes complicated tasks to figure out and complete.

Question: What would we do for health insurance and how do we get an international drivers license? Answer: Dave researched insurance for HOURS. We ultimately decided on Cigna Global. For an international driving permit you just simply apply and it’s good for a year.

Question: What are the visa requirements for each country and do we need to apply for them ahead of time? Answer: I won’t go into the details of this for each country, but a simple spreadsheet helped us organize this information.

Question: How do we get our mail if we don’t have a physical address? Answer: Virtual mailboxes. I didn’t even know these existed!

Question: Do we need to change our homeowners insurance if we are renting the house? Answer: Yes, you have to change to Landlord Insurance and the premium increased significantly.

Final Thoughts

This is not an exhaustive list of everything that went into planning this year. However, it gives you a good idea. In addition to all of the above tasks, we spent hours researching flights and where to stay. It has been a lot of work, but will pay off in the end. It has been our experience in life that all things worthwhile take a good amount of work!