#1 DFH house-crashing across the world!
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Meet the De Burgh family!
These six people live together in their home on wheels: an RV of about 35 square meters six months of the year. That is roughly six square meters each to live, eat, read, sleep, cook, and every other function we do in our homes. How do they do it? |
Well, that’s what I asked myself when I first heard of this adventurous family through family father Hugh’s website The Passionate Warrior. (The link is at the bottom, I don’t want to loose you just yet…)
Wanting to learn more about the way they had chosen to live; on the road, constantly on the move with four young kids, I emailed Hugh to ask whether he was interested in an online interview for The Dynamic Family Home site. He was positive to the idea and a few days ago this material landed in my inbox (the interview is shortened some).
Questions for the grown ups:
Q: How long have you been living on the road, and how long do you intend doing it?
A: We are on the road about half the year. We usually hit the road at the start of summer and end up back at our house for the holidays. This is our second year with the motorhome. We’ll stop when something more interesting comes along.
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Q: How do you make a living? Is there, in your experience, any alternatives to living off the internet? A: We have a business that we run from home. We just carry laptops, cell phones and a multifunction printer. We have on-board wi-fi. There isn’t much we can’t do in the RV that we can do in our office. The Internet makes our lifestyle practical. But our business is not Internet-based. We do have two people back in our fixed office who do work from there, although they could be working from home if they wanted to, and sometimes do. |
Q: How do you get any work done when the kids are around you 24/7?
A: Great question. We have to take turns with the kids. And we get lots of interruptions. There is always time to get some work done. My biggest issue is finding long stretches of uninterrupted time. That is hard to come by. I have found that waking early in the morning generally assures me of lots of quiet time to get stuff done.
Q: What about personal space?
A: What’s that?
Actually, this is something we talk about a lot. We are always debating how we might reconfigure the lay-out of the RV to provide the kids with their own space and the adults with their own space as well. We are working on that. Once again, when everyone else is asleep, I get my “space.”
Original floor plan of the RV
Q: Practical stuff like laundry, storage, cooking, sleeping, how do you do it?
A: This stuff is easy for us. We have a full sized washer and dryer on board, so laundry is a breeze. We don’t need much stuff, so storage isn’t a big deal either. We probably keep too much stuff as it is. Cooking is also easy. We use the cook top and microwave a lot. We have plenty of sleep space in our RV. My wife and I did have good sized beds with foam toppers on them in the rear of the RV. But we recently changed that setup, and bought portable bunk beds with foam toppers for the kids for the rear room, and we sleep on an air mattress in the cab over bed. And we often get kid visitors in the night wherever we sleep who want to snuggle for whatever reason.
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This pictures is not from the De Burgh family’s RV, but from another RWT 3400. I just wanted to give an impression of the size of the place.
The kitchen counter is in the foreground of the picture connected to the dining area. In the rear end (which is obviously the front end of the car) you see the driver’s seat with bed and cabinets above it. |
Q: Describe a typical day of your life.
A: Well, we wake up. But this is not as simple as you think. When you have no schedule, there is no fixed time you have to wake up. Now we adults have some business stuff to attend to, but sometimes we’ll get up, do that, then go back to bed. Sometimes one of us will stay up all night, either because we are working on some cool project (usually on the Internet) or because we can’t sleep.
Recently my kids were experimenting with staying up all hours. That went on for a few weeks. Eventually they all came back to “normal” sleeping hours. We let them do it and now it is no longer intriguing. That’s how kids learn.
Q: Do you follow daily routines – or improvise mostly?
A: We try to avoid intentional routines. At least I do. We do what we want to. We do what we have to. The rest is improvised.
This was hard to get used to at first. It was disconcerting to people who had always lived with routine. But we toughed out that initial discomfort. We dared to be lazy. Eventually we dared to be still within ourselves. Just a bit. And we changed. For the better, I think. I feel more at peace than before. Living like this can actually be a spiritual experience.
Q: How does homeschool function for you and the children?
A: When we started traveling, we were essentially on vacation, so we didn’t worry about homeschooling. All of the kids were enrolled in the same Montessori school.
When we struck out last year, we didn’t know for sure if it would be permanent, so we stayed in touch with their school, and we bought lots of workbooks. But we were doing so many really cool things that it just got to be a pain trying to get them to do their paperwork, so eventually we let it slide.
Last fall we finally made the decision to not put the kids back in school. At the same time we also decided to give up on the workbooks, and just to try “unschooling” them for a while. We have attended four different unschooling conferences, including a big one just a few months ago in Texas, and we have grown to like this approach. The kids are more relaxed and comfortable than they used to be. It was the adults who had to get used to this lifestyle approach.
Q: How does your social life function when you’re living “on the road”?
A: We have four young kids. Therefore, we don’t really have a social life. Next question?
Q: Do you socialize with people with the same way of life?
A: We have found that the unschooling conferences have put us together with several other interesting RV families who are following a similar life path. However, socializing is the weakest aspect of this lifestyle, I think.
Honestly, I’m not the best guy to ask this question because I am a bit reserved socially (read – stick-in-the-mud). I had imagined us connecting with more of these families than we have. That’s not really the lifestyle’s fault – we just don’t work at it. The opportunities are there.
Q: What are the greatest perks with this way of life?
A: We always forget the day and time. We sleep as long as we want to most days. We eat whenever we want to. We change the scenery and climate when it no longer suits us. We are free.
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Typical next door neighbour to the left and typical view from the bathroom to the right.
Q: What are the biggest disadvantages?
A: You’ve mentioned some. Small living space. Less privacy. Stuff breaks all the time. Toilets smell a lot. Hooking up and unhooking whenever you want to move to a new RV site is a pain. The airflow in RVs isn’t always great. There are cold and hot spots.
Questions for the children:
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Q: Do you enjoy living this way – in a home on wheels, moving around all the time etc.? A: I don’t like moving around all the time. But its OK. I like not having to go to school! Q: Describe your home, how do you feel about it, what is it like, big, small, just right? Q: How do you keep in contact with your friends? |
Q: What is the greatest thing about living like this?
A: No school! And no chores!
Q: What is the worst thing about living like this?
Sometimes it’s cramped. I wish we had the big screen TV from home.
Q: What do you miss the most?
The big screen TV! And sleepovers with my friends.
Q: How is school the way you do it? And how do you do it?
It’s cool. We “unschool”, which means we don’t follow a formal school curriculum. Mostly, if I want to understand something I look it up or ask my dad.
Q: Do you spend a lot of time outdoors?
Not really. We are all homebodies. And my sister is shy.
Q: How would you feel about moving into a regular house?
It would be OK, I guess.
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Phuu… Here’s a map that shows a few of the places visited by the De Burgh family recently! You can get a sense of their route by following the alphabetic order of the balloons.
Imagine the experience they get from visiting all these sites. They’ve visited the Civil War site in Virginia, crossed the head of Mississippi River on foot, watched a thunderstorm approach while shooting stars fell overhead, stood at lowest point in USA, done sand dune sledding, gold mine touring in Colorado, nature hiking in Yellowstone National park and slow Texas wanderings to mention a few. If that ain’t Dynamic Family living, I don’t know what is. |
For more on the De Burgh family lifestyle and reflections visit Hugh’s site on http://thepassionatewarrior.com/
Wow…great stuff!
You know, just after hubby and I got married, we lived in a motorhome for a year travelling around Europe. Hubby and I have travelled a lot before we met. He travelled on an old bus across Europe all the way to Pakistan whereas I travelled on foot with my backpack all around Asia.
We thought it would be a good idea, after getting married just to travel and not work for a year. Your motorhome looks luxurious – ours was a 20 year old Mercedes bus converted to be our living space by hubby. It was comfortable enough for us and had grand times travelling in it.
We travelled all around Europe, living frugally but we had the most fantastic year. Today, we are more settled now. These days, when we do travel, it tends to be more luxurious and leisurely.
Last year, we just bought a home – so this is our new life project. Looks like, I’d pop in now and again for some home improvement tips. lol
Have a great weekend.
Hello Funkkeejooce – glad to see you! Yes, this is home improvement in quite a broad sense. Sounds like such a romantic year -just you and your hubby, driving all around Europe!
Gosh, what a fantastic interview. I love the idea of travelling like that but not with children – my feelings are that kids need proper roots and the opportunity to ‘belong’ to sports teams etc.
I am retiring in 4 years and my husband and I intend to travel around the British Isles with our caravan and 4×4. We make a lot of use of it already but still have a proper home.
Thanks Juliana. I agree with you that the kids need roots so this lifestyle would not be for me and my family either, but it’s quite a fascinating way of living.
If you do go traveling I wish you’d come by Norway and see me. Have a nice day!
Hi Nicone!
Thank you so much for interviewing us! Our lifestyle is unusual, but it works for us, and our children have experienced so much more than most kids do (certainly more than I ever did as a child).
Juliana – you make a good point about roots and belonging. I would simply say that all decisions involve compromises, and we chose the road less traveled. For whatever our kids will miss from a traditional upbringing, I believe they will gain so much more.
We could have waited until they were grown to hit the road, but one of our goals was to introduce our children to the larger world while they were young. I figure they’ll have plenty of time for a static lifestyle later.
I believe that Americans tend to be too provincial and insulated from the outside world. We like to learn through a TV or computer screen. This won’t do. I wanted my kids to meet people from other places and to actually experience those places they only see on a map at school.
Anyway, I love the comments here! I am so sorry that I took so long to reply!
All the best,
Hugh DeBurgh
This is a good way to spend time with the family during a vacation. You would not have to spend much on accommodation and you can go wherever you want to go to. This is great but just for a short while. Kids would need to adjust to their surroundings every time they are in a new place. That would be difficult for older kids that have found friends.