You might have noticed that we jet around a bit.

We’re known for a lot of things, but being stationary isn’t one of them. We get itchy feet often. We have a passion for travel. We want our kids to go places and see things. So much so that we traded a perfectly good “real life” for the uncertain fate of gypsies.

Most people we meet think it’s pretty cool. A few people think we’re certifiably insane. There are days when I think we might be both in any given 24 hour period. Either way, we like our life.

It looks easy on the outside a lot of the time:

• Working from a hammock
• Shopping in exotic markets
• Sipping wine under jungle stars
• Evenings spent with musical friends
• Campfires year round as we travel with the warm

And there are a lot of wonderful things about how we live, that’s why we do it.

But there are realities too:

• Paychecks to be cashed
• Car registrations to manage
• Taxes to be paid
• Leaky storage units to deal with
• Credit cards to be renewed and mailed somewhere
• Bank statements to reconcile
• Mail to be gathered, sorted and responded to
• Passports to be renewed
• Bills to be paid

All of the same things that happened when we had a house have to happen now, only we’re not here to tend to them in person.

Of course some of it can be done on line, much of the banking, for example. But when something goes truly haywire and bank numbers are stolen and thousands of dollars disappear out of an account, the remedy needs to happen in person.

We don’t talk about these details much because they don’t make for interesting blog posts when compared to the boys’ latest bathroom fiasco.

But these details eat up a substantial amount of our time and contribute to the more difficult parts of the nomadic rodeo.

How do we manage to get paychecks deposited into the appropriate accounts and birth certificates retrieved from safety deposit boxes from distinctly *not* local locales?

We don’t.

The fact is that we couldn’t live our life the way we do without some very important people.

Our ground crew.

I don’t know anyone who travels long term that doesn’t have help on the home front.

Perhaps it’s a management company that takes care of a rental property, or an accountant who’s hip to the international oddities of life and a godsend in April.

Perhaps it’s your Mom who has the numbers for your bank account.

Our ground crew consists of two families who love us enough to make last minute bank runs when we’re running out of money, pack boxes full of hard to find items and ship them to the far ends of the earth.

• They help us pack and throw us big “see ya later” parties even though they’re the ones who miss us most while we’re gone.
• They let us store a few things in their basements that we don’t want in long term storage (holding them ransom, they would say!)
• In short, they bend over backwards to keep us afloat, keep us legal and keep us moving forward.
• And they do it all without asking for credit or anything in return. They do it because they love us more than they should.

Today, I’d like to give them a small portion of the credit they’re due and thank them, publicly, for making our wild life possible and saving our bacon on more than one occasion.

The Wood Family

Lois and the kids with Gramps & Gramma Janie

I realized that I don’t have a picture of the entire family anywhere in my archives. There are so many of them and they move fast!! Randy and Lois and their seven kids are serious contenders for the most fabulous people we know.You might remember Lois and the kids as our adventure buddies on The Mama Bus expedition.

Before we hit the road in earnest we ate an average of a meal a week in one another’s homes.I kept her kids, she kept mine. We baked bread, planted gardens, remodeled houses, picked blueberries, tapped maple trees and attended church together. I was there when Jessie-Rose made her sweet entrance into the world. Her kids are my kids’ best friends. She has one to match for each of mine and then three more for spare change.

Lois cried hard for months before we left and months after. I think it’s still hardest on her, of all my friends, when we leave the continent. And yet, she’s the first one to suggest planning a blast off party and she has the sunniest of smiles even though she wishes I’d just buy the farm behind hers and spend the remaining years of our hands on mothering shuttling kids back and forth between houses.

She took the beads I bought in Venice, in exactly the colors of the Adriatic that day, and made necklaces and bracelets for Hannah and I. Randy let us store a ridiculous RV in his driveway all summer and jokingly created a 355-D as our formal address… D… for “driveway.” The Wood kids have gotten great at Skype and email friendships. They’ve learned to hug us hard when we’re there and watch the mailbox for postcards when we’re not. They mailed “instant snow” to us in Africa for Christmas.

Randy and Lois are faithful friends in every respect. They hold the keys to our bank accounts when we’re away and Lois makes frequent bank runs for us to deposit checks and keep the coffers full. And she mails stuff for me; lots of stuff.

The Schenks

We’ve known Walter since he was 16 and I was 19. It’s a long story, but he’s one of those friends that “stuck” through the twists and turns life takes. He was present at our wedding. He held Hannah at just a few weeks old. He bought her her first Veggie Tales video when she was just four months old and proceeded to prop her up on the couch next to him and watch it with her.

His lovely wife, Dianne, came along just before Ezra was born and became fast family during the few months they lived with us when they moved to NH after graduation from university. She changed Ezra’s diapers and helped potty train him. She washed dishes every night for eight months while I ran the bedtime rodeo with four little kids. She sang through it all, even when Ezra, at two said, “Aunt Dianne! Don’t sing!”  “Why Ez?” we asked… after a long toddler silence he replied… “Because… DON’T SING!”

Walter has shoveled our driveway more than once. They’ve taken care of all four of our kids while we were off the continent and the kids were all four vomiting. They’ve sat in ER rooms with us and worried over stitches and broken bones. They’ve stocked our fridge with food when we got home late from a trip to Hawaii. They’ve suffered through the screechy part of violin lessons with Hannah and appreciate her current abilities more than anyone, as a result. I was there when two of her kids were born, and made it home just a week late for Laura. I did some midnight feedings to make up for missing her birthday. I think she forgave me.

Dianne holds the key to our safety deposit box and our mailbox. She ships the kids chocolate advent calendars no matter where in the world we are and she is the one I call if I need a certain brand of something tracked down and FedExed in a hurry. She is my personal shopper and the address that I ship internet purchases to. She’s never once complained when I’ve asked her to unpack, repack and ship a huge box of everything from Kraft Mac & Cheese to peanut butter to Bob’s Candy Canes to other continents.

There are other people who do stuff for us, people who send gifts to our kids when they’re homesick, who put a roof over our heads when we touch down, who meet us at airports at odd hours and who come see us from all over the place.

The Demls, the Habbegars, the Klekars, the Gardners, the Allisons, the Zwiers, the Harams and those are just off of the top of my head. There are others, and that’s not even counting family. They’re the people who would drop everything to help us, who do drop everything to help us and they’re the people who know just when to call and check up on us.

If you want to travel for a living, you’re going to need a good ground crew.

• They need to be as close as family and 100% trustworthy. Either of these families could fleece us if they wanted. But they don’t. 🙂
• They need to be in it for the long haul. It sounds like it won’t be a big deal when you ask if they’ll cash an occasional check, but it’s different in a snowstorm in mid-winter when the money needs to go in TODAY and you’re sipping margaritas somewhere warm.
• They have to love you. I mean REALLY LOVE YOU.

May I make a serious suggestion?

PAY YOUR GROUND CREW.

This is obvious when you’re talking the accountant or the property manager, but pay your Mom too, if she’s your ground crew.

Don’t cheap out on these people. They love you. They’d do it for free. Of course they would… but don’t ask them to. Make it worth their while. Everyone is happier. You get to bless them. They get to bless you. We all win.

No matter who you are, you’ll never have ground crew as good as ours. It’s impossible. Ours is the best. Don’t even try to keep up.

To the Woods and the Schenks…

Thank you.

A thousand times thank you.

You make this whole crazy life possible and so much more peaceful for us. We don’t worry a minute about the money, or the stuff, or the mail because we know you’ve got it covered.

• Thanks for letting us crash in your driveway when we have jet lag and your basement when we’re wiped out.
• Thanks for picking up the pieces and being the safe place we have to let down or melt down as the case may be when the adventure is otherwise than the glossy brochure advertised.
• Thank you for loving our kids enough to let them puke at your house, or in the tent in the middle of the Arizona desert
• Thank you for redecorating your weekend plans around our continental shifts
• Thank you for never being that shocked or that impressed by the next big thing and for just letting us be “normal.”
• Thank you for loving us even though we’re not normal.
• Thanks for the bank runs and the post office runs and the emergency safety deposit box bail outs.
• Thanks for the constant cheerleading, even when you know what’s going on behind the scenes.

It’s not just the Schenks and the Woods, it’s so many of our dear friends who love us behind the scenes and keep our world spinning. You know who you are. We just wanted to take a few minutes in front of everyone to thank you, and to remind you that you’re much loved.