the roamer writes

An Overseas Family Adventure

This is part 1 of a four-part series. 

One cold, dark February evening, I turned to my husband and said, with conviction, “We’re moving. I can’t stay here another winter.”

It was the collective weight of at least a dozen little things, maybe two dozen. I won’t overly exaggerate and say a hundred or a million, but over the past 1.5 years of living on our little 20-acre homestead, we’d crammed in an impressive number of authentic country-living experiences, including what happens when the well water temporarily runs out, the true meaning of a Northeastern winter, a gruesome chainsaw accident, the death of several beloved chickens and roosters and one extremely loved cat.

The final nail on the coffin came in mid-January, when Kevin was away on a work trip, and our neighbor’s dog escaped her fenced yard and ran away, nowhere to be seen for several hours. I strapped a baby carrier onto my chest and put my almost-one-year-old son in it, stepped into my muck boots, and went out to help look for the dog. She came back, as dogs usually do, but I’ll never forget the sight of my neighbor sobbing on my back porch, saying, “I can’t stand this damn snow.” 

She told me later that she always forgets this feeling when spring rolls around and things start to warm up, and I said, “I’m not going to let that be me.”

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A couple of months later, in early June, just as the weather had warmed up and I was reminded how beautiful our property was, our family left the New York countryside behind and began a whirlwind journey overseas. 

My work was having an annual meetup in Sweden at the end of June. I had gone once before, when I was pregnant with my son, and my daughter had missed me so much that she was convinced every time daddy did bedtime that it was because mommy was going to Sweden again. So, this time, I decided to bring the whole family along! 

At some point, we became bougie Delta Airlines travelers so, while my airfare was covered for the work trip, the cost of putting my husband and my daughter in the “nice but not the nicest” seats directly behind mine was…quite hefty. Since my son was only a year old, he got to enjoy business class on my lap. We made it through an 8-ish hour direct flight in the evening. I think we got to the airport around 4pm. To avoid any short flights and layovers, we opted to drive to NYC from our house that morning (a 3.5 hour drive), eat some food at JFK airport before leaving, and then enjoy a smooth flight without any stops until we reached our destination. 

We had a few challenging moments on the flight where my son wanted to get down and walk around. Some people seem to have toddlers that just sit for long periods of time, but mine do not. It was really nice, however, to be able to walk behind the curtain and hand him to my husband and say, “He’s being too loud for these bougie passengers up here, I need you to take him for just a minute.” And then I’d retreat back to my fully reclining seat and enjoy a few minutes of peace until I could hear him crying and asking for mama, and then I’d go back and get him. My daughter, however, did amazing on the flight. She loves the TVs, loves getting to pick her movie or show and even bounces around and changes her choice mid-movie. She did not sleep at all the entire flight and instead watched 8 hours of TV. 

Most of my advice is of the “do not do what we did” variety, however, I will say that for international travel with young kids, breastfeeding them has always been my secret weapon. I took my daughter on her first flight, a red eye, by myself when she was 18 months old. Since I was still breastfeeding her, it was so easy to calm her down on takeoff and landing, and keeping her asleep for most of the flight. Similarly, on this flight, it was fairly easy to get my son to stay calm and fall asleep for several hours. 

We planned to spend a week in Copenhagen, Denmark, and then a week in Gothenburg, Sweden, and then head up even further north in Sweden for the work trip. We landed in Copenhagen early in the morning, the local time, and eventually got our luggage and made our way to the rental car place at around 6:15am. We found out it didn’t open until 7am. The kids walked around picking flowers and exploring as we loitered in front of the building waiting for the first employee to show up. When he did, he was in no hurry to get things started for the day, but eventually we got our rental car and drove to our nearby Airbnb. 

I booked the Airbnb for the night before so that we’d be able to check in super early the next morning, rather than waiting until 3 or 4pm, and this was well worth the extra money. We spent our first few days in Copenhagen operating on a bizarre sleeping and eating schedule as we acclimated to the new time zone. My husband has the hardest time with this because he gets very attached to knowing what time it is at “home” and then complaining that he’s not able to eat dinner or go to sleep because “at home” he would be doing something completely different. The kids and I adapted fairly quickly, after one or two nights of waking up and eating a snack at 2am. 

Our Airbnb was someone’s home, complete with family photos up on the wall and tons of toys for the kids to play with. It was incredibly cozy and not at all like the Airbnbs in the U.S. — maybe how Airbnb used to be, a way to earn some extra income and not a business model. The house had a fully fenced yard with an in-ground trampoline. 

It was the first time I fully exhaled and relaxed since the birth of my son.

When we moved into the farmhouse in the countryside, our daughter was almost three. We found out I was pregnant with our son right after we put the offer in on the house. I remember walking downstairs with the pregnancy test and saying, “Well, are we still doing this?” 

When my son was born, I found myself in a dark and anxious postpartum. Looking back, I had some clear signs of postpartum anxiety and postpartum OCD. Although I probably experienced these during my first postpartum, my daughter was born during the COVID lockdown in 2020, when I could control my environment extremely well. I had a good reason to not leave the house or let anyone come over. She didn’t get sick until she was over a year old. We also had family living with us and a network of friends nearby. 

In stark contrast, my son was born in March when winter was still in full swing in New York, which made it difficult to even take short walks outside. We had no family nearby and hadn’t made any friends yet. My parents and my brother flew in for a week, which was wonderful, but I quickly found myself feeling more and more isolated out in the country. Our son hated riding in the car until we moved our daughter’s seat next to his so he could see her and hold her hand, but it took almost a year for us to think of trying this. It took at least 30 minutes to drive most places. When my daughter started school, I ended up alone in the house all day with the baby while my husband spent most of the day outside doing the work you do when you own a 20-acre property: mowing with the tractor, chopping wood, lots of weed whacking (and a lot of time spent fixing the little string on the weed whacker, why is this a thing?).

In this Airbnb in Copenhagen, where I could let my kids roam free in the fenced yard, let them jump on the trampoline and kick a soccer ball around, I finally started to feel myself relax in ways I hadn’t been able to in a year and a half. Granted, I was also enjoying the luxurious vacation life of having my coffee and breakfast pastries delivered every morning. This became a ritual on our trip — hundreds of dollars were spent on meal delivery, and every morning my husband would hand me my vanilla latte and say, “my queen”. It’s easier to relax when you’re also not cooking and spending your vacation money making things as frictionless as possible, but there was something about the safety of the house, the yard, and the walkability of the town. A complete 180 from the life we’d been living, isolated in the countryside.

Everyone wants to move to the country and start a homestead and homeschool their kids and let them grow up in the wide open spaces, and no one is as quick to point out how lonely that can be, or how scary to be 45 minutes away from the nearest (podunk) hospital. 

It seems almost embarrassing when we tell people this, but we spent the majority of this trip at “home”, outside, letting our kids play while we drank coffee, ate pastries, and let our nervous systems reboot. There are many other U.S.-based adventures where I’ll be able to offer actual local recommendations, but this trip was not one of them!

We did enjoy several local parks in the area of Copenhagen that we stayed in. We were also only about a ten minute drive from the sea, so we went there and tried to put our feet in the frigid water on cold and windy day, and also enjoyed the aquarium. Our son got to put his hand in a fish tank and watch as tiny little fish swam up and sucked on his fingers!

One of the coolest parts, in my husband’s opinion, was the underwater highway we got to take when we crossed over from Denmark to Sweden. He says this with a mixture of exhilaration and fear — his worst nightmare is being trapped in a vehicle underwater, so he claims this helped him “face his fears”.

We drove from Copenhagen to Gothenburg, and even the rest areas are kid-friendly. We stopped at one that had a playground with sand instead of wood chips, complete with sand toys for the kids to play with! 

Our Airbnb just outside of Gothenburg was even better than the first. It was in a small community of townhouses, tucked away from the main roads. Our townhouse was at the very end with a large, fenced yard and an aboveground trampoline with a safety net. Just on the other side of our yard was the community park. We were able to sit outside on the porch drinking our delivery coffee and eating pastries while the kids played, either on the trampoline or at the park. 

The family who normally resides in the townhouse had left to spend the week on their boat, and because they were so well-known and well-loved in their community, we had a regular crowd of neighborhood kids asking to play on the trampoline or inside the house, and they didn’t seem to care that our kids were not the regular kids who usually lived there. They also loved practicing their English with our kids, since we didn’t speak any Swedish, which I thought was really cute. Here we were, somewhere we didn’t even speak the local language, letting our daughter go to the house next door to play with some kids we’d just met that day. All of the families were so kind and welcoming — it was the last week of school in their neighborhood and we ended up crashing an “end of the school year” pizza party! 

We loved it so much there that we started trying to see if there were any houses available, as though we could just stay permanently. I’m sure we could’ve worked it out and somehow flown our pets overseas to join us. But we had one more stop — a small island further north called Marstrand. Originally I would have called this Northern Sweden, but Sweden is so much larger than I originally thought, and when my work planned their winter offsite, it was even further north! 

We had finally reached the work portion of the trip, where I got to enjoy the freedom of not doing bedtime for three nights in a row! It was surreal to be out eating dinner with other adults until 11pm — well past my bedtime! — and then come home to the kids asleep on either side of Kevin, everyone piled into the big bed. I picked up my daughter and carried her into the other room, somehow managing to slip away without her waking up fully. I asked her the next morning how the “daddy putdown” went, and she said, excitedly, “Daddy let us eat as much candy as we wanted and we got to watch TV!”

Although our two cozy Airbnbs in Copenhagen and Gothenburg were the most relaxing part of the trip for our family, the most special part of the trip was meeting some of my team members in person for the first time — after working with them for years from afar! This was made even more special because I was able to include my kids. In between work activities, my team members came over to meet my family. They have known my son since he was born, and my daughter since she was a toddler. They showered the kids with gifts (enter: the candy that would later be used for bedtime bribery) and lots of hugs! 

I was a bit apprehensive about my family being very adjacent to the work portion of this trip, but they were welcomed with open arms. In fact, everyone had much more fun taking a couple of breaks throughout the day at the park, rather than lounging at the hotel or conference room. It might be unconventional, but it’s important to me that my kids get to have a glimpse into my work life, to see what I’m doing when I have to spend time away from them “doing meetings”, and especially to see all of the aspects of work that I enjoy!

My daughter even joined us for one of the late night work dinners — our entire family eats dinner at 5pm normally, so waiting for the first course of a meal between 7 and 8pm was an adjustment! We ended up seated at a table with my boss’s boss’s boss, who said he was going to eat all of my daughter’s ice cream at the end of the night, and played with lobster claws with her. We have a dozen blurry restaurant-lighting photos of our entire table making funny faces and being silly. They are a fun crew to be around, but welcoming my daughter to the table for an evening brought out an even more relaxed side of everyone and it’s a memory that I will cherish forever. 

I enjoy a lot of aspects of my work, but I don’t think it’s particularly interesting or exciting — being a mom is the most exciting job to me — but when I ask my daughter what she thinks she will do when she grows up, she always says, “I just want to have a regular job like you and do meetings!” My son recently asked when he could have a “work laptop”. I’m not sure what the work landscape will look like when they get older, but I’m glad they’ve been able to have some really neat experiences because of our ability to work remotely. 

On the last night of our trip, before we had to start driving back to Copenhagen to catch our flight home, my mom called me, and immediately, I knew something was wrong. I knew what she was going to say.

My grandmother had passed away. 

This was heartbreaking, because we hadn’t been to see her in two years, and we were planning on seeing her in just a few months when we traveled to Oregon for my brother’s upcoming wedding. 

I remember thinking that we had a long journey ahead of us and this wasn’t the time to break down and feel my feelings, so I shoved them back and put on a brave face as I talked to my mom, and I let a few tears fall that evening as I sang some songs to my daughter as she was falling asleep. 

Now, we would have to change our plans, and spend 24 hours at JFK airport so that we could get a flight to Oregon for my grandmother’s funeral. The nomadic summer had only just begun!