What a year it's been!
We haven't written in a while mostly due to a shift in focus and frankly our lives in the states are much like our life in the states used to be. It's typically easier in your home culture, and so we ended up shifting priorities to other things.
We've settled into a house between Belding and Lowell, Michigan. It's a huge house (3,600 sq feet including the basement) on 100 acres bordering the Flat River (pictured above). We're quite blessed! Watch the video walkthrough of our Whites Bridge house, which we recorded shortly after arriving.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkW58kTXTwA
Becky and the kids have been working hard at homeschooling and I've been trying to re-build the business revenue. Progress is being made on both fronts!
We arrived back in Michigan on October 1. New Years day will mark 3 months we've been back in the states. We're going to be in this house for at least 6 more months establishing the business' referral pipeline again and recovering our savings/paying off a couple of debts we encountered from the business collapse this summer. So that puts us in the summer or fall of 2015 before we set out on our next trip. Hopefully, this next trip will be closer to 9 or 10 months and we'll live in fewer places (less quick travel, more slow-travel).
But as we reflect on this year and where God has brought us we thought we'd bullet point some major events that happened. Needless to say it's been a crazy year!
- We started this blog in February
- We sold most of our belongings
- We left the U.S. in March
- We sold our house of 7 years in April
- We flew 25 times and lived in 30+ different places
- We met amazing people, both fellow expats/entrepreneurs and locals
- We discovered that our kids inherited our passion for travel
- We found ways to experience wild animals without having to cage them and force them to entertain us
- We ate some amazing and memorable food
- We learned a few foreign words which may stick with us for a while.
2014 was also full of trial. And while it was a success in most regards we've stepped back into the US to fix those areas which needed fixing.
2015 may bring on a whole new adventure, but more on that later!
What challenges/adventures did 2014 bring for you?