Adventure Mom Finds Peace in the Midst of the Unknown

She Who Wanders

Aug 4

A Convo with Julia from @roaming.nomads

Meet Julia. She’s a type A wife and mom of two who is the writer, photographer and main navigator behind the brand Roaming Nomads. A night owl and book loving introvert, she claims to not be adventurous, although she’s been traveling with her family and their dog around the US, Canada + Europe (+ Costa Rica!) since 2014 (a life most would definitely deem adventurous:). She loves coffee, good chocolate and exploring nature with her family. Her genuine and honest perspective of living life on her own terms with all the ups and downs inspires others to walk alongside fear and stay focused on their dreams.

Tell us a little about you and your family like where you’re from, where you live now, how old are your kids and anything interesting or unique you’d like people to know.

We’re a family of four plus Cody, the dog, and we’ve been living on the road full-time since 2014. We started traveling full-time when I was 4 months pregnant with Sam and Emmi was just 18 months old.

We were both right out of college when we decided to take the chance and see how moving from Germany to the US would work out. Initially, we thought we'd just buy a motorhome to find a place to settle down after moving. Turns out, we didn’t like any place as much as we liked traveling, so that’s what we kept on doing. We’ve since switched our homes on wheels a couple of times and are now exploring in our van.

We’ve been traveling the US, Canada and Europe (and a short 3 month stint to Costa Rica) for almost 9 years now, and are recently (after some Covid delays) adding some more international trips, dog permitting.

We generally go wherever we feel the best about and don’t really plan far ahead - and when we do it’s almost a guarantee for the plans to change.

Our priorities have shifted over the years, from finding a place that feels like home to the quest of finding remote places to call home for the night to embracing everything a country has to offer. And while our focus is on being outdoors, exploring and moving and adventuring together, sometimes it also means signing the kids up for tennis camp in a town we don’t mind spending a week at.

The Great Wanderlust is all about moms stepping outside of the box and diving deeper in both travel and in life! The mission is to inspire mamas and families to feel fully alive through adventure and exploration! What is your great wanderlust? What most makes you come to life??

That’s a question that really made me think because I tried to find that one big moment…but I realize it’s all those teeny tiny moments amidst the everyday life (yes, we have that too), between bickering and planning and cooking dinner and working and adventuring. There’s not that one epic backpacking trip, but the two hours we delayed breaking camp to read in our tents. Or watching the bison in the fog during sunrise. And being back home after a failed backpacking trip, soaking wet and almost already laughing about our ordeal while making quesadillas.

Obviously, those moments are more frequent when we’re out adventuring, which we’ve been doing more and more as the kids grew older. From hiking, SUP-ing, backpacking, mountain biking,… basically every time movement and fresh air are involved, and/or wildlife encounters.

Reading in my hammock on Emmi’s B’day backpacking trip at Mount Baker, watching the wolves devour a bison (and then play with the traffic cones) in Yellowstone, watching the caribou walk on our own private beach on Newfoundland or hiking through the Snowy Range in Wyoming are all moments that made me happy and content and excited. And I think that’s the definition of coming alive.

A lesson I learned that’s applicable for both traveling life and motherhood in general: stoke is contagious. The things that make me excited and happy, most of the time the kids grow to appreciate those activities and situations as well when we share them. That goes for learning new things as a family, like surfing and climbing, or sharing our passions like photography and art to being excited about yet another bison crossing the road.

Life in general comes with plenty of surprises, changed plans and detours, and life on the road must come with 10x as much! After 10 years you must have developed some strategies for staying cool and rolling with the punches when the unexpected happens. What are some tips you’d give for keeping calm (and keeping your sanity) during these times?

Wait, I should have? Well, shoot. I’m not sure I’m the right one to give any advice in this regard. I’m a person of habit, which seems counterintuitive for someone who hasn’t slept in the same place for more than a week in…years?

Honestly though, I tend to generally, maybe, possibly deal with detours and changed plans a little bit better than I used to. However, I am a Type A personality to the core. I like planning. I like knowing what’s ahead, and I absolutely suck at using my brain in high stress situations. It’s also an important lesson that came with parenting because one of the kids is just like that, and navigating the need for consistency and the struggle with a last minute change of plans really showed me that it’s a balance that can be met and even something we can thrive in. Just like so many things in motherhood, it’s a learning as we’re going thing, and we’re constantly getting better at it.

My best advice really is this: experience has shown me that most of the time, things will be ok. And even the remaining 1% we deal with and came out on the other side. I’m not going to start with the “changed plans make for the best adventures” phrases because while that may be true, my brain will not admit that in the situation.

So, is - I have 10 plans, so I have a backup plan of a backup plan - still rolling with the punches? Probably not, but it’s the main pillar of my coping mechanism most of the time. And I’ve developed some really efficient situational research skills.

However, sometimes rolling with the punches also means asking for help, and if you’re lucky enough to be in a team it also means delegating. Especially in unexpected situations, knowing what I’m good at but also knowing which tasks I need to get out of my head for that moment is a huge help for keeping my sanity.

I’m really good at seeing the worst in a situation, but also in researching, googling and calling our way out of it. Marcel has really solid initial reaction skills, mechanical know-how and a whole lot of “this will be just fine” attitude. That translates to - we have a flat tire on some remote national forest road. I map our way out of the blind spot, find the closest tire shop, make emotional support food, find the tools and call places. He gets us slowly, calmly and safely to the next campground, changes the tire and teaches the kids while he’s at it. So I might not have the perfect skillset to roll with the punches, but as part of the team I’m pretty sure we can handle most of the detours life throws at us. That and a pint of ice cream.

Fear is such a common struggle for so many, and I don’t think it’s talked about openly enough. What are the kinds of things that keep you up at night, and how do you work through those/manage those fears and stay focused on truth?

Funny you ask that because I was having trouble coming up with an answer, and then I was treated to an hour of driving up and down some rough dirt roads in British Columbia, always anticipating the logging truck coming at us from straight ahead and not quite sure if we’d make it back up those steep and rutted grades if we had to. So basically, a couple hours of dissecting, analyzing and processing fear.

Can I say I’m pretty much borderline scared most of the time? We drag our home down narrow forest roads, tend to stay away from cell service and civilization, backpack in bear habitat and get stuck in our obligatory surprise snow storms every once in a while. All while being responsible for the kids, and our home with everything we own in it. It’s ok to be scared. The main thing for me is to still do it, just with the fear.

One thing we’ve used a lot for the two members of our family that tend to be on the anxious side of things is “we’ll just take fear by the hand and do it together.” And that’s what we’re doing. One step at a time, distinguishing between valid fear and invalid fear and not letting the latter one define what we do and how we do it. And fear isn’t always a bad thing either, just a reflex to evaluate what we’re doing, pause and then either proceed with caution (slowly driving through that snow storm) or abort mission (slowly back away from that bear that won’t move off the trail).

Also, “what’s the worst that can happen” is a great way to squelch this initial fear moment. However, if you’re going down a narrow winding forest road with a steep drop-off, that’s maybe not a good thing to ask your already anxious mind. Trust me, imagination can be quite over the top.

And on another note…kids tend to pick up on fear faster than they pick up cuss words or the common cold, so sometimes I’ll just pretend there’s nothing to worry about, and sometimes I’m convincing my brain in the process.

I’m a scientist by trade, so focusing on possibilities and numbers helped me with being realistic about my fear of “the worst possible scenario.” One example is in terms of medical emergencies, which have been a fear factor for me (especially since we’re hours away from medical help a lot of the time). Number one - it’s a thing that’s out of my hands, something even the best plan can’t prevent. And number two - we’ve had our fair share of hospital and ER visits in the past, and while they’ve given me anxiety, they have shown me that they’re usually just a minor bump on the road.

Other than that, I used to be way more scared about everything that comes with uncertainty, from car breakdowns to finding a spot to stay for the night. But after spending so much time on the road it’s boiled down to “meh, just something we’re going to take care of.”

If you had to say, where would you want to see yourself and your family in 5 years? Do you think you’ll ever stop traveling full-time?

The five year from now question is probably one of my most despised questions, but that’s more of a personal problem . Probably because I’ve fought so hard to keep my peace with not having a set plan, being at one with spontaneity, and my brain happily and readily jumping on the question ready to plan and stress about it.

Honestly though, we do have a rough outline about what our years hopefully will look like because we’ve come to realize that we’re half-way through our time with the kids at home (duh, math, I know), and there’s still so much we want to see and explore with them. We think we’re going to travel for the foreseeable future because we love it and we want to see the world, and also because it’s the only life we’ve ever known. It’s something like asking a family in their suburban white picket fence house when they see themselves starting a nomadic life. It seems like a pretty daunting and foreign idea.

We’ve played with the idea of settling down somewhere over the years, either full-time or part time, but it’s not a goal. It’s just one of many alternative plans floating around (right next to driving across Mongolia and living on a boat, so there’s that). We check in with each other regularly to make sure everyone is still enjoying what we’re doing or to change things up if we need them to. Sometimes that means staying in a spot for longer, sometimes that means adding wishlist countries to the plan and sometimes it’s just movie night instead of exploring.

And that’s what we’ll keep on doing and how we’re going to decide how our next five years look like. Maybe just not five years but more like a month at a time.

I read this quote in your bio, and it made me laugh: “Not adventurous at all, and on this trip because she didn’t realize what she got into.” What does being adventurous mean to you and do you think it’s important? How have you adapted to become more adventurous over time?

I think this question goes hand in hand with talking about rolling with the punches and spontaneity. I always thought for being adventurous you have to be fearless, spontaneous, embracing and inviting the new and unexpected, as well as thrive in situations that get you out of your comfort zone. Basically optimistic spontaneous going with the flow kinda people.

Yeah, that’s not me. I like my rituals + feeling at home, and I tend to get anxious if anything unexpected happens. It took me a long time to realize that being adventurous and being an anxious type A person don’t necessarily rule out each other. It’s all about the balance.

Now, one could argue that moving to a different country, pregnant and with a baby and no real plan is a pretty adventurous thing to do. But in the end bravery and naivety go hand in hand. And I don’t mean naivety in a negative way, more in a - it’ll be ok, trust the universe kinda way.

I think I’ve gotten some of that naivety back over the last few years, just trusting the process and that everything eventually will work out. Balancing that out with a mental list of things that could go wrong, but it’s a process.

And, again, it’s another skill that I try to teach my kids, especially the one that struggles with spontaneity and caution. And by teaching I mean we’re learning as we’re going, one spontaneous backpacking trip at a time. Because I love doing those adventures. That just doesn’t mean I’m adventurous.

Where are you off to next and what are you most looking forward to about it?

I’m just a teeny tiny bit superstitious about talking about travel plans because, seriously, every time we do, something goes wrong.

Anyways, our plan is to see new things, explore new countries and continents, and I’m so, so excited about it. We hope we’ll be able to explore more countries down the road, more cultures and maybe even get some quality grandparent time while we’re at it. I’m looking forward to getting out of my comfort zone, trying new foods, failing at learning new languages and generally just exploring this world and experiencing all that with the kids.

But I’m also excited to have the option to come back to the states any time, wake up in snowy Yellowstone, explore the bike trails in Utah or swim in Washington alpine lakes. We’ve managed to keep so many options on the table - it’s making me excited about what’s to come.

Who inspires you to dig deeper in travel and life? Do you have a few recommendations of someone I should feature next?

Marlene from the @mail.mish crew has always been a huge inspiration, both because she’s been doing this for so long with kids, and because we’re pretty similar in terms of how we have the tendencies to be a bit anxious when going down mountaineer passes in our homes. She has the same no-nonsense approach to parenting on the road and stretches her comfort zone regularly. Plus, she’s just generally a really kind human being, and it’s a joy to be around here.