Four Worn Passports
With two middle school age daughters, this season of life hardly seemed like a practical time for Dale and Kellie McIntyre to pack up the family and leave the country on a five-month world tour. But for the adventuresome couple, it took little more than a fateful Sunday morning sermon to nudge them full-bore into such plans.
On that morning in September 2012, the family sat in worship and heard Liberty Crossings United Methodist Church minister Wade Griffith speak on the topic of living without regrets.
“Though I’d never really had the opportunity to travel abroad, I had always wanted to do it,” said Kellie. Dale, who had backpacked through Europe for two months in celebration of his 30th birthday, had wanted to explore even more. And even though they had many travel obstacles to confront, including a house, two children in middle school and pets, the two remained drawn to the idea of gap-year travel.
“We looked at each other in the middle of that sermon and said, ‘We are going to do this,’ said Kellie.
With Delaney, 14, in the eighth grade and Riley, 13, in the seventh, Dale and Kellie realized this was probably the last year they could pull off such a large-scale trip.
The McIntyres, in consult with Liberty Park Middle School principal Kacy Pierce and the girls’ teachers, arranged for the trip to occur during second and third nine-week periods of the girls’ school year. At the end of the first nine weeks, they withdrew, and during the next 18 weeks, the girls kept up their studies via a home school-inspired curriculum that Kellie incorporated carefully into the family’s travel.
After 13 months of planning, the family departed in October 2013. During the McIntyres’ five-month adventure, they traveled to 11 different countries: Australia, Bali, China, England, Iceland, Italy, Malaysia, New Zealand, Panama, Thailand and Vietnam.
For her part, Delaney was less enthusiastic at the outset about her parents’ wildly unconventional plan.
“I knew they had always wanted to do it, and I was in denial,” she said. “I did not want to believe we were going until we were on that first flight. It’s hard for me because I am a teenage girl. I need my friends. But once we returned and I had time to reflect, I realized just how incredible it was to have this experience.”
Delaney admitted her time back at Liberty Park Middle has come with a few surprises.
“In the first couple of weeks we came back, some of the comments teachers made were incongruent with what I had just lived through and learned,” she said.
For Dale, already an accomplished international traveler, the trip brought him back to the heart of Griffith’s sermon that September morning.
“It changes your perspective,” he said. “This kind of travel opens your mind to what a large world it is and what a small world it is all at the same time. All over the world, people really aren’t that different from you and me.”
The McIntyres dealt with more than their fair share of traveler misfortune, from the mild – aggressive, money-hungry Gypsies in Sorrento – to the severe – facing deportation and house arrest in Shanghai.
They experienced bucket list adventures, too. For Delaney, a major highlight was bungee jumping by nothing more than a foot harness in New Zealand. For Riley, it was feeding meerkats from a basket of grass in her lap as the animals climbed all over her, a la Meerkat Manor. For Dale, it was scuba diving along the Great Barrier Reef. And for Kellie, it was celebrating Christmas and ringing in the New Year from Sydney.
For Kellie, this was an especially poignant time, since the family had spent the two prior holiday seasons in non-Christian parts of the world. (In 2011, they were in Thailand, and in 2012, the Amazon.)
“It was absolutely worth every bit of planning and everything it took to make that experience happen,” Kellie said. The family ended up staying in a hostel – the one budget place to stay in ultra-expensive Sydney.
During the family’s travels, hostels were a common mode of lodging, not to mention the occasional yurt (a Mongolians-style tent), and shared guesthouses, where you never know who your housemate might be.
Beyond the language barriers (they struggled with Icelandic but were successful with Vietnamese), the food differences (whale eye and shark blubber were two of the more extreme regional dishes to which they were exposed), and the cultural nuances (countless), one of the most enduring lessons the McIntyres brought home from the trip was what many say, but few have actually lived out.
“The selection of things we have here, not just food, but really in everything, is just incredible,” said Kellie. “Overall life in the U.S. is just so easy compared to most other places in this world. It’s evident in our freedoms, our choices, our cost of living...really in everything.”
Kellie added: “In Thailand, for instance, if you say something disparaging about the king, you will be imprisoned. It’s no more than the kinds of things every American may think or even say. We all trash-talk our leader, right? You speak out against whoever you don’t like. There, it gets you thrown in prison.”
On an academic rather than political scale, that lesson was not lost on Delaney and Riley.
Delaney recalled a tour of Vietnam in which her tour guide, a school-age child herself, woke up each day to weave mats with her mother and grandmother, a task for which she was unpaid. The rest of the day, she would go to school, working in tour guide shifts where she could.
Riley recalled an orphanage in Bali, where most of the children living there were at the orphanage by choice, having left their families for the promise of a basic education.
“And here, kids in America despise school,” said Riley. “Some will drop out or just not show up at all. We saw so many people where the privilege of education is almost out of reach.”