What if we spent a year traveling the world?
That’s the question Alison and Martín Salas allowed themselves to dream about — and then they took action on it, creating an incredible experience for themselves and their young children Sienna and Seneca.
After renting out their house in Madison, selling their car and flying to Colombia in September 2018, the family embarked on a global tour that would ultimately take them to thirty-five countries on five continents over the course of a year and a half.
The family set up home bases in Peru, Brazil, Mexico, China, Vietnam, Thailand, Sri Lanka, United Arab Emirates, Tanzania, Croatia, Italy, Greece, Spain, Morocco and Portugal — some of them for weeks or even over a month at a time — and then visited many other countries along the way, returning to Wisconsin just before the pandemic hit.
Perhaps surprisingly, Alison and Martín weren’t raised as globe-trotters.
“Neither of us grew up in a traveling family,” she says. “Neither of us ever took a family trip as kids.”
But a study abroad opportunity to Venezuela when he was sixteen opened Martín’s eyes to travel, and he shared his passion with Alison when they began dating. They started traveling together, and when Sienna was two, they brought her along to Puerto Rico. She handled the hassles of travel so well, they decided to never leave the kids behind again. “And it’s actually a lot of fun with them,” Alison adds.
Tired of maxing out vacation time for a week or two away, and craving the chance to travel more slowly and intentionally, Alison and Martín began dreaming about a year-long trip.
As they got more serious about the idea, they dispelled some myths about what this type of travel would entail. For one, they realized that moving about more slowly wouldn’t just allow them to immerse themselves in a place, but it would also make it easier to adjust to different time zones — one of the toughest parts of international travel, says Alison.
“Simply moving a country or two over was much easier to manage for everyone than taking the long-haul flights it takes to see places outside of the United States, and especially to get out of North America,” she says. “Doing this took far less time traveling, relatively speaking, and kept our travel bill down because as a general rule the country over — wherever you are located — is often the lowest international airfare available. We kept doing this until we lapped the globe. A happy side-effect was that moving just a country or two over usually meant little adjustment to jet lag.”
The trip also wasn’t as expensive as some would fear. “You’re living a lot lighter — and you’re not going to Target,” says Alison. Also, in addition to lower airfares, they found discounted rates at some lodgings for staying longer than a week, and they didn’t have utilities and car payments. And Alison continued to work remotely — her career is in the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin–Madison — while Martín took a sabbatical from his job at the Department of Health Services.
As for the challenges that come with traveling with kids, Alison says they took them in stride.
“Our youngest was two when we started, so that was a bit of a challenging age,” she says. “But they’ll have tantrums at home, so why not have a better backdrop?”
In reality, Alison and Martín appreciated having the kids along. A mix of exciting adventures and low-key hangout days proved to suit the family well, and the people they met along the way loved greeting Sienna and Seneca.
“We felt like they were these little ambassadors,” she says. “People wanted to say hello to our kids or welcome us. They opened so many doors.”
After months criss-crossing the globe and having experiences of a lifetime, it was an adjustment to return home. But their time abroad taught the family lessons that would prove valuable in the early days of the pandemic.
“We went from gallivanting every day to being stuck at home,” Alison says. “But we were used to being in close quarters together and we knew how to work remotely.”
Fortunately, they love their home base of Madison. It’s just the right size, says Alison, and it keeps them close to their extended family; hers is the Stockbridge-Munsee community in northeastern Wisconsin and his is the Bad River Ojibwe community near Ashland.
“There are twelve Tribal communities in Wisconsin, and we’re from two of them,” Alison says. “We make a lot of trips home. We always go to each of our hometown powwows, plus in other communities and in urban areas such as Milwaukee and Madison.”
Keeping a connection to their communities and heritage is important to Alison and Martín, and it’s something they’re extending to their kids, both at home in Wisconsin and in their travels.
“Whenever we travel, we try to find an Indigenous community to visit,” Alison says. “We go into our travels with a blank slate, with a healthy curiosity to learn and deference to whomever we encounter. But as we start having conversations with other Indigenous communities and learn more, the similarities in worldviews around nature, the environment, communities and families have been remarkable and heartwarming.”
As the world has begun opening up again, the Salas family has started traveling again. Last winter, they spent two months in Mexico, and in July, they explored Toronto. This fall will take them Paris, where they’ll extend their trip to the Lapland area of Finland, the purported home of Santa, and they’re planning to spend six weeks in Colombia this winter.
And at home, Alison continues to work through her photography and video footage of their big global adventure, creating episodes for the family’s YouTube channel. In her videos, blogs and social media posts, she strives to offer tips and resources for others looking to venture where her family has traveled.
She also appreciates the exercise of thoughtfully documenting the experience through photo and video, and her footage provides an easy opportunity to re-live the trip.
“It’s been so fun,” she says. “It’s honestly the closest you get to bottling up a memory.”
– Katie Vaughn
Photos courtesy of Alison Salas.
Katie Vaughn is the editor and co-founder of Northerly. She is a University of Wisconsin-Madison and Stanford University-trained journalist with experience as a writer, reporter, editor, blogger and author. She lives in Madison with her husband, daughter and son, and is always up for an adventure.