Expat Living

Did our experience on September 11th inspire us to travel?

Drink too much water? Need to hit the head? Check out our tips for using the facilities in Mexico and Central America.

Finding a place to live is always stressful. Try doing it in a new town where few people speak your language. 

Long-term travel forces us to be minimalists, but this can be hard with young kids. How do we get them to get rid of some toys when they already have less than they were used to in the US? 

I thought we'd spend a lot of money on actual and ebooks during our adventures. As it turns out, we don't need to, and we never run out of anything to read. 

In this post we detail how we landed our house sitting gig and tell you how you can too.

This post is for the girlfriends! Guys – You’re welcome to read this, but you may never look at us the same.

We've met expats that don't have insurance and others that do. In the end it's a personal decision each individual or family needs to make based on risk tolerance, their current health, personal finances and other factors. Here are some of the pros and cons we analysed when making our decision..

A tribute to my wife (and Mom) on Mother's Day. I now get why you were so busy when I worked in the States!

How we are navigating Central America using free GPS maps (and how you can too).

Throughout our travels we've seen some memorable, and sometimes funny, signs. Here are a few that jumped out at us when we were browsing through some old pictures.

Even with gas prices 20-30% higher our auto expenses are much lower than they were in the States.

We've used airbnb to find a place to crash and to make a little extra money. We outline some basic tips.

Names can be a tricky thing when travelling Internationally.  Our daughter's name "Elle" means "he" in Spanish. Here's what she decided to do about it.

We received an email from a reader who lives in the United Kingdom. Her family (which includes a daughter close to Elle's age) is contemplating their own journey of "slow travelling around the world". She had some questions for us, here are our answers.

By popular demand we've created another installment of "Mayan Ingenuity". This time we focused on "Hacks for the House".

After a recent visit from family members it dawned on us that some items we buy at grocery stores in Guatemala either look a little different or are stored differently here. To demonstrate this, here's a look at a few things from our pantry.

In Guatemala, when you don't have electricity, you probably don't have water. We didn't for 9 hours.

Orgullo Chapin, also known as Guatemalan Pride Day, is one of the many traditions celebrated the at LIFE School. Everyone in the school dresses in traditional traje, or typical Guatemalan dress. It was also right before Valentine's day this year.

There are a lot of "top mobile apps" lists on the Internet, but none of them cater to the type of travel we do. Our list is tailored to international travelers (specifically those on a budget).

Stolen DVD's and reckless driving resulted in a riot in Panajachel. The outcry from the citizen's and the response from the police were very interesting.

If you want a phone in Guatemala, you have a few options. The first and least desirable long term is to "Rent a phone". We run through the options in this post.

It's easy to stroll by a random door, building or alleyway in our town and quickly disregard it based on appearances. By US standards many might appear dumpy, dirty or sketch but in Guatemala you need to change those perceptions.

This year we were able to skirt the birthday party for our daughter in exchange for a back-to-back, double sleep-over, and a day of adventures.  

We spent the weekend in Quetzaltenango (aka Xela) and our schedule was packed. We need some vaccinations and had tons of shopping and site seeing to do.

We had been on the road for more than a month and in Mexico for over a week...it was time to take care of a few things so we carved out time each day we were in Puebla to run a few errands.

Puebla is the 4th largest city in Mexico and is somewhat hidden in the shadow of Mexico City which sits 1 hour to the Northwest. Puebla has a lot to offer so we set off to find some cool stuff.

We were warned not to drive in the city except to enter and exit the city. Thankfully we heeded this advice. Here are three primary reasons for following this advice...and it's not what you think.

After much research and reading about others’ experiences, Ken determined the border crossing at Laredo would be best for us. We could easily connect to the Pan-American highway that runs through the center of Mexico, and they are often noted as the best and safest roads