"Everything we had been planning for over the past 9 months has come down to this?" I thought to myself as I frantically dabbed away at Axel's bleeding nose at half 3 in the morning. "Maybe this was a mistake?" But I quickly pushed the thought to the back of mind and reflected on those last 9 months of planning.


It was one of those stereotypical ideas - a tiny little seed that grew quickly into a plant, then a tree, then took over everything like a weed.  


We were stuck and a bit worried about what our future looked like over the next few years, Lorne going into work, doing the same thing day in, day out. Me doing the school run, doing the same thing, day in, day out. I can't even remember where the idea originated from, but we knew we wanted to make a new life, didn't have the skills for it, wanted to do a bit of travelling, and wanted out of Edinburgh.


Then the volunteering website www.workaway.org fell into our laps. You stay with host families, and for free board and food, you help out with activities. We signed up and started searching.
Obviously with 2 small children, you are restricted on where you can go, but we soon found loads of potential places. Many hosts were families who had "done the change", moved from a city, to the countryside and started up an eco farm.


It seemed like we could do this! We originally planned going round the world for a year, but when we started looking into South and Central America, where we wanted to start off, there was just so much to see that we decided to limit our travels to that one continent. There was grasslands, mountains, desert, jungle, beach and city life all on the same continent.
Then it was just a case of giving ourselves a timeline to do everything, stop working, sort the house out, paperwork, pack, research, more paperwork and........

What were we going to do with Blanket and Rosie? Our beloved pets? We always thought they would just slip into someone else's life, but the more we looked around, the harder it became to find someone who would take them.


There was a lot of stress building up to us going away, but finding a home for them woke me up in the middle of the night, terrified we would have to cancel the whole trip, guilty about leaving them in the first place.
And then it just happened. My friends brother and his friend said they'd be happy to take on the house and the pets! Plane tickets were then bought, hotels and airbnbs were booked and it all looked real. Our car was sold, our rucksacks were packed and before we knew it, we were off.


People kept asking, "what will it be like out there? What do you expect to get out of it? What do you want out of it?"
The short answer is WE DON'T KNOW! 


We've got two kids in tow, we've never really lived in such close proximity with each other, we have absolutely no idea where we will be staying after we enter Uruguay, we're kinda just winging it a bit.
But that's ok, because we planned and prepped and researched so much, that we have the tools to wing it a bit.


We'll be in a transition period over the next wee while, then we'll settle and we'll get into the groove, and I'm sure we'll have bad times, but I'm also sure we'll have mostly good times................oh and Axel's bleeding nose? It stopped, we had a cuddle, he slept in bed with me, everything was fine.