5. Unschooling, House Sitting, and Family Adventures with Moira Mills

🎉 I welcome Moira Mills who talks about her and her son’s full-time traveling lifestyle across the United States!

🌎 Moira shares insights on their house-sitting experiences and how they balance exploring new areas while maintaining old connections.

✨ IN THIS EPISODE:

• Her experiences with unschooling growing up and with her son
• Her professional journey from a Rolfer to working online with families on deschooling and human design
• The financial and logistical aspects of a nomadic lifestyle
• The personal growth and fulfillments gained from location freedom

Mentioned in the show:

00:11 Moira's Travel Lifestyle
01:51 Pet Sitting Experiences
05:21 Unschooling on the Road
13:40 Human Design and Education
17:16 Financial and Logistical Insights
24:32 Challenges and Rewards of Travel

✔️ Connect with Moira Mills through her Substack or Website or Email! Free 5-minute Soul Read!

Host Info: I'm Suzy and my family lives between Spain and Colorado. 🌞

🌎 We feature traveling families and worldschool creators taking learning global. 🚀

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Chapters

• 0:11 Moira's Travel Lifestyle
• 1:51 Pet Sitting Experiences
• 5:21 Unschooling on the Road
• 13:40 Human Design and Education
• 17:16 Financial and Logistical Insights
• 24:32 Challenges and Rewards

Transcript

Suzy: Welcome to the Wander Slow Family Travel podcast. Today I'm joined by Moira. Welcome to the show. Please tell me more about you and your family.

Moira: Hi. Thank you for having me. My son and I travel the US full-time and have for a few years. I'm excited to be here and talk about it.

Suzy: Where are you currently?

Moira: We're in upstate New York. We're heading to Northern New Hampshire in a few days for a camping trip we do every summer for a week. We've been in the south for the last year or so, splitting our time between Florida and South Carolina.

Suzy: Great. And tell me more about your setup.

Moira: We house-sit around the country.

Suzy: Perfect. Is that through TrustedHousesitters?

Moira: Yes. When we first started this, we did a few weeks of camping as we headed south from New York. That was fantastic, but I cringe when I look back at how much we spent on spots the entire time. We were spending $50 to a hundred dollars a night for places to stay. It was ridiculous and not sustainable for what we're trying to do. Then I was introduced to TrustedHousesitters, and it's been fantastic because I want to slow crawl around the country and have a chance to check out cities like a resident would experience them.

My strategy has become to pass through an area and find a short sit for a few days. If we like the vibe of the area and want to come back, I'll look for a longer sit. If it's not really something that we're feeling, then we move on to the next location. It's been a great way to cover the whole eastern half of the country. We've covered 26 states, so we have a solid idea of where we want to go back to and areas that we're not super called to. It's been a great way to get an in-depth look.

Suzy: What has your son's experience been with the pet-sitting part of it?

Moira: It's been great. I grew up on a small homestead in rural Alaska, and I always said I wanted my kids to be around animals. We fostered a couple of cats over the early years, and he loves animals. But I want to travel, and I remember growing up on the homestead, you can't leave. We had milk goats, we had sheep, all these animals that need to be fed every day, so we were never able to travel. A big struggle for me is letting go of having pets of our own right now.

What's great about this is we still get time with pets. We tend to lean toward cat sits. It's been great because he's really a cat person and would love to have a cat traveling with us, but it's just not doable right now. So it's the best of both worlds.

Suzy: That's exactly what I was thinking. We've done some sits as well, and I love that you are in a real house. It's very comfortable, and the pets are usually great. It's a way to mix the love for animals and travel. Remind me of your son's age again.

Moira: He's nine, he'll be 10 in November.

Suzy: Okay. Yeah, mine are five and eight. So right in that phase where they like pets and animals, but they're not really doing all the work for them.

Moira: Yes, exactly. So it's good to not make it permanent quite yet.

Suzy: Are you looking farther out for sits, or do you look farther out if it's back to a location you want to go to?

Moira: It's all of the above. I've been playing with it for two years now, so it's kind of all over the board. We've got some sits that we've been back to, one specifically where we've spent several months at a time in an amazing location in Florida. We lived here in the Northeast, in the New England area for a few years, so we have friends. I'm not as concerned about finding longer sits here because we want to bounce around.

Suzy: I'm glad to hear from another TrustedHousesitters fan about how it can work in your life. In the last year, how many nights do you feel like you've been able to stay somewhere on a sit? And is there any way you can quantify the savings?

Moira: I did write one of my Substack articles on this. For the entire year of 2024, we spent 27 nights in Airbnbs, which was a total of about $1,700 for the entire year.

Suzy: That's amazing.

Moira: Yes. And we stayed with friends. We went back and visited friends we met in Kentucky, up here in New York. We had friends to stay with. So we've definitely stayed with friends here and there, but for the most part, it's been TrustedHousesitters back to back. So, yeah, 27 nights out of the entire year. It takes some hustle to get that schedule to work out. There were a couple of times, like when we were in Lexington, Kentucky for the month of May, and we had to hustle to Northern New Hampshire to spend a week, and then I had to be back in St. Louis by the beginning of June. I was like, "Okay, I did not plan this well," but I learned so much in that too.

Then we ended up heading down to Florida and got a sit where we were there for almost five months. I was like, "You can't pry me out of this kitchen right now. I'm not going anywhere." I also added up the driving. I minus the driving hours that we would normally do just living someplace, because I'm obviously going to be driving pretty much every day no matter where I'm at. But it was 167 hours of driving, and that was about 10,000 miles total for the year of location. So we did quite a bit of zigzagging the whole year, and now we have a sense of where we like and where we don't necessarily need to go back to.

Suzy: I'd love to hear more about your personal travel story. What was one of your earliest travel memories, and how did your upbringing shape some of these travel philosophies that you have as an adult?

Moira: I was raised in very rural Alaska, not off-grid, but borderline. My dad was a farm kid from the Midwest, and my mom was born in England. My grandma was a war bride after World War II. She moved over to the States after the war but traveled back to the UK and stayed with her aunt every summer. So growing up, even though we didn't leave Alaska, there were lots of stories about those summers she spent in the UK. I think the stories were always alive for me.

My earliest travel memories that I created were when I went to stay with my godmother for a weekend. That was the first time I flew alone when I was about 14. Then when I was 17, I went from Alaska down to Oregon and stayed with my sister, who was in university at the time. That's really when I started getting a love of just wandering through new towns. In my twenties, I did quite a bit of traveling in Europe with that same wandering-around mindset.

So it's always been there in my life. I just took a break from it when my son was born to, I guess, settle down and give him stability. And then I was like, "But this isn't what I want to do." And I think that he's up for it. I wouldn't necessarily have jumped into it if I didn't think it was a good fit for him too. If he needed to be in one place, but he doesn't, so I'm very thankful for that.

Suzy: It sounds like he picked up the travel bug from you.

Moira: I think so.

Suzy: You've been on the road, you've been traveling, you've been house-sitting. What are some of the family goals for this journey?

Moira: I have always wanted any children that I have to be just as comfortable in the middle of nowhere with no modern amenities around them and be able to survive, as they are navigating a public transportation system in Europe or anywhere that they don't speak the language, where they can feel confident that they can figure it out. That's a big part of it. I wanted to head overseas, but I decided this is a great opportunity for us to get to know our country. And it's massive, so there's plenty to explore for a while.

Suzy: My son looks at a map and he's like, "Alaska's so big and it's so far away." So I can see how when you grow up there, you're like, "Actually there is so much more to explore." You mentioned your son is on board for these travels. What does he think about jumping around to different houses? He likes being around the cats. What are his perspectives on your travel journey so far?

Moira: He does really well with it. One thing that I've been very conscious about is when we make a friend in a location, we make a really strong attempt to get back to that location and stay in contact with those people. We've run into a couple of other road-schooling families on our travels. Like Christmas last year, we were in Charleston, South Carolina, and they were in Lexington, Kentucky, which is not a short drive, but we buckled up and we headed to Lexington for Christmas.

Doing those things, keeping in mind when we do make connections and revisiting them, is key. And honestly, what I find a lot when we live in one location is you still don't see people that frequently. You can be in the same city as someone and it's six months and you don't see them. So I just try to do that on a much larger scale. On his birthday, we weren't around anyone that we knew in that location, but we got phone calls from five or six different people and we got to do video chats and connect with them. I think that what makes it really doable for him is that we still get to maintain those friendships as we're traveling, so it's not like we're just dropping everything when we leave a location.

Suzy: I love that. That is definitely a way to stay in connection. And there are so many ways with technology to keep in touch. I found that with one of my son's really good friends back home, they play some games together online. He'll call through my phone to his mom, so they can talk a little bit. And I think if you can keep those connections up, they can pick back up right where they left off once they connect again. I'd love if you could tell us more about your approach to education while traveling. What does schooling and learning look like for your family?

Moira: Yes. So I was unschooled my entire childhood, so I've never been to school. I just always honestly assumed that I would do the same with my kids. I just always knew that that was the direction I was going to go. So I've never felt like I needed to stay in one location for that. So, we do unschooling full-time, and it's just part of our everyday life all the time.

Suzy: What does a typical day look like?

Moira: I don't think there's such a thing as a typical day, honestly. They're all so varied. For example, one of the last things we went through is we were talking about what he wants to do when he grows up, and he wants to be a welder. As a welder, you can travel all over and do these remote jobs so he can maintain traveling and make really good money. You can weld underwater; there are so many places that need welders.

At nine, he's a bit young to learn welding. So we got to soldering. Soldering is a great way to start because you can learn the fundamentals of what you would turn into welding. We were able to do research and figure out what that entails. This is not how my brain works; it's not anything I've been interested in, so it was a learning process for me. We were able to put together a whole packet of what this soldering kit would look like, order it, and then he spends time learning how to solder.

That was a few weeks ago. There's kind of a break on that, and now we've moved into talking a lot about robotics again. So we've revisited that. We actually carry around with us this robotics kit that he's already built, or Legos. There's a common theme; he really loves creating and designing things.

Then he also has a very physical side. We're back in New York, where we lived for a couple of years, and we did Jiu-Jitsu. So we're back at his old Jiu-Jitsu gym and we're going to every Jiu-Jitsu class for kids. There's not a typical day. Depending on where we're at, when we're in the Carolinas and it's good weather, he was learning surfing. You're dealing with so many storms out in the ocean on the East Coast that sometimes we'd go two or three weeks and he couldn't get in the water at all because the water was too rough. And then the water opens up, and it doesn't really matter what our other plans are, we're dropping everything and he's getting in the water to work on his surfing. The only constant is it's constantly not the same.

Suzy: If someone was curious and hadn't heard of unschooling before, how would you describe that to them?

Moira: It's child-led. A lot of when we think about education is based on these ideas that as adults, we've come up with what's important to learn, and we segment them into subjects: reading, writing, and arithmetic. Unschooling touches on all of those. The way that I do it and the way I was raised doing it is that you're going to find all the subjects in something you're interested in. You're just not going to find it because you're looking for math.

As a kid, we formulated all of our own animal food. You have to learn that when you have a milk goat, it needs different nutrition than if you're raising a pig for market. You're learning math because you're formulating, and it's not just this subject or this math problem on a piece of paper that's not attached to anything. It's what you care about. You want your animals to thrive, so you're learning math to be able to formulate the best diet so that they are thriving. You're going to find all the subjects, but you don't think in terms of subjects. You think in terms of what makes you come alive, what are you interested in? Because it believes at a very foundational level that we're designed to want to learn. So let's foster that want of learning and then follow those things that light you up, and you will just naturally find the subjects in them without thinking about it that way.

Suzy: It's true that there are really so many things to experience all around us. Math, reading, and writing all come up in one way or another. How do you balance between supporting an interest and guiding it further, or letting them decide when they're ready to move on? When parents are thinking of world-schooling or going on the road, they think, "Okay, how am I going to teach my child?" And so maybe they're looking for curriculum. If someone wanted to step back and practice more unschooling, what would be their role in that?

Moira: This is where, for me, Human Design, which is what I do for work, is the best tool that we have. We can hear all the time that people are different and they do things differently and have different ways of thinking. But I find that there's not a lot of understanding of what that actually looks like in day-to-day life. For me, Human Design really lays out that we all make decisions differently. There are people out there that do really well at initiating new things, and there are people that's just not how they work. I am what is called a Generator, so when it's something that I care about and I'm interested in, I have endless amounts of energy to do that. But try to tell me that I'm supposed to be interested in something that I don't care about, then it's drudgery. But not everybody is designed to have that amount of energy. There are people that are here to initiate and start things and not complete them.

If we expect that everyone is supposed to do X, Y, and Z and that we all work exactly the same, that's where the frustrations can really come in. To understand our kids and how they're different from us is such a powerful tool. I'll use an example of my son and I. I make decisions very quickly. If you ask me if I'm interested in something, my gut is like yes or no if I listen to it. If I try to override that, I generally am in for a problem because I'm just not going to have energy. Now, my son, he also has his gut tell him yes or no to things, but he's a more emotional kind of person, so he needs a little bit of time. I can give him an option and he can be really excited about it, but if I give him a couple of days, then he will be much happier with whatever he chooses.

So I guess this is a very long answer to the question, which is understanding how we're different is where it needs to start because we cannot overlay the same recipe on each person. The more we can understand how we're different, that's where our power is. Then we can trust that each person is really designed to attract the things that they need to and we just have to support them in their process.

Suzy: That makes sense. It sounds like the first step is really understanding yourself and how you learn and react, and then also your child and how they learn and react. Where could someone read or understand or take a quiz to tell them which category they are?

Moira: There is the typical Human Design that uses something called tropical astrology. What I use is something based on sidereal astrology. Sidereal is what is used outside of the Western world. I find it to be far more accurate to who we are right now on this planet. I pull charts for people and actually, I do have a free resource, the Five Minute Soul Read. It pulls from the sidereal astrology, so it lays out your type, authority, and strategy.

There are different energy types, and that's how our aura works, where we are either drawing things into us, so we need to respond to the things in front of us, or we're here more to inform on bigger systems. There are different variations. And then how we're making decisions because the foundational piece of all of it is, how are we entering into a decision? How are we deciding where we're putting our energy? This gives you those first pieces, and people can study this for a lifetime, but those first pieces are really that doorway into the energy type. And then you can look at your energy type and your kids' energy type and see how they work together or how they can challenge each other.

Suzy: I'm going to check that out. This is actually a good segue into talking about the financial and the logistical side. How are you funding your unschooling road-schooling adventures?

Moira: It's been quite the journey because I am a trained Rolfer. That was my profession for many years, and that requires that you stay in a location and you have an office. I did that, and I love the work. I will always see everything I do through a Rolfer's eyes. But I really had to set that aside when I wanted to hit the road.

I've shifted over into helping families who want to shift out of the public education system and into homeschooling, specifically the deschooling process, thinking about what education needs to look like so that we can see the possibilities. And then I shifted really into just embracing the Human Design aspect fully, specifically with helping families who are struggling and want to be on the road, and also business branding. I have a background in branding and helping entrepreneurs who want to align their work closer to how their own energy works. So that's where I'm at now and it's been so much fun. I really love helping people be able to design the businesses that really align with their energy.

Suzy: How have you been finding families to work with?

Moira: It started more in person. I used to run a pop-up play event for a few years in upstate New York. And then it was word of mouth through people that I had made face-to-face contact with. I felt like I was really good at this business when it was in a location. And it's that shift to fully online. So now even if I meet someone face to face and we're going to work together, we're doing it online because I need to keep edging that direction because I don't want to be held to any location. It's been a shift over the last few years, but it really started when my son was about six months old. So we're going on nine years.

Suzy: The flexibility with remote work and being able to choose when and where you work is invaluable. You mentioned how house-sitting has been able to greatly reduce your accommodation part of your annual or monthly budget. Is there a budget that you work within?

Moira: I feel like it goes up and down. What I've really been working on is trust that the universe will deliver. I just say all the time, "divine and perfect timing." It will work out and it always does work out, but it takes a lot of trust. I feel like if I try to overthink it too much, there's no way I ever would have started.

Suzy: Any financial advice to others looking to start traveling more? Do you recommend the house-sitting or anything that you found that helps make this lifestyle work for you?

Moira: Honestly, I don't know how we would do it without the house-sitting for the last couple of years. It's been, I've been able to focus on my business fully and completely, which has been amazing. It's not a forever thing. I think that actually probably by the end of this year, we're going to stop doing the house-sitting and I would like to head over to Southeast Asia, so shift things a little bit. But it's been a fantastic couple of years of fully doing it.

Suzy: That's good. I'd like to go back, actually. If a family was transitioning to unschooling and wanted to work with you, what could that process look like?

Moira: I do one-on-one consults, like a one-off thing where we can spend an hour or two just going over what questions they have. Being a lifelong unschooler myself, a lot of times the questions that people have are like, "How does this translate into adult life?" So it can just be a consult. I can also work on a longer-term basis where we check in every couple of weeks about the process. I also, in all of that, generally use Human Design as an element, pulling the charts and talking about who you are as a family and how everyone works together. That just makes the process so much easier.

It's so important, not just for the kids, but it's just as important for the adults to understand what they think about education and to be able to undo some of that. Because when you can undo some of your assumptions about what you think education needs to look like, there are so many options out there that become clearer. For anyone who has ever gone to public school or the traditional model, spending a really good chunk of time deschooling is probably the best gift you can give yourself.

Suzy: I can see how parents might need more guidance in that aspect. Kids can be quite adaptable and move on to the next thing quickly, whereas a parent might be feeling a little lost through that process. And if you are spending a lot more time together, it can be really important to understand each other a little better.

Moira: I think that's a big shift in the last few years. There are a lot of people homeschooling that never considered it. I always expected that I would, so it was a natural evolution as he started getting older. But I can't imagine that transition from just assuming that you're going to do it one way to all of a sudden, on a massive scale, considering a very different way of being. All the respect, that's an amazing thing to take on, but it's not a small thing.

Suzy: Have you found that the resources and support for homeschoolers have increased over the last couple of years?

Moira: I definitely think that it has. When I was being unschooled in the eighties, there was nobody. We didn't call it unschooling when I was a kid. It wasn't until adulthood when I decided I was going to have my own kids and I was looking at where homeschooling was and I was like, "Oh, there's a term for it." I think just having more people out there and more experiences... you've got a solid amount of people that were homeschooled themselves growing up. So you can see, "Oh, they turned out pretty okay." A lot of them have gone on to universities, have done all of the things that were assumed for a long time that homeschool kids just couldn't participate in. Now companies are not looking for four-year degrees in the same way. They're actively looking for homeschool students to enroll in university. It doesn't have the barriers that it used to have.

Suzy: What are some of those resources that you found to be beneficial?

Moira: If we go to books, there's one book specifically that I recommend: John Taylor Gatto's book, Dumbing Us Down. Top of the list. All of John Taylor Gatto's work is fantastic. For people that don't know, he was voted the number one teacher in New York State in the nineties and he promptly quit and wrote a book saying, "I'm really good at doing what we do in schools and you don't want this happening to your kids." It's not the curriculum, it's all of the bell ringing and the subjects where you have to stop being interested in one thing and then quickly change to the next subject. He lays it out beautifully, and he was a fantastic writer, so it's a very engaging read, and it's not a long read. I would say that's a fantastic resource because before you can move on to what's possible, we really have to be objective about what we're dealing with currently.

And then it really takes... Facebook is great for groups and being able to connect with people. But what I see a lot of is people that talk and connect, but then we need to meet in person. I love social media and I love online for being able to connect, but we've got to take it a step past that and really meet in person with people, set up play dates, and not wait for someone else to create the play date. Be the leader in that. The community needs a lot more leaders.

Suzy: Part of keeping it real though is also discussing the realities of long-term travel. What are some of the struggles or challenges that you and your family have experienced on your travels?

Moira: I actually feel like I'm kind of going through that now. We're in an area that we've lived before. When you leave, people just assume you're gone. If people aren't in the traveling lifestyle, it can be hard to maintain those friendships. It's like we come back into town, and we're ready to meet up, but their schedule's already full. And that can be a hard thing because you can't just pick up where you left off sometimes because they've continued on with their life. We've made friends that live on the road too, so they understand that, but I would say that's a challenge. It's strange to be back in what we would consider a hometown and not have the contacts. People have left or people have moved on. So that's bittersweet.

Also, I love not having a whole lot of stuff. I've gotten rid of most of our stuff, but right now we're going to go camping in Northern New Hampshire and it's going to be pouring rain all week apparently. And so I'm like, "Oh no. We don't have rain boots," because he's outgrown his. So it's this moving stuff around. It just takes another level of organization. You don't just have an attic to go throw the winter gear in to hang out and then whenever you need it, it's just still sitting there. We got rid of it because there was no need and he probably would've grown out of it anyway.

You know, those little day-to-day things I feel like you take for granted. We show up to a location and we don't already have the fridge with all the condiments like ketchup and mayo. You have to go buy all of that stuff. And then when you leave, you're trashing what you haven't used, and then you get to the next location and you're buying the condiments again. Who buys ketchup 12 times a year? So yeah, that's, I would say it's little things like that that are just, you know, you don't think about them and they can be a bit challenging, but then you learn how to work with them.

Suzy: Stuff management still persists even if trying to choose a minimalist lifestyle. It's never-ending. But to finish on a positive note, what is the current family win right now?

Moira: You know what, it's really fun. My son is at this age where he still really likes hanging out with mom, which is super cool. I don't know how many more years I have of that. I feel like I'm going to be good to like 11 and 12. Whenever he says that he's ready to settle down, we'll do that. But it's just really fun to be able to hang out with him and watch him grow up and go explore. Our favorite thing is to go into a new town and go into the downtown and walk around and look at the shops, go into the thrift stores, find a good latte, learn about the town, find a playground. It's not the same playground year after year. We get to explore and be like, "Remember that one playground in Charlotte? Or remember that barbecue we got in Wilmington?" I love that part of it.

Suzy: The variety can be really helpful when you're in new locations. Playgrounds are, at the end of the day, a playground, but they're so different in different places that it's just a way to make something novel again. And kids love that. Is there anything else that you want to share that I haven't asked about yet?

Moira: I love talking about this. This is the thing that just lights me up, so I'm always accessible. If anybody wants to chat, just feel free to reach out because I have endless amounts of energy to talk about this stuff.

Suzy: Perfect. And if people do want to connect, where can they find you?

Moira: The best place is going to be moiramills.com. My email is connect@moiramills.com.

Suzy: Sounds good. I'll make sure to put all those links in the show notes. And I really appreciate you sharing more about your journey with your family and unschooling and house-sitting. It sounds like it's been a blast. So thank you so much for sharing.

Moira: Thank you so much for having me.