Hi there, it’s Caroline from CarolineCain.com with a quick video today for you on the non-glamour of travel and location independence and really moving around the world.

You may or may not know that we’re about to move back from Australia to Europe. We’ve been here about a year and we were living in Thailand before that. I’ve done over 20 international moves throughout my life; I was brought up as an expat child moving around every couple of years.

A lot of people say, “oh you’re used to it, it’s easy for you, it’s not so easy for other people” and really, you know, it’s never easy.

Listen to audio:

Life happens, there’s always stuff to organize, there’s always stuff to think about, and you’ve still got to eat and find somewhere to live, and buy the tickets and prepare the shipping and all this kind of thing. So there are a lot of bits to it and it’s not necessarily glamorous. Add to the picture that you’ve got kids; it affects them in a very specific way as well.

I’ll just show you quickly here, we’ve got our shipment about to be picked up, and the great thing is that this time—woo! I nearly just fell over on my daughter’s scooter, which is right in the way! —is that we’ve actually got the shipping company coming to pack everything up for us for the first time. Normally we just pack things ourselves and then have them shipped.

So what I wanted to share here: really the key to making your dreams happen, even when it seems like a monumentous task, is to really—just to give you an example, we only do things in life that excite us. Sometimes need to do a few other things that don’t, but just really get clear on what excites you and make your decisions based on that and take it one step at a time.

For example, we weren’t planning on moving back to Europe right now, we’ve got a really good reason to do it and we’re excited for that, but we were really looking forward to living in Australia for at least another year or two. And so what we’ve decided to do is to turn the trip back—which, with a toddler is not always the most pleasant of things to do, necessarily—into an adventure.

So we’re actually taking two weeks to get back instead of just one long haul flight. We’re stopping off in Singapore for a few days, we’re going to Hong Kong for 5 days to visit my sister, then we’re stopping off in Dubai for a few days; so we’re taking about two weeks to move back from Sydney to Europe. So always look at situations in your life, and perhaps situations that are not ideal, and think about: how can we make this exciting, how can we turn it into an adventure?