The 15,000-mile journey that changed their lives
They just didn’t know how they’d do it.
In 2015, the couple — whose kids were then 10 and 13 — hit the road in a 1985 VW Vanagon van. They spent $6,500 on the van and $7,000 refurbishing it with a new transmission, shocks, gaskets, brake hoses and more; they even glued eyelashes on the headlights and named the van Wesley, after the main character in their favorite movie “The Princess Bride.
“She had no electricity, dirt floors, chickens were running around everywhere, her water came from a hose connected to a spring … There were glass bottles everywhere where she said she was trapping earth spirits.” They helped her make chocolate bars -- that’s how she earned money, Rebecca says — that she sold to hotels, tourists, “and a bunch to the commune up the hill” where the residents might have sometimes “been a little stoned,” Paul jokes.
Paul documented the costs of the trip, and estimates that they spent $36,000 on the year The biggest cost was food for the family, which he estimates was about $12,000 for the year; that was followed by accommodations at about $10,000 for the year. Paul jokes that he wanted the family to sleep in the van the whole time, but “in an effort to not give them too much to talk about in therapy later,” he jokes, he agreed to hotels and AirBnBs sometimes .
“Despite the hard times, we could see the resiliency in the kids as things progressed. They were able to bounce back from disappointment and hard situations — hot weather, bugs, foods that they didn’t necessarily love but ate because that is what there was in this or that village. They also gained a perspective, first in a sense of understanding how privileged we are to be born and raised in the US,” Rebecca says.
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