Saturday, August 23, 2008

Do you want to spend more time with your family? Move abroad!

Tired of the rat race? Starting to forget the names of your own family members? Then it is time to take action! Go on an adventure together. And I don't just mean an adventure vacation (though that can be a nice start), but a real life-changing adventure. Move to a new country! And why not? If you're not happy in the new place, you can move back. Where ever you've come from will not just disappear.

Having done it ourselves, I can definitely recommend it. And starting a lodge or B&B with your family is something else that I can recommend. My two boys were born in Belize as we were building up our jungle lodge, The Belize Jungle Dome. And it was a wonderful lifestyle for us as new parents. We were always together as a family as the lodge was also our home (we later build a house at the edge of the land to have some more privacy). And, as a new mom, I didn't get the feeling that I was just 'sitting at home with the kids'. We really had the best of both worlds. Building a successful business and being full-time parents.

Starting this project as a couple also brought my husband and myself closer, as we don't have many of the same interests in life, and having something like this to share has been great for us.

So why have we moved away from Belize and our lodge after all these years? Because we felt like our job was done there. We did what we said we were going to do and created a great business. We didn't want to expand anymore and our staff had become so good at running the lodge that there wasn't much left for us to do.

Also, I wanted to do something in the creative field again and didn't see any opportunities for that in Belize. So now we are living in Aruba and I have joined a local radio station, Cool FM. And I sing in a band here on the island, called RetroMatic.

The lodge still runs wonderfully well without us and provides us with a nice income so-again-we have the best of both worlds.
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