Invermere families head for horizons, living life abroad

By Steve Hubrecht 

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The Columbia Valley is home to a lot of people who make the most of life’s opportunities. This is clear from the number of local residents who are hiking, climbing, paddling and skiing in the valley’s spectacular backcountry nearly every day of the year. It’s also clear from the array of art galleries, artists and other creative types that the little town of Invermere boasts. And it’s clear, too, from the number of locals who get out to the far-flung corners of the world.

Spend an hour or two thumbing through back issues of the Pioneer and you’ll find reports (or travel photos) of Columbia Valley residents playing soccer in Peru, ski mountaineering in Pakistan, participating in the Olympics in Italy and China, soaking up the sun on beaches in Hawaii, or even posing with penguins in Antarctica. Columbia Valley residents go everywhere it seems — and with everyone, including their whole families.

Whole families, you say? Sure, that makes sense. A week in Cancun with the kids.

Except it’s much more than that. Over the past year, several Invermere families with young children have made extended, multi-month (in some cases year-long) trips to remote parts of the globe. Think of it as a family vacation for the truly venturesome.

Sounds a bit crazy, right? Well, not to those families who made it their reality. There were challenges, of course, but there were plenty of rewards too, making these trips of a lifetime en famille immensely worthwhile.

Nicole and Scott Morgan, along with their son Bodie (age 10) and daughter Mackenzie (5) spent more than a year on the road in 2023 and 2024, visiting parts of Europe, southern Africa, Southeast Asia and Japan. Yan and Sophie Dupont took their daughters Ivy (8), Olivia and Malou (twins, both 5) down to Argentina for three months, much of it spent camping this past winter. And Christine Shaw and Jay Lightfoot were gone from Invermere almost a year across 2023 and 2024, cycling and camping in Europe before heading to the Persian Gulf and Southeast Asia, with son Ty (14), and daughters Emma (9) and Sara (6).

Morgans on the move

When the Pioneer caught up with the Morgans via a Zoom call, they were still at the tail end of their trip on the Greek island of Syros. The evening view from their patio was spectacular, with rows of white and pastel-painted, flower-bedecked houses making their way down the rocky shore to the aquamarine Aegean Sea. A departing (or arriving) ferry honked in the background.

Getting there took more than a decade of careful planning and saving. The Morgans are not fantastically wealthy, and worked normal jobs — Scott in marketing at Kicking Horse Coffee and Nicole for the Shuswap Band. They’d travelled as young adults, before they had kids, camping around North America, and decided it was the type of experience they wanted to share with their kids. So they diligently set aside money, bit by bit, then resigned their jobs and rented out their house while they were gone to earn extra income. They kept costs down by camping and cooking their own food whenever possible. They set out in spring 2023 and spent 14 months away.

“It’s a different kind of travel,” Nicole said of backpacking with kids.

For one thing, the kids still need to do school work. The Morgans homeschooled Bodie and Mackenzie while they were on the road.

“For me it (homeschooling) has been fun,” said Scott. “It was a great chance to be more deeply involved with their learning.” 

The Morgans used the Rocky Mountain School District No. 6 distance program, and divided up the homeschooling: Scott taught the Grade 5 curriculum to Bodie, and Nicole taught the kindergarten curriculum to Mackenzie. Nicole and Scott targeted 10 to 15 hours of dedicated lesson time a week; the rest was experiential learning.

“You can give your kids a history lesson by showing them where things actually happened,” explained Nicole.

There was, for instance, a great experiential history lesson for the Morgans on the beach of Normandy. And another at the beautiful old city of Krakow, Poland, which is near the site of Auschwitz, the infamous Second World War Holocaust concentration camp, and near the factory from Schindler’s List. A visit to Oslo city hall sparked a lesson on civics and government policies, as did a visit to the Nobel Peace Prize museum (also in Oslo). 

Wildlife encounters in Namibia, Botswana and South Africa became classes in biology and ecology. And there were cultural lessons aplenty all over the globe, but especially in Asia.

The Morgans found that keeping a daily routine while abroad was important, especially for the kids. Most days, they’d wake up, eat breakfast and spend a few hours homeschooling. Then they’d figure out which activities or outings to do in the afternoon, eat lunch, head out, and then be back for dinner. 

When they had to travel from point A to point B (or country A to country B) they would devote an entire day to it, and then pick up their routine again the next day. This meant they couldn’t always just go wherever or do whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted, but it gave their days some structure, and helped keep everyone sane.

They made visits to attractions that would never have considered checking out as adults, but which appealed immensely to Bodie and Mackenzie, such as a playground in Budapest with an excellent spiral slide, and the Universal Studios in Osaka, Japan. The studios were Bodie’s favourite part of the entire trip, and the family’s stop there coincided with this 10th birthday. Nicole and Scott also specifically chose family-friendly destinations, opting, for example, to visit Tokyo — a place to experience a big Asian mega-city, but one that is a lot less chaotic and confusing than Mumbai or Shanghai.

There were moments when things weren’t always easy. Bodie missed his friends at some points. Another time, the Morgans were on their own, driving through the bush somewhere in southern Africa without a guide. It was getting dark, and the family was not sure where they would spend the night. “We ended up sleeping on the roof of the vehicle. In hindsight, it was exciting. It was a highlight. But at the time, as a mom of two young kids, yes, you do worry a bit,” said Nicole.

But in the end, the memories of the year abroad more than compensate for the difficulties.

In Lombok, Indonesia, instead of touring all around the island, they decided to stay put in a ‘home away from home’, renting a house in the small fishing village of Gerupuk on the south coast. Spending a long time in one place was a nice break from being constantly on the go, and let them get under the skin of village life. “There are not a lot of tourists, it’s not overdeveloped, like nearby Bali . . . it was pretty special,” said Nicole. The Morgans learned to surf while there, but also learned how locals live.

“We were there during an annual event, where the locals got up at 3 a.m for three days to harvest local sea worms to eat, for bait, and for local crops and compost. We joined the early morning action with hundreds of people, from all the little villages, who came together to collect and celebrate this worm harvest,” recalled Nicole. “They were so happy. Calling out to the sea and singing . . . (it) made my heart sing. To see people still living on their lands, feeding their families as they spear fish and hand (net) catch their daily meals, is such a beautiful sight to see. There were local efforts being made to help keep the ocean and beaches clean and sustain local fish populations by limiting commercial fishing, as developments were starting to pop up around the island.”

Duponts in windy Argentina 

 The Duponts’ three months in Argentina, from December 2023 through March 2024, was a kaleidoscope of amazing experiences: glacier-clad peaks, penguins, icebergs, waterfalls, wide-open wide-swept places, valleys of bright green cacti, and rocky desert ranges with geological striations in 14 different colours. 

Their trip was inspired by a wedding invitation. A good friend of Yan announced he was getting married in Argentina and that Yan was the best man. Yan had to go. And the more he thought about it, the more he realized it was the perfect excuse for a once-in-a-lifetime family trip.

He and Sophie, like the Morgans, work normal jobs — Yan as a carpenter, Sophie as an education assistant. But, like the Morgans, they’d saved diligently, they rented out their home in Invermere while gone, and they kept costs low. Fortunately Argentina has plenty of open, natural spaces, so the Duponts spent most of their nights ‘wild camping’ — pitching a tent for free wherever they found a good, open space. This not only made the trip more affordable, but provided some priceless memories as well.

“When we first told the girls, they were very excited about it. They love camping, so the idea of going camping for such a long time sounded great to them,” said Sophie.

It was also a nice family break from the omnipresence of technology. At times “we were so far from cities and towns that there was no wifi, no (SIM) cards (for phones), and no way to communicate for four or five days at a time,” explained Sophie “The phone could not ring. It was great,” added Yan.

While the Morgans found establishing a routine was important, the Duponts found the opposite: that it was better to go with the flow.

“We wanted to be free from scheduled constraints. That was part of the point of the trip, to teach the girls that life doesn’t have to be wake up at this time, go here at this time, do that at this time, go to bed at this time. We wanted to teach them to take each day as it comes,” said Yan.

For instance, at a remote spot in the middle of nowhere, they found a waterfall formed by a narrow river plunging over the lip of a crater. There was sulphur in the water, giving it an orange hue, which stood out all the more starkly because of the green, vegetated mountains surrounding it. The Duponts had the spot all to themselves, and loved it so much that, on a whim, they stayed all morning.

That’s not to say everything was carefree, however.

“With kids you have a responsibility. If it’s just me and Yan, well, we can sleep anywhere if we have to, in the back of a bus, wherever, or skip a meal if we need to. But with kids you can’t do that,” said Sophie, adding that as parents, she and Yan went through their own learning curve, figuring out how to adapt to the kids’ new rhythms and moods in Argentina.

Olivia has diabetes, for example. Sophie and Yan worried before the trip, and to be prepared for any contingency, they brought plenty of diabetes-related supplies (more than half a duffel bag’s worth). As it turned out though, they were stunned to watch Olivia slowly adapt. “We changed her food a bit, her habits a bit, but she was fine,” said Yan. They checked her insulin levels, gave her a little more insulin when needed, watched how she reacted and adjusted accordingly.

“It was eye-opening for us to see what her body could adapt to,” said Sophie.

They also needed to carve out time to play, to rest, to do homework (the Dupont homeschooled their girls as they travelled), and to read stories at night. Like the Morgans, the Duponts found that being on the road presented plenty of unexpected opportunities for experiential learning.

The girls taught Sophie and Yan a thing or two as well. Sophie recalled that she and Yan were trying to patch up the tent at one point, and both were dejected. They looked over and saw Ivy, Olivia and Malou merrily playing with a stick. The sight perked Sophie and Yan up. “They actually helped us get through a few low points, because we couldn’t hit the wall and say bad words in front of them. We had to dig deep and stay cheerful,” said Sophie.

Indeed the Duponts feel their experience was richer because of its occasional challenges.

Patagonia’s notoriously howling wind, for instance, was a constant nuisance and sometimes an outright struggle.

“People told us it would be windy (in Patagonia), but until you’ve experienced it, you don’t really realize just how strong the wind is there,” said Sophie.

She and Yan awoke one night at 3 a.m. to absurdly high gusts whipping their tent around.

“It was so bad the sides of the tent were actually touching our cheeks,” recalled Sophie. They had camped atop a cliff by the ocean. They could hear the tent poles start to snap. They quickly roused the girls, bundled them into the rental car, packed up, and threw their gear in the vehicle. Sophie had to literally lie down flat on the tent to keep it from blowing away.

“The girls thought it was so funny to see us frantically running around,” said Sophie. “At the time, it was crazy, but now it’s probably one of our favourite memories of the trip.”

Ivy, Olivia, Malou and Sophie soon fell asleep in the car. Yan drove to the nearest town, arriving in the very early morning. The car was too cramped with tossed-in gear for anyone to change, so the Duponts marched into a bakery in their pyjamas to get croissants.

“It (the trip) bonded us together as family. We’ve always had a strong bond, but it got even better on this trip,” said Yan.

Shaw-Lightfoots cycle the Danube

 When Jay Lightfoot turned 30, he had an early-onset mid-life crisis and wanted to buy a sports car. So he started putting away a little bit of money each month. A decade later he’d saved up enough, but by that point his dream had long since morphed from a sleek ride with four wheels and a strong engine to a family-friendly ride with six wheels and 10 legs pedalling. He wanted to do a family cycling and camping trip in Europe instead of getting a sports car.

His wife Christine Shaw had saved up too, so they bought two tandem bikes (each parent would go on a tandem bike with one of their daughters), and a single bike for their teenage son Ty. These weren’t ordinary bikes; they were ‘folding bikes’, with frames built from several hinged parts that can be either popped open and locked into place to ride, or unlocked and then tucked in on themselves enough that the bikes can fit into suitcases.

As with the Duponts and Morgans, the Shaw-Lightfoots are not wildly rich, and work normal jobs — Jay as a home building contractor and Christine as a teacher, but managed to attentively save up for their big trip, little by little. They used many of the same cost-saving measures as the other Invermere families did: renting out their home while they were on the road, camping a lot instead of always staying in hotels, using credit card points to purchase flights, buying food from grocery stores instead of eating out, staying with friends and family along the way, and choosing more affordable destinations as much as they could (they spent more time in Eastern Europe and Turkey than Western Europe, for instance, and then a few months in Southeast Asia, where living costs are generally cheap).

They started by riding along the Danube River. They’d wake up in the morning in their campsite, have a fresh baguette, get on their bikes and ride along dedicated paved or gravel cycling tracks between beautiful riverside towns.

But their trip took a turn when Ty fell off his bike and broke his arm in Austria. Christine whisked Ty off to a hospital, while Jay walked Emma, Sara, both tandem bikes and Ty’s bike back to the campground (yes, both girls and three bikes all at once. And yes, that’s tricky to do). Even in this seemingly challenging situation, Christine found positives. “It was really fascinating to see how a different health care system works,” she said. Ty saw a surgeon and the family stayed in the campground for a week, figuring out what to do next. Plans had to shift, since Ty could no longer ride a bike.

The Shaw-Lightfoots sold one tandem bike and shipped the other bikes home, along with their camping gear. They instead headed south down the Adriatic coast through Slovenia, Croatia,  Montenegro, North Macedonia and Albania.

Here, especially in Albania, they found a slice of rural Europe where shepherds still pile up haystacks with pitchforks, and crystal blue water still flows in rivers and lakes. They lingered in a small Albanian village homestay run by an elderly couple, making family-style meals from the garden, playing chess and drinking raki, and taking walks through the hamlet, even though their host spoke no English.

It was “a pocket of magic,” said Christine.

An average day for the Shaw-Lightfoots seemed to fall into the middle ground between establishing a routine, as the Morgans did, and going with the flow, as the Duponts did. Christine is a teacher, and had the kids doing an hour of schoolwork each morning. But after that “we didn’t have a very structured regiment,” conceded Jay.

But, as with the other Invermere families abroad, there was a lot of learning happening in an unstructured way.

“It’s a different kind of education” said Christine. “They’re learning so much along the way.”

In a coincidental twist, the Shaw-Lightfoots actually met up with the Morgans in Bali, where they both ended up staying in the same hotel.

Although Jay and Christine emphasized that you don’t need to be rich to travel with your family for a year, Christine said that they feel “very fortunate to be able to do it. It’s possible, but it’s not necessarily easy . . . it’s a privilege.”

It was a great chance to “spend a lot of time together as a family, with our kids. And I do feel very fortunate for that,” added Jay. “It’s one of the best things you can do in life, spend time with your kids. It doesn’t have to be somewhere exotic, or far away.”

“You only get so much time with them,” said Christine.