Just last year we moved up into the north east quadrant of Calgary and thought that renting a house cheap would be great, little did we know that we would be screwed by a school system that would love to have my wife drive the kids 5 minutes to a pickup spot so that a school bus can take my 4 and 8 year old kids to a school way the hell away from my house.

Why is it that you can have a major Canadian city have a school board that couldn’t give a crap about the kids that are going to the schools in the city. I have a school down the street that the kids can’t get into because people that want to go there have their friends pretend that they are living in their house. So because of that my kids are screwed.

Have I worked that rant through? I don’t know.

Anyway just suffice to say that the Calgary Board of Education that has not looked after my kids needs is hopefully forever gone from my life.

Back to the move. I have movers coming in to move the big stuff on Tuesday and then I have a cheap moving truck that my wife and I will use to get the rest of the boxes on Wednesday. Then we will be moved, cleanup on Thursday and I think we are out of Calgary…..

EscapeArtist Home Page: Living Overseas – International Real Estate, Overseas Jobs – Expatriate Resources – Overseas Retirement

I have not moved yet but am going to be moving a few blocks at the end of the month. I am looking at this site and sites like it with more interest all the time.

I moved to Calgary about 10 years ago and since then I have moved several times within the city but that is more of a poverty issue than being nomadic. I have even gone so far as to see if I could get work in the states or in some other company.

So here is where I get to define nomadic from a North American point of view, well at least my point of view anyway.

I think the greatest way to live would be to travel to a different country or at least a new geographic region and then move again each year on a defined date and then work, live and integrate with the people that live in that area. I think absorbing and integrating are the most important parts of this lifestyle as we see people all of the time that move to another country and then live among their fellow countrymen…..how is this any different than living at home.

The one part of this world view that I am missing is the language barrier. At this point I only speak English and I have not worked nearly hard enough to learn another language or tow. So I fear that as I try to integrate I will have trouble with relating to the people in the new lands as they will always see me as a foreigner that does not speak the language.

I do have a couple of things that hold me back. Money, which I will deal with in another post. And another thing that holds me back is family. My wife would be a little nervous about moving all of the time but she is itching to move as well. My concern is with my three year old son and six year old daughter and how as much as this would be a great learning experience I myself never had to leave a school even once because of a family move and in their case I would need to move them always to conform with the lifestyle, probably even home school the kids.

Comments? Ideas?

I had heard of this book on TV or something and picked it up hoping that it would be the holy grail to a more nomadic lifestyle so I was a little disappointed in it from that standpoint as I thought it would deal a little more with the nomadic concept that I was looking for.

The really great thing about A Grownups Guide To Running Away From Home is the way that it talks about how to plan your leaving and decide what is important. The book deals with generic items such as passports, shots and some really good items like health care, finances, what to leave and how to structure your banking.

This book also deals with a bunch of stuff that is hard to find in books otherwise, there are chapters on how to cut costs overall, working overseas, transportation away and how to find deals, and how to make the most of your time away

Two of the end chapters of A Grownups Guide To Running Away From Home deal with a couple of really good topics, there is a chapter that is a moving away checklist and another chapter on transitioning back to North America if you decide you do not want to be living abroad.

I was talking to my wife Sunday morning. Actually I was talking at her, I think people can only hear so many words from someone else before they tune out and I hit that limit years agho with my incessant talking. Anyway, I always talk about a nomadic lifestyle where I could just move from country to contry and travel around working odd jobs and not being attached to one small lot of land. I asked Michelle if that was a normal thought and she seemed to think that anyone would want to do that. So I am going to devote this week in this blog to writing about that lifestyle and how to pull it off. I know that I hinted at this a few weeks ago but I am right now in a rut in the evenings of reality TV and the only way to break it is to change my reality myself

So here is goes….