We Came, We Saw, We Left: A Family Gap Year
Charles and Leah Wheelan had always dreamed of taking their family on a world-circling gap year, and when their three children reached their teens — 14-year-old CJ, 16-year-old Sophie, and 18-year-old Katrina — they decided to take the plunge. Packing only what each member of the family could comfortably carry, the Wheelans left their home in New Hampshire with a one-way ticket to Colombia.
From there, they traveled through South America, Australia, Asia, Africa, and Europe, circumnavigating the globe and experiencing, day by day, the joys and strains of tight-knit travel. In the Amazon jungle, one of them picked up a mysterious tropical disease that manifested weeks later on the other side of the world. In New Zealand, Charles obsessively tried to find a kiwi bird to photograph. In India, they waged a long battle with the bureaucratic visa system. And in nearly every country they visited, they struggled with inter-teenager conflict, virtual home-school woes, and the constraints of a predetermined budget. We Came, We Saw, We Left is written with humor and peppered with insights into upending the typical family vacation.
Quote:
‘We took a walk through Cartagena’s narrow streets with their pastel-colored buildings, wrought-iron balconies, and red-tile roofs. We passed a sixteenth century Spanish fort and a handful of churches, each with multi-colored bell towers rising above the other buildings. There were flowers spilling over the balconies and creeping from every available space. The day was perfectly clear; the bright sun highlighted the colors of the city against the blue sky. All this colonial beauty made the Slave Museum feel like a slap in the face: a reminder that the lovely Spanish colonial architecture had a darker side. We spent an hour walking through exhibits documenting the scale of the slave trade and the cruelty of Spain’s colonization of the Americas. I was pleased with this first dollop of homeschooling. “What did you think?” I asked CJ on the way out.
“The air-conditioning felt great,” he answered. Obviously we still had work to do.’
Author:
Charles Wheelan is an author, Dartmouth College professor, and former Economist correspondent. His books include Naked Statistics; Naked Economics; The Centrist Manifesto; the novel The Rationing; and the travel memoir We Came, We Saw, We Left.
Published: 2021
Length: 269 pages
Set in: United States, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Argentina, New Zealand, Australia, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, Bhutan, India, Tanzania, South Africa, United Arab Emirates, Georgia, Germany, Slovenia