Freeways to Flip Flops

Forthcoming travel memoir:

Freeways to Flip-Flops: A Family’s Year of Gutsy Living on a Tropical Island Parents move their kids from Orange County, California, to Belize hoping to find a solution to their family problems. Once there, mom questions the sanity of their decision to move almost daily, until an unexpected event reconnects her family.

We ferry our 10-year-old son to school on our boat

Freeways to Flip-Flops: A Family’s Year of Gutsy Living on a Tropical Island

In 2004, my husband, Duke, and I were so fed up with life at home, we decided to chuck it all and move to Belize hoping to reconnect our family. We uprooted our three sons— ages sixteen, thirteen and ten—and moved from a materialistic life in Orange County, California, to a hut on stilts in Belize, Central America. Our life was out of balance. Duke worked long hours, then spent additional hours commuting back and forth to Los Angeles each day. I was upset by the entitlement attitude of teens and pre-teens in our neighborhood and wanted my kids to experience life in a less affluent part of the world, just as I had as a child in Nigeria. We decided to sell the house, our cars and everything else we owned to start a new, simple life in a third-world country without TV, gadgets or teenage girlfriends.  (Read Chapter One)

View from our house on Ambergris Caye

Most of us dream about getting away from our hectic life and finding “paradise,” but something stops us. We find excuses not to act: This is not a good time, we tell ourselves. We’ve got kids in school, bills to pay, a job, a house, and so on. So we continue getting more stressed at work, more exhausted and frustrated with life. We put everything on hold until retirement, as if something magical happens on retirement day that frees us from our burdens. Except that it doesn’t, because life will continue to throw obstacles in our way. We’ll face emergencies, more bills—and fear. And we stay put, because it’s much easier to continue our daily routine than to explore the unknown.

Our first rental hut in Consejo Shores, in northern Belize

Duke and I asked ourselves, “What’s important in life?” We wanted to spend time together, rather than let life slip through our fingers while we were amassing “stuff.” So we opted for a no-frills life in Belize, at first renting a hut on stilts in Consejo Shores, then to a beach house on the beautiful island of Ambergris Caye. (see view from our house in the middle photo).

We lived in two different parts of Belize during our one year there.

I want to share our family adventures with you, and how each member of my family changed. Please sign up to be notified when my travel memoir is published.

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