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Conversations with the Inspiring Leslie Stroud

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Today we’d like to introduce you to Leslie Stroud.

Thanks for sharing your story with us Leslie. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
Greetings from Thailand! I’m currently traveling the world with my husband Chris and our five children, ages 11-1 years old.

We are currently (for the next week) enjoying Chiang Mai, Thailand, famous for elephants, temples and delicious street food.

How did we get from Denver to Thailand? It’s quite a journey with a lot of work, faith, overcoming fear and braving the unknown.

As a Colorado native, I could not have been happier when my husband and I settled back in the Denver area as we were expecting our first child. We settled right in and he fell in love with the things I love: the friendly vibe, the love of life and nature and pets, the gorgeous mountains. After a few years, we started our own business in online marketing consulting. We bought a home in Highlands Ranch, had three more kids, and settled in for our forever.

When an obvious need to move surfaced in our lives to follow an incredible client opportunity, I panicked. The dreams of my forever home broke into little pieces and I tried as hard as I could to dig in my heels. Even my stubbornness couldn’t avoid this change, however, and we sold our home, packed up our family and moved to Utah. Over the next 2.5 years, our business grew, we had our final baby, and we became more restless than ever to figure out our new “home.”

We came to a decision point of where home might be and realized we were not limited to… well, anything! We worked remote and had a successful business that only really requires the internet. Our children were young and we were all in good health. Why limit ourselves to Colorado or Utah? Why even to the US?

Our dream of exploring and searching for our new “forever” began. We made the decision to say goodbye to our life, our things, our friends and family and set out into something unknown.

We began easily on ourselves by exploring the western US. We decided a month in each location suits us best. We spent a month in Portland, Northern California, Southern California and then two months in Hawaii.

We stepped into the dark and booked our first Christmas of our new life in Bali, Indonesia. After six weeks and some adjustment, we loved our foray into Asia.

Since Bali, we have visited Singapore, Hong Kong for Chinese New Year, Taipei, Bangkok, Krabi and now Chiang Mai, Thailand. In a week we head to Vietnam, a tour of China and two months in Japan.

How do we do it? We keep working! That means, for now, working at night with calls to the US. We homeschool our children, along with worldschooling them as we experience the world. We stay almost exclusively in Airbnb homes and haven’t driven a car in months.

Traveling full-time with children is a challenge. With five children, it can be exhausting and overwhelming. Not having a home base anywhere is both freeing and causes us a bit of anxiety.

We have learned our thirst for exploration has not been quenched after nearly a year but deepened. We are more thirsty than ever to see more of this beautiful world and those beautiful souls that comprise it. Our children are learning, growing, adjusting and overall loving the experience as much as we are.

For now, we will keep “wayfinding” our way around the world! We hope someday a place pulls on our heartstrings and begs us to stay put. Perhaps, in the end, we will return home to Colorado. Either way, our treasure trove of memories is a gift that we could never gain any other way.

We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc. – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
The challenges and obstacles of full-time travel are enough to cause insomnia even in the best of sleepers. We had a few months before our departure that can only be described as torturous. Every free minute was consumed for months on packing, planning, stressing, filling out forms, canceling plans and utilities, saying goodbye to those we loved. All the while, we were still working and parenting five children while trying to explain to them what it might look like on a vista we had yet to see.

Since leaving, we have breathed a sigh of relief from that time but still, deal with challenges. Primarily, the challenge of never being apart. This is both our greatest blessing and our biggest challenge. How do you learn to live, breathe, eat, sleep and be together at all times? It is a rare exception that either adult gets “me time” and even more rare for the children. We make an effort to get the older children out on monthly “dates” with one parent. We find babysitting for the younger children to take the older on activities that suit only them. However, alone time, for the most part, doesn’t exist anymore for any of us.

The next biggest challenge is the risk of burnout and exhaustion. How do you sit still and have a down day when you are in a place you may never visit again? What about when you get sick and miss a place altogether? We try to extend for a month in each place, but sometimes only have a week. The flu knocked out Chris from most of Hong Kong!

Outside of these, we deal with the regular downsides of travel: finding what we need in unfamiliar places, trying to navigate language and cultural barriers, misstepping customs and societal expectations we may not be aware of. Due to the busy nature of our lives, we are never in “downtime.” We are either experiencing or traveling or planning travel. We rarely have much, or any time, to back-research a new place before we arrive. I often wish I could go in armed with more knowledge and information on a location before we get there.

Please tell us more about your work, what you are currently focused on and most proud of.
Our work of sharing our story is a great passion of ours. We share our travel through our blog, our social platforms and our videos on our YouTube Channel.

We wanted to change our lives and travel has become the method for this change. We were able to leave behind our “norms” and expectations and start anew. We wanted to strip our lives down to what was most important to us, our family, and see what else is important to us.

We love to encourage others to change their lives for the better if they feel the need. We want others to feel empowered to change if they feel the call to do so.

We also want to showcase a big family doing something unusual. We want to share our experiences around the world with our children. We want to convey the ups and the downs, the real and the magical.

Do you have a lesson or advice you’d like to share with young women just starting out?
To any young woman starting out her career, I’d say two things: work hard and take care of yourself. You’ll want to succeed and you’ll dive headfirst into your passion. You’ll have a zeal to get it all done. Eventually, you will probably burn out.

At this point, please take some time to care for yourself. Figure out how to recharge your batteries. For me, this has included connecting with other women, writing for my blog, exercise and reading a good book. If you burnt out too hard, you’ll crash both emotionally and physically.

Eventually, you may become a mother. Don’t let fears of your career stop you. Women have such unique and special skill sets that empower them to succeed. In our business, StroudInc, we contract with remote staff in both Utah and Colorado. We’ve contracted with stay-at-home moms for years and find them to be a fantastic fit for our company. They have amazing skills but wants something less than an 8-5 corporate environment. We have hugely benefited from their skills and desires to use those skills.

As the workforce, in general, moves more remote, many more women will be enabled to use skill sets that are of great value. Women who need or want more flexibility in their career can add back into companies skills that would otherwise be unused for childbearing years.

Additionally, we find mothers to be fantastically suited for rapid problem solving and multi-tasking. They are used to being challenged and having to balance many things at once. Working from home as a mother challenges me constantly and I have to get creative in how I tackle work time as well as how I find it.

Contact Info:

Image Credit:
Chris and Leslie Stroud

Getting in touch: VoyageDenver is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.

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