Why “Kairos”

Kairos is a Greek word for an appointed time — an opportune moment, a due season. The Greeks contrasted it with chronos, the sequential, clock-driven time that just accumulates, day after day, whether or not anything actually happens.

Think of your life as a line. Most of it is chronos — the ordinary passage of time. But every so often, something significant intersects that line: a moment that’s ready, whether or not you’re paying attention to it. That’s a Kairos moment. It doesn’t wait for a convenient time.

And it doesn’t repeat.

Most people experience a moment like that and let it pass. Not because they don’t notice — because staying on schedule, staying comfortable, is easier than acting. We stay in the uncomfortable comfort of conformity, running on autopilot.

We almost did too.

How this started

I was talking to some of the men I respected most — mentors from years in corporate America, guys who’d built real careers and raised their own kids along the way — about an idea: taking my family out of the normal routine to live abroad for a while. To homeschool while we did it.

I expected pushback. Practical questions, at least.

Instead, one after another, they told me the same thing, almost word for word:

“You’re doing the right thing. Don’t put your career in front of these moments. I wish we would have done that.”

One line stuck with me more than the rest:

“You blink, and they’re moving out of your home.”

That’s the thing about a Kairos moment you don’t take — you don’t get a warning shot first. You just get the regret, years later, from men too honest to pretend otherwise. Their moment had already passed. Mine hadn’t. Not yet.

Taking it — and what happened after

We took the trip. We rented out our house, and on July 24, 2022 we handed the keys to somebody else. We got them back on May 24, 2023.

Ten months out of our house. Five of those months actually abroad — Scotland, Italy, France, Spain, England, Mexico. The rest with family in Michigan and Ohio, which is the part nobody puts on Instagram.

That decision was the catalyst. It didn’t just give us a good trip. It broke something loose — the autopilot most of us run on without noticing. Once we’d acted on one opportune moment, we started seeing the smaller ones everywhere: the espresso lady at Bar Fonte Dei Messapi in Castro who taught my daughter to say grazie, an ordinary afternoon at a park in Lecce, a conversation with a stranger we’d have rushed past back home. Those moments were always there. We just weren’t awake to them yet.

That’s really what this site is about. Not the trip. The waking up.

What we actually did

My wife Heather and I have two daughters. They were 6 and 4 when we left the first time.

2022–2023 — ten months, five anchors. We stayed about thirty days each in Glasgow, Castro, Barcelona, London, and Playa del Carmen, with shorter stops and day trips connecting them.

Not hotels. Not resorts. Real neighborhoods:

• Mount Florida, Glasgow — an Airbnb flat across the street from Scotland’s national football stadium
• Castro, Puglia — a house above the town, with a car from Bari and a dozen coastal towns within an hour
• The Monumental district, Barcelona
• East Ham, London — the far east end of the city, not the postcard end
• Just north of downtown Playa del Carmen — the neighborhood, not the beach strip

The kind of place with a grocery store you learn to navigate and a coffee shop where they start remembering your order.

2025 — thirty-nine days in Italy. We spent eleven nights in Rome, bookending the trip on both ends, and anchored in Florence for four weeks in between — going out from there to Pisa, Val d'Orcia, Assisi, Perugia, Bologna, and Venice. This time another family came with us.

About the school part

Our 2022–2023 trip, we homeschooled on our own — no co-op, no outside commitment, nobody’s calendar but ours.

Since September 2024, our girls have been in a two-day-a-week hybrid academy, September through May. They have a cohort. Same kids, every week.

Our 2025 trip ran April 7 to May 16 — straight through the school year. We didn’t withdraw. We planned thirty-nine days inside it and went anyway.

I mention this because the first question we get is almost always “but what about school?”

— and we’ve now done it both ways. Fully independent, and fully enrolled. A thirty-day anchor fit inside both.

My wife runs about 95% of our structured schooling — she’s the one who makes sure the “school” part of homeschool actually happens. My end of it is what I’d call life education: the daily stuff — the conversations, the mistakes, the getting lost and figuring it out, plus keeping the household running while we’re on the road. Two different jobs, same goal.

The family who heard the story and went

In 2023, we told some friends from our homeschool community about the trip. Just told them. Over coffee, the way you tell anybody.

In April 2025, they met us in Rome.

Huey and Chelsea and their two girls traveled Italy alongside us for five weeks — separate apartments, shared dinners, and one thing we hadn’t thought of in advance: we watched each other’s kids, so both couples got real date nights in Florence. Their kids and ours ran through the same piazzas.

They didn’t need a program. They needed to hear that somebody had already done it and survived.

That’s the whole reason this site exists.

Where the name came from personally

I grew up thinking homeschoolers were, frankly, a little weird. It wasn’t until college that I first questioned the script everybody hands you by default: good grades, college, forty-five years of work, retirement at 65.

For us, homeschooling was never about opting out. It was about freedom — the freedom to take my kids to Italy to actually stand where Roman history happened, instead of asking a school system’s calendar for permission.

Why this site exists

I started writing these stories down because I didn’t want them to just live in our family group chat. If any of this — the trip planning, the mistakes, the “how did you actually afford this,” the curriculum side of it — is useful to your family too, that’s the whole point of ExperienceKairos.

Your moment hasn’t passed either. Not yet.