> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.experiencekairos.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Remember When We Packed Ten Months Into Two SUVs and Couldn't See Out the Back Window - URL: https://www.experiencekairos.com/two-suvs/ - Published: 2026-08-29T11:48:43.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-29T11:48:43.000Z - Description: Everything we owned fit in two SUVs — here's what housing actually cost each month abroad, and what covered it. - Author: Jon - Tags: Remember When, Nashville, Worldschooling, Housing Costs, Packing We were parked in a friend's driveway in Nashville, where we'd been staying the last week while we finished packing. Heather was in her SUV. The girls were buckled in behind me, boxed in on both sides by everything we'd decided was coming with us. Both SUVs were packed to the ceiling. I adjusted the rearview mirror out of habit and got a wall of duffel bags. Windows down, engines running. I looked across the driveway at her. "You ready?" "Ready as I'll ever be." Ten months. Two vehicles. That was the whole inventory. --- Here's what I was sure would be hard to leave, and turned out not to be: my clothes. My shoes. A whiskey collection I'd spent too much on and thought about more than I'd like to admit. Here's what actually made the cut without a second's debate: our annual photo books — one for every year we've been a family — plus my coffee grinder and AeroPress. Ten months of unfamiliar kitchens, and I wasn't going to spend them drinking bad coffee. The weeks before we left were spent sorting the last of it — clothes, toys, books, the things you keep because you've always kept them. It's a strange thing to hold every object you own and ask it to justify the space. Most of it couldn't. ![An adult and several kids play in a living room full of moving boxes during the final week before departure.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ba/47/ba47fa80-32e0-470b-a595-2af5dfa8bdc3/content/images/2026/08/slot2_packing-week-living-room.jpg) The last week in Nashville, July 2022. The people were the hard part. Our small group had been our life for eight years — church, most weekends together, our first kids born inside three months of each other, and we'd buried parents together. On July 24th they came over, celebrated the girls' birthdays early, and prayed over us before we went. ![A pink frosted cake with a gold "Happy Birthday" topper and a "Bon Voyage" plaque, set out for a going-away celebration.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ba/47/ba47fa80-32e0-470b-a595-2af5dfa8bdc3/content/images/2026/08/slot1_bon-voyage-cake.jpg) Our small group's send-off, July 24, 2022. That's when the doubt showed up. Not in the packing. In a living room, surrounded by people who were about to be a plane ride away instead of a drive. --- Handing over the keys was the least dramatic moment of all of it. I dropped them off with the friends renting our house, they told me how excited they were for us, and that was it. Those keys were how we paid for the housing on this trip. ## The house paid for the housing We rented our house out. The renters paid **$1,500 a month**, and they took over the utilities — internet, gas, electric, water, averaging about $335 a month. The $1,500 covered our mortgage with a little left over. Renting the house didn't make us rich — it made the house stop costing us money. Add the utilities we stopped paying, and that was about **$1,835 a month freed up for housing abroad**. They stayed the whole ten months. No vacancy, no turnover, no month where we were covering an empty house from another country. That mattered more than the rate did — a lower rent that holds beats a higher one that gaps. Here's what a month of housing cost us. | Where | Nights | Housing | | ----------------------- | ------ | --------- | | Glasgow — Mount Florida | 28 | $2,304.63 | | Castro — Puglia | 28 | $2,428.26 | | Barcelona — Monumental | 31 | $2,150.84 | | East Ham — London | 29 | $1,765.55 | | Playa del Carmen | 31 | $1,621.82 | London and Playa del Carmen came in under what the house was covering — we were ahead those months. Glasgow, Castro, and Barcelona ran between about $300 and $600 over, which came out of pocket. Those are nights paid for, not an even thirty. This works if your house can rent for something close to what it costs you. Ours could. > Housing is the biggest number in extended family travel by a wide margin. Cover it, and the rest is a normal family budget in a different country. ### What it took to get the house ready **We left the furniture.** Beds, tables, TV, office equipment — all of it stayed. They moved into a house that was ready to live in. It also meant we didn't pay to move or store a single piece of furniture. **We stored everything else for free.** Anything temperature-sensitive went to Heather's parents' basement in Michigan. The rest went into a friend's attic. Neither cost us anything, which is the only reason the storage line in our budget was zero instead of a monthly bill for ten straight months. **We got aggressive about what we kept.** A lot of it we donated or sold outright. The test was simple: is this worth the effort of hauling it to a basement in another state? For most of it, the answer was no. **We drove both SUVs to Michigan and parked them.** Then we called our insurance company and downgraded to storage coverage. If a car isn't being driven, you shouldn't be paying to insure it as if it were. That's a phone call most people never make. **What we still paid for:** gas from Tennessee to Michigan, twice over, and the time it takes to empty a house properly. People asked if this was a sabbatical. It wasn't. I kept working — what changed wasn't the job, it was me. ## The mistake we made We packed for things that never happened. Extra outfits. Extra shoes. Full snow gear — helmets, goggles, snow pants — for weather we barely met. All of it "just in case." Every one of those bags took space in a vehicle we'd already decided was our limit. If I did it again, I'd cut what we brought by a third and buy the rest when we needed it. We figured that out fast — before we left Glasgow, our first stop, we were already mailing clothes and shoes back home. ## What the girls learned before we ever left the country Every toy had to fit inside a child-sized suitcase. That was the rule, and it wasn't negotiable, because there was no room to negotiate with. They fought it. Both of them. Sitting on the floor with a pile that didn't fit and a suitcase that wouldn't get bigger. Inside twenty-four hours, neither of them mentioned it again. Not once in the ten months that followed did either girl ask about a toy she'd left behind. They learned to choose. Then they learned that the choosing mattered a lot less than they thought it would. --- We drove out of Nashville with a blocked rearview mirror and everything we owned that mattered stacked behind our kids' heads. Ten months later, when we came home and opened the attic, I couldn't remember what half of it was. --- Want the full framework we used to plan that first 30 days — housing, budget, school logistics — all of it? [Get the free Remember When Guide →](https://www.experiencekairos.com/?ref=blog-two-suvs#/portal/signup)