We are Diana and Steven Zwerink from The Netherlands. We are chosen life partners and a unlawfully married couple. In 2011 we embarked upon a one-year adventure: run our web development company remotely while traveling Central America. One year in, we spend all of our savings but managed to make money building websites and producing video for companies in The Netherlands. The experiment had been a succes and we strongly felt it was an invitation to explore life on our own terms. And so we did. Mid 2012, in our first year of travel, we found a 1972 VW Kombi on our path. Her name is Nina. We have been traveling in the van on and off for several years now. We love slow travel and usually stay at one place for a few months. We celebrated our love during a barefoot ‘wedding‘ in Mexico in 2013. Over the years we had the opportunity to see parts of Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, the United States, China, Indonesia, India, Thailand and Spain (the last 5 countries without van). We are life partners, business partners and parents. We spend 24 hours a day together, which of course is not always easy and yes we fight too. It is not always as gorgeous as in the pictures. We never wake up with an alarm clock other than our own kids :-). We make an effort to keep up our independent activities and friends as well and we guess that is what keeps us healthy as a family and business.
Family life
Since november 2015 we form a nomadic family with our daughter (2015) and son (2017). They travel with us and it is our deepest wish to spend as much time with each other and with them as we possibly can. Time is the profit from our own entrepreneurial endeavour. It enables us to grow to our fullest potential and also give back to the people we meet in life. It enables us to help our kids experience the world, teach them how to make choices from the heart and create or build the things they love as they grow up. We do go back to the Netherlands every year to be with our families. When we do, usually in the summer months, we live in a mobile home.
Family education and development
We love to provide a educational and development base for our children (and for ourselves) through travel: pick up skills by doing, following example and experimenting. Learning from the best, wherever we can find them. Sometimes that is just next-door, sometimes it is within our community and family, sometimes on the other side of the world. We meet and seek lovely people during our travel and in Holland, who help us teach our children. To help them develop beautiful skills, just by being in the world around them. In the years to come we look to spend time, online and offline with experts in their fields from whom to learn specific knowledge that follow the interest of ourselves and our children. As our children grow and as we grow as parents and teachers, while we travel, they develop wonderfully. And that is the ‘education plan‘. And by all means, it is a privileged life, we are very aware of that.