Julie Frieder is an innovator, problem solver, and sustainability professional with a double master’s degree in public affairs and environmental science from the Indiana University O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs. She stepped away from a career in sustainable and responsible investing to travel with her family for 13 months in a 24-foot RV equipped with four bikes, three kayaks, a 72-watt solar system, and a very large dog.
Based on her travel experience, Frieder would later co-author Wonder Year: A Guide to Long-Term Family Travel and Worldschooling (Wonderwell Press, September 2023). In her book, Frieder and co-authors Angela Heisten and Annika Paradise share tools and ideas about planning a wonder year and teaching through direct engagement in the world, a trailblazing approach known as “worldschooling.”
Frieder’s traveling roots: The transformative power of a grandmother’s world journey, a family road trip, and travels abroad
Experiencing new things and enjoying adventure might be in Frieder’s DNA. It is possible that her enthusiasm was inherited from her grandmother, who embarked on a global expedition at the early age of 22, and whom she was named after.
Or her wanderlust may have been sparked by a family travel experience in her pre-teens. In 1977, her father remarried, resulting in a blended family with a total of seven children. To bring everyone together, they embarked on a road trip. “We rented a class A RV and made our way around the western U.S. to LA,” Frieder said. “It was an incredible adventure—rafting, horseback riding, bush cooking, sleeping under the stars, campfires. It was transformational. We left as the Frieders and Rubins and came home as the Frubins,” she said.
In her young adult years, when she lived in Israel and New Zealand, her love of foreign lands grew even stronger. And when she met her husband, Charlie, they quickly discovered their shared passion for travel and living abroad. Frieder said, “We started dreaming of an epic family adventure right from the get-go!”
From vision to reality: Preparing for the adventure
When Frieder’s son Johnny turned nine, her dream of a family wonder year came to life. “I had a huge wall map, and we were putting pins in and reading about places,” Frieder said. Regarding planning, the seasons and other themes, such as the family’s ancestry, would frame Frieder’s itinerary and tie the trip together. Exploring their ancestral roots would take them overseas for five weeks. The remainder of the trip would be domestic.
It would take Frieder and her family about a year to get everything in place, including closing up their home and organizing travel arrangements. For Frieder and her son Johnny, figuring out those travel details would prove to be exhilarating. She said, “It was like sweet anticipation, and it made it that much more fun to finally hit the road.”
A year of wonder: The best year of Frieder’s life
Being from Colorado, they decided there was no better way to kick off their wonder year than to attend the Telluride Bluegrass Festival right in their backyard. Ironically, it would turn out to be one of the most gorgeous places they traveled to.
When asked about reservations, Frieder shared, “I expected that we would need some time to find our feet as travelers and so in the first few months, we did have some reservations. We sort of knew where we were going. Then, once we started to find our travel groove, we were much more comfortable with just winging it and seeing where chance would take us. During our trip, we found a rhythm and manner of travel that was family focused.”
She said, “At nine years old, Johnny was at a time in his life when he was eager to try anything. He liked hanging out with his scrappy parents and wanted to do real work like chopping wood and fixing bike flats. He was then and is now a super adventurous, curious, and kind kid.”
When asked about her favorite destination or memory, she shared about the Hoh Rainforest in Olympic National Park, the small Sicilian village where they worked the olive harvest. She mentioned paddling across Aialik Bay in Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula to a magnificent cove with the clearest, coldest water. “My favorite places, though, were not the destinations or towns, the attractions or parks, they were the long stretches in between destinations, the unplanned spaces where we simply existed as travelers,” Frieder said.
“And every day still, even after being home for a few years, we are enriched by the year of wonder, the memories and lessons, the colorful perspectives, complex relationships to home, and a familial closeness that will never, ever unravel. I would do it all over again and again. And again. It was the best year of my life.”
Lessons learned from worldschooling: reflections on a life-changing journey
“Our worldschooling and itinerary was designed to maximize the surface area between us and the world,” Frieder said. “We wanted to follow our curiosity, help Johnny discover his passions, and then support an exploration that deepens that inquiry. It was such a beautiful way to learn. We encouraged Johnny to “follow your bliss” and when we’d meet people who were doing work they love, we repeated the mantra that ‘work is love made visible’ (Kahlil Gibran).”
“Learning is a lifelong journey,” she said. “Like Georgia O’Keeffe said, ‘to see takes time.’ We weren’t in a hurry. We went deep into places. We tried to connect locally. The world really was our classroom, especially for my son, Johnny, who was so curious. We noticed his proclivities and passions, and then we were able to support that, and have our education be the deepening of those.”
“Worldschooling is simply learning through direct interaction with the world,” she said. “It comes in lots of varieties. The world is a very good teacher. When you notice, things open, and for young children to have the opportunity to see other places and immerse themselves in other cultures, there’s an opportunity to build global awareness and a global sort of citizenship in our children,” she said. “There are so many teachers. A local might be a teacher, a river might be a teacher, or local currency might be the teacher.”
Frieder offered examples of worldschooling:
- learning to tap a rubber tree in Krabi, Thailand
- sourcing ingredients and learning to cook kebabs with a hostel owner in Istanbul, Turkey
- collecting river water in your neighborhood and looking at it under a microscope at your kitchen table
- calculating currency conversion to buy Uyghur currants at the Xinjiang market
- visiting with a Ski Patrol team in Colorado to learn how dogs become avalanche rescuers
- talking with your elderly neighbor about what life was like when she was a kid
- listening to an audiobook about the ancient Mayans while exploring the temple regions of Guatemala
- learning how to say hello, goodbye, please, and thank you in a local language new to you
- drawing a picture and naming the phase of the moon every night for a month from your campsite
A decade later, Frieder can still witness the rippling effects of worldschooling from their family wonder year. “Johnny made the decision to go back to Alaska to work as a kayak guide at one of the outfitters that we used when we were in Alaska ten years earlier,” she said. “During the visit, we were standing on this 3,000-foot ridge, Grace Ridge, over the Kachemak Bay and he’s telling us, ‘You know, mom, the smaller the unit of measure you use to track the length of a coastline, the longer the length is going to be.’”
Frieder explained, “The coastline is all these parameters, fjords, fees, inlets, and detail. And as you go closer and closer and closer, and smaller in your unit of measure, you are going to pick up all that variety. And so, the smaller the unit of measure, the longer the length will be. It is called the coastal paradox, and my 19-year-old kid is sharing this profound wisdom.”
“That’s what this trip did! That is what worldschooling does for our family; to let you look into yourselves, to one’s family, one’s natural world, and take in the full measure of that majesty, to know what your passions are, that feeling of bliss.”
The power of observation: A learned skill from O’Neill for seizing opportunities
When asked how her time at the O’Neill school prepared her for these adventures in leadership and discovery, Frieder shared, “I was trained to ask questions, to articulate outcomes, and consider the various ways to get there. I learned that you can dive into an opportunity without having all the answers. Observe, consider, listen to others, synthesize. With a strong analytical foundation, this has been my MO and it has led me down an interesting career path–finding myself in challenging positions in which I am by no means an expert. But I draw on my skills from the double master’s program and bring to these challenges a way of thinking about tensions, synergies, tradeoffs, risks, and benefits and use this framework.”
Julie shared valuable advice for current O’Neill students and young alumni embarking on their careers. She said, “LUCK is a function of timing and preparedness. Be ready to jump on opportunities and put yourself out there.” Clearly, Julie practices what she preaches.
To learn more about how to make long-term travel and worldschooling a reality for your family, check out Wonder Year: A Guide to Long-Term Family Travel and Worldschooling–now available wherever books and e-books are sold.
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