A 41-year-old who lives with her dog in a motorhome travelling up and down the UK after quitting her job as an air traffic controller has said she now “knows how snails feel” and loves the freedom of life with her home “on her back”. Kat Bird, a blogger originally from Jersey, began living in a motorhome with her daughter and her husband, who she would prefer not to name, in 2017 to help home-school her daughter by taking her to places, rather than “learning out of a textbook”.

Kat believes her family benefited from this experience, with her daughter being able to “interact with adults a lot better”. Her daughter decided to go back to mainstream college to do her A-Levels, but once she went off to university, Kat quit her job to travel full-time.




Kat and her husband travelled until they separated in 2022, and Kat now travels by herself with her five-year-old spaniel called Mac, travelling all over the UK and abroad in places such as Ireland and Italy. She only spends around £1,000 a month, on petrol and Wi-Fi, and makes an income by blogging about her travel experiences, talking at shows and has written several books about motorhoming and van life.

Kat said: “I have the ability to go wherever I want with my home on my back – I know how snails feel. It’s amazing not having to pack or figure out where you want to go. I sort of wing it when it comes to where I go.”

In 2017, Kat’s daughter began having “some issues at school”, so the family decided it would be best to home-school her – but decided to do this from a motorhome.

“We got her through her GCSEs,” Kat said. “Instead of learning history out of a textbook, for example, we took her to different places to see it for herself, such as Germany to see things about the war.”

Kat believes that she and her family benefited as a whole from living in such close quarters.

She said: “My daughter is an only child, and I think the experience made her interact with adults a lot better. She heard us having conversations about money and things, and she was always included in higher-level adult stuff that a lot of kids perhaps don’t see. I think looking back she can see it made us closer as a family too.”



Source link