Four Homeless Millionaires My wife and I are full-time artists & have raised our kids to recognize that taking risks and working hard is only reasonable when you're pursuing your dreams. We don't have a million bucks, but we feel like some of the richest people in the world.

Carpe Diem Connoisseurs

For our little family this has been the Year of the Snail, as we have Quasimotoed our way around the world with our home on our backs. My wife, Zara and I, sold our house in Canada to spend a year traveling with our son Zion, (13) and our daughter Riel. (9) For 12 months we’ve been sashaying our way around the globe like four homeless millionaires, investing in dreams and memories that will last a lifetime. Somewhere along the way we’ve become badass Carpe Diem Connoisseurs, embracing the palette of possibilities and the art of making, ‘no where’ special.

From the roadside fruit stand on Oahu’s north shore, where a group of Hawaiian G’mas with sparkling eyes and laugh lines drawn like road maps across sun-dried faces, introduced us to delicious deep-fried bananas called lumpia and fresh pineapple sprinkled with li hing mui. To the Australian outback, where we were greeted by a mob of kangaroos racing pell-mell alongside our vehicle, until the curvature of their scimitar-like tails disappeared in a cloud of red dust and our exuberant cheers.

We ate second breakfasts and elevenses as we trekked and tramped our way across New Zealand, our kids whistling the Lord of the Rings theme song as we explored Middle Earth. We collected paua shells as we watched blue eyed penguins waddle ashore outside Dunedin, and dug holes in the sand at low tide on Hot Water Beach in the Coromandel, where underground lava fields fill homemade hot tubs with scalding water.

We spent months navigating remote regions of Europe and Scandinavia without the use of English. To survive we became burgeoning thespians in the theatre of life, drawing on an elaborate fusion of physical contortions, full-body charades, hand gestures and animated facial expressions to communicate. Cut off from the rest of the world we were blissfully unaware Eyjafjallajoekull had erupted, as we scrambled over the crumbling brick and mortar of Cathar Castles in the Languedoc region in France, digging deep into the stories of sieges and horrors visited upon innocents in the name of God and the holy Church. In Rome, we skulked through an awesome creepfest beneath the Capuchin Church of Immaculate Conception. Bones of over 4,000 individual monks are nailed to the walls and ceilings of this crypt in a variety of floral patterns, forming arches and crosses as a chandelier of vertebra dangles overhead. That was the day our kids added the word macabre, to their vocabulary. In the Kingdom of Crystal, an area five hours south of Stockholm, painted lines on weathered concrete floors were the only thing separating us from the fires and flames as we toured the work floors and studios of world-renowned Scandinavian glassblowers.

We became connoisseurs of creating and consuming the finest moments every day, and in the process, discovered how to live deep and travel light. Selling everything we had let us experience the world…and we did it together.