Welcome to the 18 Summers Adventure Blog!

Read tales from our travels, road schooling and family experiences. Come along on the adventure with us…

We could not decide what to title this page. It is a travel blog? Kind of. Family life blog? Maybe. It’s a compilation of our journeys as a family. It’s stories from different turning points in our lives, captured in pictures and thoughts as we experienced them in the moment.

A journey can take many different shapes, teach us many different lessons. How to share an RV with four kids, three adults, one dog and seven chickens. How to prepare for donating a kidney to save your father’s life. How to say goodbye to a woman at the end of her life.

Initially, we wanted a place to share our travel tales…

We’ve always loved traveling as a family. It gives us a chance to disconnect from life’s distractions and RECONNECT with one another. Warm destinations by plane have always been our favorite. Our passion for life on the road grew even more when we rented a 32-foot RV and packed our family of 6 (and 7 chickens, yes, really!) into it for a maiden voyage. On that day, we further advanced our game.

Our life as an entrepreneur family allows us to work from nearly anywhere, but our children couldn’t just skip a month or so of school every time we felt wanderlust….

So, we developed an alternative learning system that is a fun and effective way to learn while traveling. We call it Road Schooling. Our version of Road Schooling combines curriculum tools from online virtual school and homeschooling with hands-on learning opportunities while traveling. Some teachable moments can be planned, but many come to us organically as we explore new things and places. Our family loves that we can learn and share at our own pace in this way, and it’s a wonderful way to make learning fun and diverse.

Our teen son, Leland, says Road Schooling teaches patience and kindness because of all the togetherness. Check out his perspective of our adventures in the post, “Street Smarts: A Student’s Take on Road Schooling.”

After reflecting on these travels we did as a family, we realized we had other experiences, adventures to share. Jim donating a kidney to his father. Jamie navigating hospice care and the end of life celebration for her grandmother. Experiences that – just like travel – taught us lessons, brought us together, opened our eyes and made us think a little differently about the world and our place in it.

Enjoy the journey!

-The Sheils Family (Jim, Jamie, Alden, Leland, Maggie & Sammy)