The Family Who Sold Everything to Travel the World

The morning the Gee family left their old life behind, the Utah house was empty. The carpet still held the rectangles where the sofa and the dining table had stood. The kitchen drawers were open and bare. In the driveway, a couple from Provo was loading the last of the children's beds into a pickup truck for forty dollars. Jessica Gee stood barefoot in the empty living room with a one-year-old on her hip and watched her husband Garrett zip up the last of the four matching backpacks. Their oldest, Dorothy, was five. Manilla was four. Calihan was the baby. Together the entire family owned what fit on their backs, and that was the point. A few hours later they were at Salt Lake City International, walking through security with one-way tickets to Hawaii, the cheapest international destination an American passport could reach. The plan, on paper, was six months. The deeper plan, the one they did not yet say out loud to family, was the rest of their lives.

Garrett had not always been the kind of man who burns the boats. Two years earlier he had been a stressed-out twenty-something running a QR-code start-up called Scan out of a small Provo office, working eighteen-hour days, with a wife at home who had just had their third baby in five years. The company was promising but tiny. Then in 2014, Snapchat made an unsolicited offer of fifty-four million dollars in cash and stock to acquire it, and overnight Garrett went from sleep-deprived founder to a man who never had to work again. Most twenty-eight-year-olds in his position would have bought a bigger house and a Tesla. The Gees did the maths the other way. The money was enough, they realised, to fund a very modest life on the road for many years if they were careful, and almost any conventional Utah upgrade would feel like a cage. The bigger the house, the more time at home maintaining it. The fancier the car, the longer the workdays needed to pay for it. They wanted the opposite. They wanted their kids.

The first year was, by Garrett's own admission, a slow-motion disaster recovery operation. The toddlers were ill almost the entire time they were in South-East Asia. Manilla had a parasite for three months. The baby learned to crawl on the floor of a budget hotel in Chiang Mai. Jessica, who had imagined infinity pools and elephants, spent more hours than she wanted to remember in pharmacies trying to translate symptoms into Vietnamese. There was a low point in Bali, around month nine, when both adults sat on the porch of a homestay after the children were asleep and looked at each other and said, quite seriously, that they could go back. Friends in Provo were buying second houses. They had a baby who barely had a passport. The world was much harder than Instagram had made it look. They stayed up most of that night talking, and then in the morning they did not buy the tickets home. They booked a boat to Komodo instead. Years later Jessica would describe that night as the moment the trip became their life.

The Bucket List Family, as they began to call themselves on the small YouTube channel they had started to keep grandparents updated, found its rhythm in the second year. They learned that they travelled best in three-week blocks: one week to recover from the previous flight, one good week of being present in a place, one week of preparing to move. They stopped trying to see ten cities in a country and started trying to see one slum, one school, one beach, one family kitchen. Garrett, who had been a competitive soccer player at Brigham Young University, began to film everything with a small mirrorless camera and edit on his laptop in the evenings, often crouched in airport bathrooms because the WiFi was better there than at the gate. The channel grew quietly at first, then suddenly, the way these things do. A single video of the family snorkelling with whale sharks in the Philippines crossed two million views in a weekend. By the end of 2017 they had a million YouTube subscribers and the trip had begun to pay for itself.

There were rules, never written down but enforced almost religiously by the parents. Each child was allowed exactly one small backpack of toys; if a new one was bought, an old one had to go. Birthday presents were experiences, never things. Schoolwork, two hours every morning, came before anything else. The phones lived in a zipped pouch in Jessica's bag and came out only for navigation and the once-a-day family photo. When the children turned eight they were each given their own camera and made responsible for documenting the parts of the trip the parents missed. Dorothy, the eldest, turned out to have an eye, and several of the most-shared photographs on the Bucket List Family Instagram are hers, taken at the height of a five-year-old. A French photographer in Marrakech once asked Garrett what gear he used and was surprised to learn that the soft, low light he liked so much came from a child who had no idea she had broken the rules of composition.

They have lived with the Bajau sea-gypsies of Indonesia, sleeping in stilt huts and waking to fish jumping under the floorboards. They have swum with humpback whales in Tonga, the children clinging to Jessica's back as a fifteen-metre mother turned its eye on them and held it for a long second before drifting away. They have done more than fifty safaris in Kenya, Tanzania, Botswana, Zambia and South Africa, until even the youngest could identify lion tracks from giraffe tracks at a glance. They have been quietly turned away at the border of Saudi Arabia, then quietly let in a year later when the rules changed. They have slept in treehouses in the Peruvian Amazon and in concrete budget rooms in Bishkek. They have eaten dinner with a Maasai chief and breakfast with a Hawaiian shaved-ice vendor. The children, asked what country they are from, have learned to pause before answering.

The conversation that comes up most often when Jessica is interviewed is about money. Outsiders assume the family lives off the Snapchat windfall, and a little of it did fund the early years, but the truth, she insists, is more ordinary than that. After year two, the YouTube channel, the Instagram brand partnerships and a steady stream of tourism-board collaborations made the trip a full self-funded media business. The Gees fly the cheapest economy seats they can find, chase free hotel nights with loyalty points, do their own laundry in hotel sinks and split a single hot meal between two children at a restaurant. The annual budget, Jessica has said in more than one talk, is less than what an average suburban American family spends on a single mortgage. The Snapchat money, she says, is mostly still in the bank for the kids' college. The trip itself pays its own way.

There has been criticism, of course. Child psychologists have wondered in print whether children with no permanent home develop normal attachment to place. Other travelling families have accused the Gees of glamorising a lifestyle that requires either huge savings or a viral camera presence to sustain. Garrett's answer has never really changed. He admits the model does not scale. He admits that a YouTube channel is not a retirement plan. But the question he asks back, gently, in interview after interview, is whether the average American childhood, with its two hours of screen time after school and its weekend soccer practice and its summer of nothing in particular, is really so obviously the better outcome. He is not arguing that everyone should sell their house. He is arguing that almost no one should be afraid to.

In 2024 the family briefly settled in Hawaii so the older children could try a regular school. It lasted one semester. Dorothy, then thirteen, lasted three weeks before she asked her parents at dinner one night whether they were planning to leave soon, because she missed Senegal, where they had spent the previous spring. The family put the rental house on the market the next morning and were on a plane to Greece within the month. Settling, it turned out, was not the resolution to the experiment they had thought it might be. The children, who had been told by friends and family that they were missing out on a normal childhood, had quietly built a different one entirely, and they had no interest in trading it back. The Bucket List Family is now a family business in the literal sense. Garrett still edits the videos. Jessica writes most of the captions. Dorothy has begun directing some of the shorter clips. The kids vote on the next destination.

What the Gees have built is, in the end, less of an itinerary than a method, and the method is the part anyone can borrow. Pick three weeks. Pick somewhere you have never been. Take only what you can carry. Walk the children into airports yourself, do not hire a guide, do not pre-book the days, leave the laptop in the hotel. Eat where the local families eat. Talk to the people who serve you. Make your children look up from the screen and at the person handing them the ice cream and say thank you in the local language, however badly. The other ninety per cent of what looks like Instagram magic, Jessica says, is just patience plus the willingness to be uncomfortable for a few days at a time. The trip is not the trip. The trip is a way of paying attention. The Gees have been paying attention for a decade, and the bet they made in their empty Utah living room, the bet that experiences would compound faster than property, has so far paid out exactly as they hoped.