Have kids will travel

Are you tied down by a mortgage and 2.2 kids? Has life turned into a rat run with endless commuting and only the odd packed beach in the school holidays to offer respite? Bet you dream of escape - of ending the nine-to-five tedium, of trading it for a way of life where you could see more of the children and less of the inside of the car, of a more meaningful, educational, rewarding existence?

That's more or less what my friend Kathy and I were discussing, as you do, over a coffee in our local cafe. It wasn't hard to dream of getting away from it all, of jacking in Britain with its grey skies and relentless rain (this was October). Kathy was fed up with London, while her husband, Mark, was fed up with his job and the journeys to and from his office across town. Their children were happy in their primary school, but there was no easy next choice for a secondary. Kathy wanted to change the world - or their world, at least - so she could see new places and meet new people, so Mark could give up the work he wasn't enjoying and so they could spend more time with each other and their children.

Dream on, I hear you say: but Kathy has done more than that. A few weeks ago the "sold" sign went up outside their house. The hamster was billeted with friends, the car sold and the family possessions packed for long-term storage. And, at a time when their friends are setting off on their annual holidays, nine-year-old Eleanor and five-year-old Olivia are leaving for the journey of a lifetime.

The Wittets are about to be transformed into a family of travellers. First stop is Canada, then New York, the Adirondaks, Virginia, Florida, LA, the Cook Islands, New Zealand, Australia, Bali, Singapore, Bangkok, Kathmandu and India. Then it's back to Europe and Athens from which they might, when and if the mood takes them, return to the UK overland. There's no definite return date - they're going to see what life serves up for them in the months ahead.

Now the plane tickets are on the mantelpiece, the inevitable panic has set in. "I'm worried," says Kathy, "Worried we're going to regret leaving our lives behind. I dread the day Olivia wakes up and says, 'Mummy I want to go home.' And the trouble is I'll probably feel like going home too, and so will Mark and Eleanor at some point, and we won't have a home to go back to any more. That's scary.

"There's the worry, too, about how we'll cope with just one another for company. Of course we'll meet other people along the way. But we'll be thrown together an awful lot. When you think about how much you rely on your friends and extended family to stay sane, you realise what we're giving up by going it alone."

Home-schooling the children on the road, as the family are planning, has its advantages and disadvantages. Kathy and Mark are enthusiastic about being more involved in their children's education, and are travelling armed with a suitcase of work books from WH Smith, a long list of educational websites and a laptop. But it's possible that the children might get bored without school to entertain, as well as educate, them.

Then there's the last-minute crisis over where to invest the money they're about to get for their house, and the internet banking ("It seemed such a great idea") that isn't proving such an easy option.

Mark admits that when Kathy came home from the cafe that day eight months ago and outlined her grand scheme for the family's future, he thought she was a bit bonkers. But the more he thought about it, the more sense it made. They'd travelled before, pre-parenthood, and both knew it was something they wanted to do again. "I realised we had a perfect opportunity, and that the girls are at an ideal stage to do this kind of journey. It wasn't a mad dream, it was an achievable ambition - and that's when we decided to go for it."

Of the four of them, he is risking the most: at 40 he may not easily slip back into an equivalent post to the head of finance job he gave up. "I know it's taking a chance from a career point of view, but I hope prospective employers will understand why we did it. The alternative would have been to wait until I'd retired before we travelled more - and the trouble with that is that, as happened to my parents, you may find your health isn't good enough to do it."

Meanwhile, nine-year-old Eleanor is sanguine. "I was a bit sad saying goodbye to Mango [the hamster] and it's going to be really sad saying goodbye to my friends. Also, it's going to feel a bit funny travelling around the world and thinking that our old house isn't ours any more, and that we don't know where we'll be living when we come back. But it's going to be a really exciting adventure, and I'm looking forward to having a lot more time with my mum and especially my dad, who I don't usually see a lot. It's going to be good being taught things by them, and I think I'll learn a lot. At school you read about things in books and you see them in pictures and on videos and stuff, but I'm going to see real things and some of it will be amazing."

Five-year-old Olivia has latched on to the news that the Florida stopover will include Disneyland, which has taken the edge off saying goodbye to her friends. Olivia's needs have been uppermost in Kathy and Mark's minds as they've prepared for the trip, because she suffers from a severe nut allergy - not good news for a family planning an extended stay in south east Asia, where peanuts and peanut oil are a staple part of the diet. "It's frightening just thinking about it," says Kathy. "Of course we'll be carrying drugs to treat the allergy if Olivia does eat nuts, but the reaction is life-threatening even with immediate treatment. I can't say I'm not worried about going to Asia, but we very much wanted to include that area because we have some family links with India and wanted the children to see it. What I'm planning to do is buy a cooking stove in Australia to take with us, and then to cook Olivia fresh vegetables ourselves when we're in Asia. It's the only way I can see that we'll be sure about what she's eating."

Olivia also has an egg allergy, which means that the family won't be visiting sub-Saharan Africa or South America as the necessary vaccinations are egg-based and therefore not suitable for her. "The vaccinations have been one of the hardest aspects of the whole trip," says Kathy. "Olivia, just like any five-year-old, hates having an injection - and she's had to have lots. You feel terrible, putting your child through that just so you can travel. But what I have to keep remembering is that it hopefully isn't what she'll remember, and she'll get lots out of the experience of being away."

In many ways, says Kathy, opting to travel at this stage in their lives wasn't as complicated as many people might imagine. They acknowledge they're fortunate to be in an economic position to take a year off - they're funding the trip using some of the profit they've made on their home over the last few years as London house prices have risen.

But, says Kathy, the most important trigger was simply knowing that they needed to make some radical changes to their life. "What we were doing here seemed too stale, I knew it wasn't enough to just carry on. Going round the world is going to broaden all our horizons, and it's also going to give us new impetus to start again somewhere - not London, probably it's going to be Oxford - when we do eventually come home.

"I still have to pinch myself to believe we're actually going to do it. But there's no going back now - in less than a week, we'll be on that plane... "

• Kathy Wittet will be filing an occasional series of reports over the next 12 months charting the family's progress around the globe.