Eighteen months of exploration, 18 countries, 50 flights. In December 2023, Victoria, Frédéric and their children, Kyle and Lewis, decided to leave their life in Luxembourg to travel around the world and find a new home.
It’s an adventure they share on a daily basis on their Instagram account @partir_vivre_ailleurs, which now has over 130,000 followers.
Two children and a house in Bertrange
Victoria Williams is Franco-English and has been in a relationship for 25 years with Frédéric Perrier, who hails from the southwest of France.
Travelling has always been part of their story. When they met, they spent six months in England, staying with Victoria’s family.
Then, once back in France, the couple finished their studies and left for Ireland, before making the move to Luxembourg almost two decades ago.
“We moved to Luxembourg where we had job opportunities, and we stayed there for 17 years,” Victoria explained.
“I was working in a bank, and we moved to Bertrange and bought a house. We had our daily lives here, and we had two children, two boys”, Frédéric added.
However, after such a long time in the Grand Duchy, the couple felt it was time for a new chapter.
“The last year in Luxembourg was complicated. The children had a lot of problems at school and we felt we had to fight the system all the time for them to feel comfortable there,” Victoria said. “Our eldest was at lycée, had already repeated a year and was due to repeat again […] In the end, we were told that they didn’t want to keep him at the school. It was difficult and we had a lot of questions about their future.”
We lived well, but we didn’t put anything aside. Everything went on the bills.
Fréderic
In addition to the worries about school for the children, other events made them pause and reflect.
“Someone we knew lost a child, who died within 24 hours of contracting meningitis. It was devastating. At that point, we said to ourselves that life was really hanging by a thread, that we could lose our children at any moment,” Victoria said.
“We were working like crazy to pay the bills and, in the end, we weren’t seeing them grow up […] That was the trigger,” she said.
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Then, in January 2023, the bank announced a change to their mortgage repayments. “We were living comfortably, but we weren’t putting anything aside. Everything was going on the bills,” Frédéric said.
“What’s more, the weather wasn’t great. Coming from the south of France, we needed the sun. We really missed it. We thought it was time to make a decision and change while we still could,” he added.
Family decision
The decision to leave Luxembourg was taken collectively as a family, but it was mainly their youngest son, Kyle, who insisted, according to Victoria. “He said to us: “Why was I born here? He really wanted to leave. When we told them we wanted to sell the house and leave, Kyle jumped for joy and said: ‘Finally!”
Once the decision was made, everything fell into place. The children, then aged 11 and 17, were taken out of school and homeschooled. Then the house was put up for sale.
“It was a real shock. The house was 200m² and filled to the rafters. It took me a year to clear everything out and get rid of what we’d accumulated over 17 years. So many objects that had no use and were just cluttering up the cupboards,” Victoria recalled.
In our situation, we wanted to find a new place to settle in. We weren’t just there to discover the world and go sightseeing.
Victoria and Frédéric
And so in December 2023, the adventure began, and the family headed first to Qatar and the Maldives to rest up – with their round-the-world trip guided by the sun they were missing so much.
“In our situation, we wanted to find a new place to settle down in. We weren’t just there to discover the world and go sightseeing,” the couple said.
“Every time we went to a country, we looked at the visa procedures for settling in, the school systems, the hospital system, job opportunities, house prices and so on. Our approach was completely different from that of the ordinary traveller,” they said.
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During their trip, the family also went to Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Thailand, and spent a month and a half apiece in Canada and Mexico. From there, they visited the United States.
“Our big boy, Lewis, absolutely wanted to go. So we spent six months there, the most we could do as tourists. We visited 16 states,” the couple explained. After their American adventure, the family headed to the Middle East, spending seven months visiting Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman and finally the United Arab Emirates.
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During these 18 months of visiting, exploring and meeting new people, the family still had one thing on their minds: finding a new home.
“If it wasn’t so difficult to get a visa for the United States, we’d have stayed there, but it’s very long and complicated. It’s good to say to yourself that you’re going to go and live somewhere else, but you have to take into account the visa to be able to stay there when you have a French passport,” Frédéric explained.
Falling in love with Abu Dhabi
In the end, the family opted for Abu Dhabi. “I fell in love with it. The serenity, the calm, the safety and above all the permanent sunshine,” Frédéric said.
And so, in June 2025, their round-the-world trip came to an end. As surprising as it may seem, the request to finish the 18-month journey came from the children, who wanted to go back to school.
“They realised that the more they travelled, the more they discovered, the more they wanted to learn,” Frédéric said. Kyle and Lewis started school on 25 August in Abu Dhabi.
Does the family miss anything about Luxembourg? “Not at all. We came back this summer for three weeks and saw some friends again. But let’s just say we’ve turned the page,” Frédéric said.
In their new home in Abu Dhabi, there is only a two-hour time difference with Luxembourg and France. But that was of little importance to them. What mattered most was the ease of air travel, “an easy way to get back in an emergency, to avoid too many stopovers”.
A new life now awaits, but having discovered 18 countries, the family has every intention of exploring further.
“We’ve finally settled down, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to stop travelling. We’re going to keep on discovering new things. There are still countries on our list that we haven’t been able to see. We’re here temporarily because there’s school,” the couple said.
Asked about the next destinations they want to visit, the list is more than plentiful. “South Korea, Japan, China, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Polynesia, South Africa, Namibia,” the couple said. Perhaps another round-the-world trip is needed.
(This article was originally published by Virgule. Machine translated using AI, with editing and adaptation by John Monaghan.)
