"How do you just... move to Spain for the summer?”
Week 1 in San Sebastian: the recs, the routine, the reality 🇪🇸
“How’s your vacation?”
“Wait, you’re working while you’re there?”
“How do you just... move to Spain for the summer?”
“Who watches your kids?”
I’ve answered some version of these four questions every day since we landed, usually more than once. And I get it. Four years ago I would have asked the same things.
This marks our third summer packing up our lives in San Francisco to live and work remotely from Europe, and I don’t see us ever stopping. There is something magical about trading our familiar home routine for a few weeks of total immersion, watching our 4- and 6-year-old adapt to a new culture, and finding our footing in a brand-new city.
But this summer is different. This summer, 30 other families came with us on my dream summer abroad program.
Just one week into living in San Sebastian, Spain, with Roam Collective, the company I co-founded last fall, and we have fallen in love with this beach town. We may have been exhausted and overheated those first few days (yes that heat wave throughout Europe was brutal), and there were a few travel moments I’m still processing. But I can confidently say this is my favorite destination yet.
For the next six weeks, I’m swapping my usual Summer Camp Research programming for something more personal: a weekly, unfiltered log of our life in San Sebastian. Not our vacation… our real, working life. The work calls, the restaurant exploration, the wins, the meltdowns (theirs and mine), and the behind-the-scenes of running a scaling business remotely (we just opened our 4th MNTSTUDIO location two weeks before leaving, and #5 is deep in construction), as well as preparing for Roam Collective Summer 2027 from the city where its first cohort is living.
Here’s what’s inside this week’s edition:
Every restaurant and beach we visited in week one, with exactly what to order
Our real first-week routine, including what Roam handled that was one of the best perks I could have imagined
The airport incidents that have me fired up about kids in public spaces
My 3-Day Rule for beating jet lag with young kids
The backstory: how a 3.5-week trip to Tuscany with an 8-week-old became a written-down, non-negotiable core tenet of our family (and eventually a company)
Alright. Let’s get into it.