One Year on the Road: Jim
As a follow up to Carrie's post, I thought I’d share some of my own thoughts after one year of being a home-free nomad.
Time Flies (Sometimes)
It feels like an eternity since we last had a “home” but it also feels like we’re still just starting this journey. At any given time, I might feel like we’ve been in our current location forever even after just a few weeks. But when it’s time to leave I often feel like we only just started to get to know the place.
In many ways, we’re still figuring out a lot about our day-to-day life. We’re often asked how we spend our time or what a typical day is like. But it’s so different depending on where we are, how long we’ve been there, where we're going next, and how we’re feeling, that there really isn’t a typical day.
Shopping
It’s interesting the things I realize that we’ve taken for granted. I remember in Rwanda, a British couple was asking about what frustrations we had with our lifestyle and they were surprised that one of my responses was grocery shopping. We cook virtually all of our meals and rarely eat out. I plan the meal calendar and do most of the food shopping while Carrie does the cooking. I’d never realized how much I took for granted the infinite variety of food available in the US. Every type of diet from kosher to vegan to lactose-free to every ethnicity under the sun is found in virtually every major grocery store in the US. Within these categories you’ll generally find multiple brands, variations, flavors, and more.
Even if we can find a really big, modern grocery store, we often discover that some things that are very common in the US are very uncommon elsewhere. There always seems to be a handful of things that are part of our usual meal routine but are very difficult to find, varying from place to place. And while things like organic food, gluten-free, and other specialty diet items are becoming more common, it can be very difficult if you have specific dietary habits or needs. Yogurt is available everywhere, but Greek yogurt might be impossible to find. It might be possible to buy flour and sugar but chocolate chips might only be found in a specialty store. Peanut butter can occupy six shelves eight feet wide in a typical American grocery store with more varieties than you could imagine. Outside the US, sometimes you can't find peanut butter at all, and if you do, you might only have one brand and a choice between creamy or chunky can feel luxurious.
“Nut spread” selection in Vienna. Peanut butter was surprisingly hard to find.
So we find that we have to tweak our menu everywhere we go and learn to adapt to using different versions and types of the foods we normally enjoy. After a week or two in a new location, we've usually got things mostly figured out and establish new routines apropos of our new situation.
One nice change, though, is the really poor selection of snacks outside of the US. What snack foods foreign supermarkets do carry are in smaller packages and there’s much less variety. The largest bag of chips you can find is often smaller than the smallest bag in the chip aisle of your local Kroger. Less variety makes it much easier to resist snacking and smaller packages mean you eat less when you do!
Moving Still Sucks…
... but the nomad life still beats having a home full of stuff. 😉 Travel days aren’t much fun when you travel with a large suitcase, a carry-on bag, and a backpack. I’m always evaluating what I carry and looking for ways to bring less. It’s not just about the travel logistics, either. It sounds cliché (and very hippy) but the more you purge, the more you realize what a burden possessions are! Sometimes I dread the end of this life because I fear accumulating more things in a more permanent home.
Besides the hassle of lugging our stuff around, it’s very common outside the US for airlines to impose weight limits on carry-on bags. Some US airlines may have policies about the weight of carry-on bags, but I've never had my carry-on actually be weighed. Internationally, however, many airlines weigh your carry-on bags at check-in and the strictest of them do so at the gate right before you board. If your bag is overweight they'll make you check it right there (for a hefty fee, of course). So we travel with a handheld baggage scale and are always looking for ways to cut ounces, grams, pounds, and kilos from our load.
Everything we need for six months of travel.
Finding the Duration Sweet Spot
We always say that we’re not on an extended vacation. Have you ever returned from a trip and thought you needed a vacation to recover from your vacation? When you have just a week in a place, it can feel like you’re going non-stop to cram in as much as you can in your limited time. That makes sense when you have limited time to travel, and we used to do that, too! But with our current travel, it’s exactly what we don’t want.
I'm in complete agreement with Carrie that a month or so is the minimum duration for a stay in a given location. It’s a big trade off, though. The list of places we want to visit is endless and if we stay two months instead of one, we only get to see half as many places. That doesn’t count time back in the US visiting friends and family; it also doesn’t include the vacations we do take. E.g., we spent ten days in Rwanda as our “vacation”: eating out, staying in hotels, and cramming in our activities, since we didn’t particularly want to spend a month there.
It’s hard to predict the future, but I suspect we may never really stop this lifestyle, but instead just gradually slow down. We'll start staying longer at each stop and we’ll return to familiar favorites regularly. Over time, I could see this morphing into something where we live in just a few different locations for several months at a time and cycle through them over and over until Carrie has to pick out my nursing home.
Is it wrong to make sure Jim's nursing home also has a petting zoo with alpacas to play with?
Planning vs Freewheeling
I get the sense that many other nomads don’t book much in advance and travel more on a whim than we do. Of course, many (most?) of them are younger, single, and more actively mobile than we are. They’re eating many or most meals out and aren’t as concerned with their accommodations. Of course, we’d love to play things more by ear and this is something we plan to dabble in next year a little. But we haven’t done this yet, mainly because we really want to be happy with our Airbnb stay.
If you want to book something from December 1 to December 31, for example, and look at Airbnb in March or April, you’ll have a wide selection of options with ample reviews. Few other people have booked their vacations so early and many Airbnb accommodations have huge availability left. But if you wait until even September or October, there will be tons of people who’ve booked a weekend here, a week there, etc, and leaving very few options fully available for the entire month of December. Those options that you do find are much more likely to have poor reviews or no reviews (because it’s a new listing). There often are options, but you’re taking a gamble. The last thing we want is to spend a lot of money staying in an Airbnb that we’re not happy with for a month or longer!
However, we have some plans coming up in the spring (details to come) that will force us to leave a big gap in our calendar. If that pans out, we’ll be “winging it” come March or April.
I Love Being Home-free
I love not having the responsibility of a home to keep up, clean, insure, and maintain. Sure, there are things I miss. Our current Airbnb has a nice hammock in a wooded yard and it reminds me how much I've missed just being able to sit outside in private and enjoy nice weather. But on the flip side, we spent many of our Budapest afternoons in the nearby park picnicking and reading. We might otherwise have never discovered how many old, overweight Hungarians like to sunbathe in the nude. Do I miss things like having a smoothie maker or picking out my own mattress? Of course! And maybe in a week or a month I’ll be done with all this and ready to settle down. But, for now, those luxuries aren't something I'd be willing to trade for the freedom and adventure we’ve experienced this past year.
It’s hard to believe these memories of Vienna below are almost a year old!
