Reflections After Two Years of Nomadic Travel

When you’ve been on the road for a few years, you learn some things. You learn things about yourself, you learn things about your partner, and you learn things about your priorities.

Before I launch into all of that and more from our year of nomadic travel, it makes sense to get into how we got here.

For a bit of background, we sold our house in San Diego to take advantage of some life-altering money in the bank. The pandemic spurred us into action, too. I had already quit my job teaching by then and was pursuing full-time remote work.

Brian did the same with his insurance gig when we put the house on the market. It was the epitome of a YOLO moment, a spark of, “If we can do what we’re doing anywhere, why not do that?”

That’s how it happened. We sold most of our stuff and we hit the road. We stuck with the United States for the majority of our time as nomads for ease of travel with our big dog and no home base.

We lasted on the road for two years before moving abroad. (That’s a different story altogether.) These reflections from that time share the rewarding bits of nomadic travel and the not-so-great things.

I’ll keep things honest with you in case you’re thinking about hitting the road long-term yourself, including whether it’s been worth it in the end.

RV life isn’t for me.

We considered an RV or #vanlife as an option for a hot minute as we were planning our escape.

We booked accommodations in standalone RVs during a few trips coming up on our adventure to see what it would feel like and quickly learned that it wasn’t going to work.

First of all, living in an RV doesn’t really save you any money. We’d been a little more insulated from gas prices driving around in a hybrid, but you won’t get that when filling up your RV.

Add maintenance costs and I’m not paying much more for a long-term rental or night at a budget-friendly hotel.

It’s also monotonous looking at the same space day in and day out, without any separation from the driving to your sleeping to your relaxing.

There’s zero privacy, which is pretty clutch when you’re doing the digital nomad travel thing and trying to maintain a positive relationship with another adult. Depending on the size of your vehicle, you may not be as mobile as you think, either.

Our RAV4 could pretty much go anywhere, from the bumpiest roads to winding mountain highways.

That all said, I envy people who embrace the nomadic RV life. These are likely super flex people who get their kicks out on the open road. You do you, RVers.

You need to be a good planner.

I’ve always been a Type A person when it comes to travel planning. I get down into the nitty gritty details with dates and times and attractions I want to hit by neighborhood in my multiple Google docs.

As a nomadic traveler, I’ve had to become an even better planner, but that doesn’t mean planning with more detail.

It’s meant more flexibility. It’s about contingency plans if something falls through or the destination you were planning to hit is way over budget.

It’s building in time for weather delays or the real-life obligations you need to get to before you can go out and do the touristy things. It’s figuring out which pet stores carry the hard-to-find dog food your anxiety-ridden pup loves.

It’s planning on steroids.

It’s actually harder to plan ahead, not easier.

The world is your oyster when you’re a nomadic traveler in the sense that you can change your route on a dime if it suits you. That’s not always the easiest or most cost-effective course of action, though.

It’s expensive to book accommodations last minute in most places. If you hit the Midwest during high season as we’d been doing in our travels, you’re shut out of most of the best options well before your visit.

If you want to take a break from the road tripper thing and catch a flight, it can also be a challenge figuring out where to fly out of if you’re perpetually on the road.

We’d taken to calling Chicago, my hometown, our travel base. Flights out of O’Hare were easy to find and often much less expensive than smaller regionals.

That doesn’t mean it was always breezy to figure out how to drive back to Chicago whenever we needed to if we were on the West Coast, for example. That’s a lot of driving.

Things WILL go wrong.

We’ve dealt with ants in the bed, dead mice in the kitchen, and last-minute cancellations on bookings. We’ve narrowly avoided tornadoes and driven through blinding storms. We’ve had to crawl through windows to get into our units.

We’ve hated certain stops and felt sad leaving others. We’ve gotten sick in the middle of multiple moves over the course of a week. Things will go wrong in your nomadic travels. You can’t control that. You can control how you react.

Take a deep breath and don’t make rash decisions when things go wrong. Your initial instincts on what to do next may not be the best based on your emotions. Just be cool, travelers, and keep things in perspective.

You can save money as nomadic travelers.

We lived in San Diego before hitting the road. We gladly paid what’s affectionately known as the “sun tax” to live in America’s finest city. Once we left, it became apparent how expensive Southern California was.

We’d left Chicago, another fairly pricey city, to live in San Diego. Much of the country just isn’t that expensive in comparison, especially if you’re willing to sacrifice a bit to be outside of the thick of things.

Thanks to Brian’s financial prowess, we have more money saved today than we did when we sold our house.

We’re certainly lucky enough to be able to make money from our savings through risk-averse decision-making on stocks and such. (I say it that way because that’s not my arena.) Living on the road has turned out to be cost-effective for us.

You can certainly blow your budget quickly as a nomad, but for many, it’s less expensive than a home base.

READ MORE: Interested in the money side of the nomad thing? Check out Brian’s guide to the best digital banks.

Cheaper is not always best.

My husband and I say this one out loud all the time: CHEAPER IS NOT ALWAYS BEST.

It took us a few disastrous stays to realize that cheaper isn’t better every time when it comes to where you lay your head at the end of the day.

We spent a week in New Haven, Connecticut, in a space so small that I’d knock my knee into something every time I had to adjust my body. The aforementioned mouse in the sink was a fun find upon arrival at a place in the desert in Crestone, Colorado.

We’re not luxe travelers by any means. We want to see as much of the world as we can, which means traveling on a mid-range budget. Sometimes paying a little more pays dividends in terms of your comfort, safety, and sanity.

Look through reviews carefully before booking apartments and hotels. Look for those red flags. Analyze those photos. Oftentimes, if the price sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Sometimes the middle of nowhere is fun. Sometimes it isn’t.

The pandemic changed the way people travel. More and more people started looking for places to visit that were off the grid vs. the more popular spots around the United States.

I love that people were getting out there more, but that also meant those off-the-beaten-path destinations became more expensive for everyone else.

It also means the experience you were looking for — hyper-local, quiet, quaint — may no longer feel that way once you get there. It may look like Instagram influencers and crowded cafes and heavy foot traffic at outdoorsy destinations, instead.

That’s fine if you know what you’re getting yourself into. Browse through social media on destinations you’re interested in. If it’s blown up recently, it may not be as off-the-grid as you were hoping for.

The middle of nowhere can also mean:

• Limited Internet access,
• Limited access to groceries,
• and long drives from Point A to Point B.

Just do your research, especially if you want to linger there for a while.

Your mother will worry about you.

Every time I talked to my mother, she would ask the same thing: “Are you bored of this life yet?” My response was always the same: “How could I be bored?” (She got a trip to Nashville out of it, so she wasn’t hurting the whole time.)

I’ve found sending regular photos helps with a weekly phone call to allow her to hear my voice in real-time. If your nearest and dearest are similarly anxious, make sure to keep in touch.

They want to know you’re not only alive and well but thriving. If you’re not thriving because you just found a dead mouse in the sink, leave that part out. That’s a funny story for later.

Someone needs to get your mail.

You’d think in the digital world we live in, mail wouldn’t be that big a deal. It has to go somewhere, though. My mother still receives all of the important stuff, and she couldn’t be more pleased about it.

It means we have to come back at some point to sift through all of the junk mail she refuses to toss. “It’s up to a full drawer,” she likes to say.

It also gives her an excuse to call when something quasi-important comes through, like a warning from the Chicago Police Department about my speeding during our last visit.

You’ll see things you likely wouldn’t have otherwise.

Driving around the United States exposed us to places that would never have been on our radar otherwise. We stayed for full months in places like Augusta, Georgia, and Fairplay, Colorado.

These weren’t on my American bucket list, and yet we had some great experiences there.

We’ve stayed in all kinds of small towns along the East Coast, a reason why I fell in love with that part of the country. Does it get better than fall in New England, by the way? No, it does not.

You need a home base.

I’m not saying you need a base to return to every few months. Your home base is the address you’ll use for things like your car registration, your license, your health insurance, and your taxes. For us, you already know that’s my mom.

We can also set up a virtual mailbox through a company like iPostal1. It’s easy enough to set up if you don’t have a nosy mother of your own. We used it until we realized we didn’t really need it with her help, but I don’t have anything bad to say about it.

Here’s why we chose iPostal1 in the first place:

• It gives you a real street address instead of a PO Box. This is important for some banking institutions and travel insurance carriers.
• They’re all over the United States. You’ll need to choose a base, but that can just be a place that you wouldn’t mind returning to once in a while.
• You don’t need to go there in person. They’ll forward your mail or scan it for digital access if you don’t need the physical letters.
• It’s budget-friendly. They have several plans that vary in price to suit your needs. We went with the most basic.
• They offer free storage. They’ll hold your mail or packages for up to 30 days, depending on the size.

Moving around every few days gets old.

Since we didn’t adopt the RV life, we had to unload and load the car every time we moved from one place to the next.

I didn’t think we had an exorbitant amount of stuff, but we had enough that it can become a pain, especially if there were steep stairs or long elevator rides involved.

We found a sweet spot of choosing destinations to settle into for up to a month at a time, but it didn’t always work out that way.

If we had our heart set on a destination because we’d never been but accommodations were expensive, we would stay a couple of days or up to a week. I’m looking at you, overpriced Rapid City

If we found somewhere inexpensive that we thought we’d like within a short drive of more things we’d like, we booked a longer stay.

Flexibility is key.

We had the first six months of our travel planned out before we even hit the road. We didn’t look at prices at our chosen destinations much.

We just felt like things would fall into place as we went along on our journey and let our good fortune be our guide.

Well, things didn’t work out that way. Our goal of spending a full month in Savannah, Georgia, went sideways when we looked at what that kind of goal would cost us.

We spent a few days outside of the city, instead, rather than a full month. Even the outskirts were beyond the reach of our budget.

It’s about navigating a fine balance of planning ahead but not planning so far ahead that you’ll bum yourself out with constant adjustments.

Your relationships become more important than ever. 

Nomadic travel can get lonely. It’s certainly nice to have a partner and a dog to share it all with, but you still feel a lack of community and a lack of connection when you’re not in one place for long.

The relationships you have back at home, wherever that is, become so much more important.

I try to keep in touch with my close friends as much as I can, whether that’s simple texts, social media connections, or FaceTime with a select few.

Working remotely seemed to prepare us for this, but that still doesn’t mean you don’t miss the ones you love when you’re out on the road.

Your friends and family will ask where you are every time you chat.

Don’t get weird about this. It’s hard enough for me to keep track and know exactly where we’ll be next week. I can’t expect the same from my friends and family. At least they’re asking. If they’re not, they probably don’t care.

People have a lot going on, and your galavanting around the country is probably not at the top of their minds. If they don’t ask at all, like ever, that’s not cool, though.

You will see things that surprise you.

There are places in this country where moose walk right into the town’s coffee shops and stay a while. There are hippie towns in the middle of very red states and culinary delights in places you really didn’t consider before.

In some places, pirates ride down the street on their scooters. (That’s in St. Augustine, Florida, which feels right if you know anything about Florida.)

You’ll make all kinds of weird and unplanned stops as a travel nomad just because there’s no way to know about every little thing you’ll come upon while on the road. Embrace those little moments of magic, as you won’t always see things that delight you.

You will see things that frustrate you.

Our country is politically divided in a way that frustrates and dehumanizes. That division presents itself in offensive bumper stickers and flags outside of people’s homes.

Hey, freedom of speech is cool. A waving flag proclaiming “F*CK BIDEN!” without that asterisk isn’t cool, as these same people likely have quite a few thoughts about things their kids shouldn’t be exposed to.

Gun culture is all the more apparent if you’ve been on the road for a while, too.

Fun fact: There are towns in this country where bullets and guns are more accessible than affordable produce.

Food deserts are a huge problem. If the closest real grocery store is 45 minutes away from your house, you’re probably eating canned beans and Pringles from the Dollar General down the street, instead.

You’ll get treated like a local.

I always got a kick out of tourists asking me for directions when we were in a place for a longer period of time. I usually had Kimmy with me, which was a good indicator for most that I was a local.

Unfortunately, I’m also terrible with directions, so wasn’t usually much help in those situations.

Note: We’ve certainly been to a few places around the country where we just didn’t fit in at all, and that’s OK. I’m fine with being just a visitor in those towns.

Prioritizing self-care will make you feel better.

It’s not just about trying the local pizza wherever you land and chugging beers on couches near and far. Nomadic travel is also about making time for the things that make you feel good.

I’m talking about eating your veggies, exercising, and taking care of your mental health.

If we were staying anywhere for more than a few days, we needed kitchen access to make home-cooked meals. I’m not as young as I used to be and I can’t bounce back from eating out all the time anymore.

Exercising is easy to do when you have plentiful access to hiking trails where you are. If that’s not where you are, get outside anyway. Put on a YouTube yoga session. Do a round on the in-house elliptical.

This isn’t me being nonsensical, by the way. We stayed in a place that was once a physical therapy office and the elliptical was left behind.

Self-care is also about scheduling those appointments you’ve been putting off. We always knew how to have a good time at our “home base.”

That meant dentist appointments, annual physicals, and whatever else needed to happen to keep us in tip-top shape and traveling as long as possible.

Less is more.

We sold quite a bit of our stuff after we left San Diego and put the things we’d want in a forever home at Brian’s parents’ home in Wisconsin for safekeeping.

You’ve already heard about how annoying it can be to move stuff in and out of your car every few days. You can certainly make that less annoying if you embrace the mantra that less is more.

This can become challenging when you have a bin of kitchen supplies for long stays and a large dog that isn’t the most low-maintenance creature on the planet. We did our best.  

Beware of toxic positivity.

One of my friends taught me about toxic positivity when we started this nomadic experience. That’s when you feel like you have to be super happy and optimistic all the time even when you’re not feeling that way.

I felt like because we were doing this amazing thing, we weren’t ever able to talk about things that bothered us or things that didn’t feel so great.

When you feel like the sky is falling, it can be hard to articulate that to others when you’re out there posting about all the cool things you’re doing.

That’s why I try to be honest not only on social media but with our friends and family. It’s not all sunshine and peonies. We had a lot of fun but we also felt things that weren’t always fun.

We doomscroll just like you all. We have to take care of our mental health just like anyone else. We were just doing it from the road.

Sometimes you will feel very, very tired.

Travel can be exhausting. Even when it feels very rewarding and you see all kinds of amazing things, it can still feel like a lot. It’s like when you say you need a vacation from your vacation, which I know is a super annoying thing to say.

Nomadic travel can be like that, but ALL the time if you’re not careful.

Staying in destinations for longer stints has alleviated this somewhat, but we still go weeks where we’re just on the road constantly. That can mean working on less sleep than you’d like to fit in everything that you need (and want) to do. I know, poor me.

The work doesn’t disappear because you did something fun today.

Along those lines, when you’re in one of those busy periods where you’re moving from place to place every couple of days, that perfect balance can be hard to achieve.

I’m a freelance writer. There are weeks where I have more to do than others and days when I’m not on deadline.

That doesn’t include my blog. That also doesn’t include seeing the places we visit in any detail or giving myself some downtime.

If I took a morning hike on a day with a looming deadline, that deadline didn’t go away. Sometimes I’m at the mercy of my editors, too. I may not know something is coming in until the day it does.

Yes, the flexibility with nomadic travel is great, but it can also be stressful if you’re not great at time management. Thankfully, I’d worked as a freelancer before and got a taste of the hustle, but traveling while freelancing is another level.

Building in buffer time is a smart thing to do.

If I have any indication that I’ll have a busy week ahead, I try not to plan too much in the way of travel to account for that. That’s why staying places for a little longer is so great. That buffer time is built in to give me time to work and time to play.

We used to take very aggressive road trips where we’d stay in spots for a day, do all the things, and move on. We don’t do that anymore.

If I knew it’d take us four days to see everything I wanted to see in a destination, I’d request that we build in an extra couple of days. That buffer could account for work, blogging, and travel time.

Note: Not every attraction I want to visit wants my dog there, either. Buffer time is good for building in time to see things that aren’t pet-friendly, too.

Traveling with a dog is the best.

Kimmy has become quite the adventure dog and we’ve watched her confidence grow over the course of our travels. She loves to hike and hang out underneath tables at breweries.

She still doesn’t love car rides unless she’s able to stick her head out the window. Her smile seriously lights up my life, so it’s great to have her around. Traveling with a dog can be so much fun, until it isn’t.

Traveling with a dog makes things more challenging.

Finding accommodations that take pets isn’t all that challenging, but you will end up paying more for that hotel room or apartment if you’re traveling with a dog. Pet fees are commonplace.

I try to avoid them when they’re exorbitant enough, but if you have your heart set on a place, there may be no way around it.

If your pet has any special needs, nomadic travel becomes even harder. Luckily, Kimmy Kibbler is a healthy girl.

She did have her first encounter with fleas in New Orleans, but thankfully her flea preventative meant we nipped those bugs in the bud after a medicated bath or two.

I’ve already mentioned scheduling all of your personal appointments to keep yourself healthy. You have to do the same for your pet. Plan travel so all of their relevant shots are covered, and that you have access to a vet as needed.

If you want to take your pet abroad as we did, you won’t want any gaps in vaccinations, either, especially when it comes to rabies.

You’ll only think of more places to visit.

Nomadic lifestyles mean you’ll see more than you would otherwise, but you’ll never see it all. I have a running list of places I’d like to see around the country. Many of those places are in states we’ve already explored.

Every time we leave somewhere I’m left with a couple of wish list items we just didn’t get to for whatever reason, whether that’s weather or time or expense.

For example, there’s a place in New Jersey that serves up a one-pound mozzarella stick. Obviously, that’s on the list. I want to return to the Finger Lakes because of the crappy weather we got on our brief visit last time around.

There are places all over New England I’d love to see that require a little more pre-planning than we expected our first go-around.

Don’t worry, I have a global bucket list, too. There are always new corners to explore no matter where you are, and I’m OK with that. It keeps the road exciting.

You’ll feel pretty dang lucky.

We were able to do this thing at a relatively young age and know that many people hope to do something similar once they retire. We understand our privilege and have no regrets.

Fun fact: If you’d like to follow in our footsteps, avoiding the kid trap helps. Seriously, kids are expensive. We wouldn’t be out here doing what we’re doing with a baby on board. Kimmy is enough.

This isn’t that toxic positivity, either. It’s keeping things in perspective. We were able to tick off all 50 states during our two years on the road. Few Americans can say that, even though it’d make them much more empathetic humans.

It was great while it lasted.

Initially, our nomadic experience was about finding a new place to live at some point. There was so much of the country we hadn’t yet seen. It became so much more since.

It became about finding the cities and towns that aren’t on any shortlist for a more permanent move and finding places that were good for today if not for tomorrow.

Once we decided that a move abroad would be the next big thing, our domestic travel felt more freeing. We weren’t on the hunt for anything other than meaningful experiences, good food, and outdoor activity.

Even though our priorities changed, the experience itself was worth it. I wouldn’t rule out another go at it when we’re back, either.

READ MORE: We moved to France! Check out more about how you can make it happen.

Nomads travel for a variety of reasons.

Some want to see the world. Others have reached a certain age where they feel like now is the time to get out of their comfort zone.

Some nomads travel because of economic reasons. It can be quite cost-effective to avoid putting down roots, especially if you choose budget-friendly destinations.

For us, the pandemic broke our brains a little bit. We just had to get out. We had to see more.

In our case, we stuck to the United States during our nomadic journey. You can certainly take your journey abroad if you have the time, the means, and the desire to travel the world, instead. I’m here for all of it.