Reflections on our first year of full-time travel

First, let’s get this out of the way…

It hasn’t been the year we expected to have, but that is true for everyone in the world.  The first five months proceeded relatively as planned, with just the early 2020 lack of tourists from China foretelling the massive change to all our lives.  Since then, everything has changed around the world.  Although not the focus of this reflection, it can’t be ignored.

Brief review of how COVID has impacted us: 

• In March, April and May, a strict lockdown which granted us the chance to experience first-hand true Kiwi kindness
• A front-row seat to an amazing governmental and societal response
• Then months of COVID-free life while the rest of the world was surging with cases and deaths
• In August, a chance to see science and community quash another outbreak in Auckland
• The chance to remain in New Zealand for much longer than we planned
• And every day throughout the last seven months an even greater realization of how fortunate we are in every way

Now a brief recap of the timeline of our year:

• We gave notice on our careers in September, worked our last day in October, and the next morning got on a plane to New Zealand, having rid ourselves of everything except what was in our suitcases. 
• We bought a car and spent five months traveling this incredible country week by week staying in rental apartments and going on a new adventure every single day. 
• Our plan was to spend 6 months here (summer) and then fly to a lower-cost destination.  By 4 months in, we had decided to spend 9 months here, then fly to Fiji for my birthday, carry on to the US for me to do canvassing for Democrats, then on to Europe for their fall and winter.  Tickets booked…
• Then COVID hit.  After two months of extremely strict lockdown, we were free to go back to travel within NZ.  (We had already applied for an extension of our tourist visas, but hadn’t heard.)
• We returned to our beloved Northland to revisit old places and find new favorite spots – slowing down our travel dramatically. 
• We visited Raglan and the Coromandel, the two places we had originally planned to be during lockdown, and thus completed our original itinerary.
• As spring approached, we became confident that we have a route with Immigration NZ to stay longer, so booked travel through end of April 2021, which will be 18 months total in NZ. 

Now…on to my analysis of our first year of full-time travel.

To take away any suspense, I’ll start with the fact that we’re incredibly happy and still constantly asking ourselves if this is really our life.  It has lived up to our expectations in every way.

Travel style

We are re extremely pleased with our choice of how to travel and where to travel. 

We debated so many options in the years leading up to this – buy another boat and go sailing again, buy a caravan and tour a continent that way, backpack a region using public transport, etc. etc.  Then multiply all of those ways by all the areas of the world that call to us (I can promise you that that is a long list) and we had plenty to discuss over long walks, wintry mornings at the coffee shop, and evenings spent mulling all the options.

We are very happy that we chose traveling by car and staying in Airbnb type rentals.

• We love having an entire place to ourselves with a kitchen, bathroom, lounge area, frequently a separate bedroom and usually a washer.  We carry our own skillet, pillow, etc. but primarily rely on everything being provided in the homes for us. 
• We’ve met wonderful hosts and stayed in generic places, but both types serve their purpose and 95% of the stays have been very good.  None have been complete nightmares.
• Buying a used Subaru was the perfect decision and we’ve become pros at moving in and clearing out and repacking our belongings into the car each week.  Because we love our toys, this transportation option is perfect for transporting our bikes, kites, surfboard and filthy hiking boots.
• And we’re happy to see that nothing has changed since our time sailing in terms of each other – we still love spending every day together and haven’t run into any new conflicts with this way of life.

Travel Pace

We have realized that we need to slow down a little.  First Hale was expressing that a new place every week was too fast and I, in the spirit of compromise, was agreeing to a slower pace in future.  But then COVID and winter forced it on us and I realized that I enjoyed the slower pace too.  I joked during lockdown that our “metronome” had been forcefully reset.  It turned out that we are happy to keep it at that pace (at least for now.)

Indeed, when one time this winter we slipped back in a one week stay after several longer ones, it felt rushed and exhausting.  I was also shocked at how much I hated wasting one day a week moving.  (How did we possibly maintain that for five months?) 

We now want to try a majority of longer stays, with shorter stays scattered in between for variety.  With those longer stays as building blocks, we can even add in some very fast paced travel where we cover long distances with short stays along the way.

On a related note, and this will seem ironic, but I am happy to have cut down on my travel in a different way.  I loved some aspects of the travel I did for work, but I was exhausted much of the time and suffered far too much from jet lag and the toll it took on my body.

Equally critically, I was constantly cringing at the impact I was having on climate change with the frequency of my international and domestic flights.  We’re definitely not pure now since we’re burning petrol almost daily, but I’m glad to have reduced my jet fuel usage. In our next destinations, we’ll buy a hybrid car or use trains to reduce our footprints as we continue to pursue perpetual world travel. Slowing down now will continue to help in that regard even while still driving and fueling up regularly.

What We Miss from Work Life in the States

Hale doesn’t miss his job one iota, but I do miss aspects of mine.  I miss the intellectual stimulation of designing strategies and overcoming complex challenges.  I miss the brainstorming and camaraderie of solving problems with my managers and with my leadership peers.  I miss the coaching and learning from my excellent employees, co-workers and boss.  I don’t miss the unrealistic demands of a corporate board that has short term analyst views at the forefront and I don’t miss having great ideas from my team scrapped due to that short-sightedness.  I don’t miss one ounce of the work politics.  But I do really miss my work friends (and my two 24″ monitors as I type this on a 13” laptop).

On the trivial side, Hale misses stout which is incredibly hard to find here. (NZ wine is world-renowned and their cider is crisp, so I say it’s a fair trade-off.)

And let’s face it, we both miss Trader Joe’s!  But I’m willing to trade that for the opportunity to buy avos and kiwis for almost nothing from roadside honesty boxes.

We miss our families and friends, but I have more time for long phone calls with them than I ever did whilst I was working ridiculous hours.  Due to COVID, we don’t know when we will see them, but in a normal year that will be in our control and we’ll make it happen with the right frequency.  We’ll make up for the missed hugs then.

Constantly Learning

We’ve both relished our constant exploration of nature here.  We are thrilled to be experiencing a new trail or beach nearly every day. 

We are also loving learning about New Zealand: the politics, the culture, Te reo Maori, the wildlife (and the farm animals), the geology, and the quirks.

Hale is enjoying learning to surf and continuing to improve his kitesurfing skills.  I’ve finally added weight training and stretching into my life after promising myself that I would for years and maybe one of these days I will take it to the next level.

I’ve grown my travel planning skills, finding enjoyment in the constant effort of planning where to go, where to stay and what to do while there.

Hale has perfected his relaxation skills.  I’m working hard on learning to relax and letting myself spend an afternoon on the couch with a good book.  We both have struggled with wasting time scrolling through news, but we blame it on the constant onslaught of COVID news and the horror of our home country’s politics.

I have found that I absolutely love taking pictures and liked keeping a daily journal for our own memories, but neither of those translated well into maintaining a blog. We clearly failed at keeping this website up to date. The journal approach is neither sustainable nor of great interest to others, so we are formulating plans to approach it differently next year.

I imagine that in the future there will be something else for me beyond all of this …but I am being patient with myself as I transition from work and give my mind and heart time to figure it out.

Finances

We are happy with our financial performance –both with our reaction to the stock market volatility and with our spending.

• We seem to have truly learned our lessons in 2008.  This time we are invested in a way that allows us to watch the market changes with interest, but with emotional detachment.
• We thought we could only afford six months in this high cost country, but we’ve surprised ourselves with staying under budget while enjoying ourselves immensely.  Sure, it will be great to pay a euro for a macchiato instead of five NZ dollars for a flat white, but by watching what we spend we can afford to stay here indefinitely and that is a wonderful feeling.

Where We Are

We absolutely love Aotearoa / New Zealand.

• We are constantly awed by the grandeur and the quiet beauty, by the wide open spaces and the emptiness of the trails and beaches, by the diversity of landscapes and the ever present birdsong. 
• We continue to delight in the kindness of the people and their relaxed, pragmatic attitude.
• We’re beginning to learn more about Maori culture and can clearly see the connection of the welcoming spirit and community approach here with the Polynesian heritage. 

We’ve been here long enough to know it’s not a perfect country and every country has its share of jerks, but the positives outweigh those 100:1. 

There is one problem about falling in love with Aotearoa. When we went sailing, our first lengthy stop was the Bahamian out islands. Although we visited dozens of other islands in the following years and loved many of them, none ever outshone the Bahamian waters of the Jumentos.  We’re very fearful that we’ve done the same thing again – starting our land travels in the best place of all.

We’ve played with the idea of settling down here and staying forever, but the pull of new places is still far too strong and the variety of the world far too great to actually consider giving up the nomadic way of life.  That just has to stay on hold for a bit while we await the end of the pandemic and count ourselves incredibly lucky to be doing so in the best place on earth. 

We’ll enjoy every minute of our extra time in New Zealand and take it as our own very thick and beautiful silver lining on the dark cloud of the terrible pandemic.

Summary

I’ll close where we started, with COVID…

You could say we chose the absolute worst time in modern history to quit our jobs to become world travelers, just before borders shut all over the globe and a US Passport became nearly useless. 

We are looking at it from exactly the opposite viewpoint.  Had we waited any longer, we’d be stuck in the US with the world’s worst pandemic response, stuck in work environments that are deteriorating, stuck in the wildfire smoke of Portland and isolated there by not even being able to go see our families…all while dreaming of getting out here. 

Instead, here we are – happy every day and overwhelmingly grateful for this rare and precious opportunity to experience this magical life the way we want to.  We think we left at the absolute perfect time and came to the perfect place.

For those of you following along, we hope you have been able to live vicariously through us – something more important this year than we could ever have imagined when we set out.