Check it out:
It's Not an Extended Vacation
Our descriptions of Digital Location Independent Lifestyle Designing NuNomads.
and... if any of the above descriptions strike a chord with you.. then you might want to participate in:
A new survey for Digital Nomads & Location Independent Professionals (and those who want to be).
Austin is where Cherie grew up, and her brother now lives - so it’s a frequent stop over point for us as we criss cross the country visiting friends and family.
Our specific timing for being in the area was to rendezvous with Cherie’s parents in nearby San Antonio for her father’s USS Robert E Lee SSBN-601 Submarine Reunion, which he organizes - and was finally stepping down as president.
Click to follow the adventure!
Environmental Impact
An ever increasing number of people are growing concerned about the impact of their daily lives upon the environment, and many are taking proactive steps to minimize their impact and to be more conscious about consumption.
One excuse we’ll often hear from more eco-aware folks is that traveling full time would inevitably have too high of an environmental impact for them to consider leaving home without a heavy burden of eco-guilt.
This guilt is understandable - a life in motion consumes resources, and we certainly do not dispute the environmental impact of travel.
But we have discovered that “being green” while traveling is actually very achievable. And indeed, it is often possible to have less of an environmental impact living nomadically than by living a more typical lifestyle.
.. click to read the full article
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
radven on the road full time for an extended trial of technomadism. The trial obviously worked, because we're still at it, have an ideal home for us and see no end in sight!It's been an amazing two years on the road together and I can hardly believe it's already been that long already.
Here's a post we made on http://www.technomadia.com with a fuller reflection of our two years being digital vagabonds together:
http://www.technomadia.com/2009/05/t
It was an amazing experience, and I'm so glad we gave ourselves several weeks to experience it. We saw amazing things and got to visit with friends old and new along the way. That's one of the things I love best about our life is that we get to visit with so many people that have moved or we meet at various events. It's a different kind of community than I was used to with living in one place, but I am loving and adapting to the more transient nature of it.
Anyway.. click away if you want to follow along, lots of pictures too! I'll be back adding in links to more video segments we shot as we traveled as I have time to produce them.
http://www.technomadia.com/2009/05/trav
We're now in New Braunfels, Texas after spending the weekend in San Antonio at my father's submarine veterans reunion. Tomorrow we start heading northward towards St. Louis with the goal of making it there by the end of the week for Mother's Day. After that.. we have no plans until Burning Man.
Over the coming weeks, we are going to post about the various excuses we’ve heard for why people aren’t out doing whatever is they want to be doing, but in particular, traveling full time as a lifestyle.
Excuse #3: Stuff
We're conditioned in our society to acquire stuff. Our culture and economy often seems to revolve around this quest. And no matter how large a space we have, we can easily fill that space with stuff. It seems to be a universal law - the amount of "stuff" you have expands to fill all available space.
The acquisition of stuff can easily end up consuming our space and our lives, cluttering our homes, our budgets and our minds.
We pay to acquire it, pay to house it, pay to store it when we run out of room, and pay to move it when we seemingly inevitably "upgrade" to a larger place. Repeat this cycle a few times, until the day comes when your next of kin get stuck with paying once again to dispose of it all.
For those wanting to travel full time for an extended amount of time, breaking the acquisition cycle is pretty important as to scale way back on the space you allow for stuff in your life.
.. Click to read full article
During our visit to Hemet, California we had a nomadic rendezvous with fellow technomad Ben Willmore. Ben, like us, gave up his physical home and has been traveling around full time for over 3 years now in a customized 40ft motor coach. He's an expert photographer and Photoshop wizard, and he funds his nomadic lifestyle by giving seminars, writing books, and conducting training expeditions.
We thought it's be interesting to talk with him about his approach to technomadism and compare notes:
.. click to read more, and see awesome cool photo art he made of us!
.. Click to read the full story
Over the coming weeks, we are going to post about the various excuses we’ve heard for why people aren’t out doing whatever is they want to be doing, but in particular, traveling full time as a lifestyle.
Excuse #2: Affording It
People often associate a high price tag with traveling. I think they often take the typical cost of a weeklong vacation and use that as a basis as what it might cost to travel full time. When you add in airfare, hotel costs, parking, car rental, dining out, going to attractions, pet sitters and more - yes, indeed, a typical American 1 week vacation adds up and would be quite unaffordable for most on a long term basis. Even if you shop for sales and bargains, many folks save up for months, or even years, to manage a single memorable week-long trip.
Things get especially expensive when you consider that you still need to keep paying your normal living costs as well - your rent/mortgage, utilities, debt payments, etc.
Traveling full time as a lifestyle however isn’t the same as going on a typical vacation full time. It’s a lifestyle change.
... Click for the rest of the post.
When we first started off nomading around together almost two years ago, we really didn’t want our journey to be about anything other than our own discovery. Our website used to be primarily for friends and family to keep up with us. But over time, more and more folks have been peaking in on us, and apparently being inspired by what we’re doing.
We think it’s come time to allow our journey to include an element of purpose and story beyond ourselves, and to more pro-actively share our journey with whoever wants to read it. Which is part of the reason why we’ve revamped our website.
We’ve toyed around with a few ideas, but the one that is resonating loudest to us is interviewing locals as we pass through areas about the local things they love. We intend to produce segments of less than 2 or 3 minutes featuring people we meet talking and sharing. This gives us a new perspective in looking at the places we go to, and will hopefully share with others some of the wonderful things we encounter on the road.
Our first set of interviews featuring Sacramento are ready, thanks to some quick ramp up with learning iMovie today while parked under Morro Rock along Central California’s coast.
Our dear friends Sean Catanese and Lindsay Brown agreed to kick off this project by being our first victims..err… subjects.
... click for the full story
We’re often asked what a typical day is like for us. There really is no typical in our life - we try to avoid having that word describe us. So it’s probably best to occasionally illustrate what some of our days look like. Yesterday, our first day back in motion after a few months parked in San Francisco, is a stellar example of what a day can be like for us.
Sample Day: March 28, 2009, transitioning from San Leandro to San Simeon, California
7am - Wake up and freshen up. Tidy up the house and get things locked down to be in motion. Including securing the swing arm on the monitor, taking down the suction cupped pictures from the walls, locking all of the windows, turning off the inverter, locking the bathroom and closet doors, making sure nothing is likely to slide around and securing the kitten in her carrier in the Jeep.
7:30a - Hit the road, leaving our host’s curbside in San Leandro. We stop for diesel, and then head southward down the twisty mountain road into Santa Cruz.
... click to continue this post
As we travel, we have the pleasure of meeting wonderful people. And oftentimes when folks hear what we're up to - we get the response of 'You're living my dream!'. To which we of course reply 'Then why aren't you doing it too?'.
Over the coming weeks, we are going to post about the various excuses we've heard for why people aren't out doing whatever is they want to be doing, but in particular, traveling full time as a lifestyle.
Excuse # 1: Jobs & Career
In America, traveling full time is something that seems to be by default left for retirement after a career - when life savings, pension and social security can pay for the base expenses. Full Time RVing is a lifestyle that generations ahead of ours have been exploring for sometime, and have thankfully paved many of the practical paths for us.
However, waiting for retirement may not be the solution for all of us. Our callings for wanderlust come stronger and we begin to wonder if we can make travel a lifestyle earlier in life.
... click to continue this post
Today we hosted a very fabulous Open 'House' at our little RV Park in South San Francisco, as a way of being able to show our many friends in the area our wonderful Oliver Travel Trailer, and say 'good bye for now' to many as we prepare to hitch up tomorrow morning to embark on our eastward trek.
It went wonderfully, and I am reminded with how blessed we are to have such a diverse and wonderful community in this area.
I am also reminded of one of the few things that a nomadic life makes it difficult to do - and that is hosting. When I lived in Florida, I had a decent sized home with a hot tub near the beach in which I frequently hosted weekend long gatherings (I don't dare say 'party', because they were really much more casual and laid back than the word implies) of friends. We'd make up all the guest beds, put out air mattresses and just all enjoy hanging out, cooking, soaking, walking the beach, watching movies, playing board games, sharing music and YouTube finds. They were wonderful weekends.
Living in a small trailer of course means we don't have room to host such things under one roof. We can do things like we did today - but had the weather been bad like the forecasts hinted at, it would have been quite miserable. But no matter the weather, folks can only hang outside at a trailer park for so long comfortably.
When the weather is better, I would like to host a campout where we can bring our house and others can camp around us. I think that would be quite fun, and a great way to bridge the gap. And I look forward to various nomadic gatherings across the country, such as NuRVers and our own Camp Nomadia at Burning Man.
But I will always miss providing a space for gathering.
On Monday morning we will hitch up after having had the landing pads down for a few months in the San Francisco area. We've had a wonderful time immersing ourselves in community, building friendships and doing all the things that we love about the area. Being able to be somewhere for several months at a time has been wonderful and more our pace than being in constant repositioning.
Being nomadic, after all, does not mean having to always be on the move.
Our general plan for the next couple of months is to head south than east, arriving in Austin by late April and St. Louis by Mother's Day. And then back in the Bay Area by mid-August for Burning Man.
Our specific plans for the coming weeks however are coming together. It looks like our routing will look something like this:
Mon, 3/22: Hitch up and boondock somewhere in the Bay Area, after having some general maintenence done on the trailer.
Tues, 3/23: Head up to Sacramento to switch out stuff in storage and see Lindsay & Sean
Wed or Thurs, 3/24: Head back to the Bay Area for the Lonely Planet Travel Blogger Awards
Friday 3/27: Head to Santa Cruz
Sat - Mon, 3/28: Head south
Mon-Wed, 3/30: Hang in the LA area
Thur, 4/2: Palm Springs, CA to rendezvous with fellow technomad, Ben Willmore
Friday, 4/3: Check out Quartzsite and/or Slab City
Saturday, 4/4: Head to Lake Havasu City to visit a fellow Oliver owner
Please keep in mind, all projected dates are on NST (Nomad Standard Time), and are always subject to change :)
As always, if you're anywhere near our projected path - please be in touch! We love meeting folks along our journey.
radven and I had a fabulous weekend in Truckee in the snow.. and now we are attending the O'Reilly ETech conference in San Jose this week, where we are presenting on Technomadism on Thursday. We're both actively twittering our experience this week, if you care to follow along. The main feeds will be http://twitter.com/technomadia and http://twitter.com/radven. The conference is excellent and inspiring, and I'm honored to be able to be here.
We're in a park that is about half full time residents in single wide trailers, and transient folks like us in RVs set up to be moved at any time. I've enjoyed many walks around the park, especially with friends who have come to visit us to get a taste of the park.
By and large, everyone we've met here are incredibly nice folks, and we've not had any trouble here. We've even made a few friends and it's been nice having neighbors that we chat with. The age ranges are quite variable, to folks working at nearby places on contract (hospital, construction jobs, etc.), retired folks, folks on disability and young families.
There's one unit in the back of the park that has intrigued me and friends that we walk by. There is intricate wood carving around the single wide, a work shop, murals and a hand built and painted wooden town model in the front.
I was always curious as to what it was.
This afternoon we had friends visit for lunch, and we went on a walk around the park. As we approached the trailer, the owner was out working on the exterior. I commented on how lovely his model was, he glowed and proceeded to tell us about it. It's a replica of his home village near Florence, Italy that he reconstructed and he proudly pointed to what had been his home growing up, and the structure of the gender segregated church next door. He also gave us a tour of part of his workshop, and shared his incredible mural with us - another painting of his village interspersed with paintings of the planets.
He also welcomed us to the 'Beverley Hills' section of the park, which he didn't seem to understand how it came to be known as such. I asked him a bit about his life and got a summary of his incredible adventure to his landing at the park.
And then he handed us his card.. and I just checked out his website at http://www.francomagnani.com . Wow, he painted that village from his memory of the last time he was there in 1958. And it matches current photos.
Very cool stuff.
Trailer park living has been quite the interesting addition to our experience set, you just never know what you'll find tucked away.
- Location:South San Francisco, CA
We've starting to think forward as to where our travels should take us in the coming months. The map above is a very tentative possible travel plan for late March through mid- May.
Here's what we're thinking:
March 22 (few days) - Leave the SF Bay Area and head south towards Los Angeles
March 27 (around a week) - Hang out in the LA area, visiting friends & family
April 3 (around 3 weeks) - Head east, checking out Arizona and New Mexico
April 21 (around 2 weeks) - Hang out in the Austin/San Antonio area
May 4 (around 3 weeks) - Head north towards St. Louis and hang out in that area
The plans (both the dates and routes) are very subject to change depending on events we want to attend, people we want to see and nomadic whims :)
However, if you're anywhere in the vicinity of these plans and would like a visit - let us know! Or, if you have recommendations for 'must sees' along the way, always love those too.
We went ahead and switched our fridge/freezer over to electric (we normally run off propane), and have also been running 2 MacBook Pros, a Mac Mini, a 24" computer monitor, a 1 TB external hard drive, a wifi router, a small electric space heater (instead of our propane furnace), phone/camera chargers and handful of LED lights. As we'd definitely not be in 'solar efficiency' mode anyway, we opted to not be overly conservative with our power consumption to see just what it took to run our whole household at a 'don't think about it' load.
We just got our power bill for a month - 197 KW-hrs is what we used. Which translates to a powerbill of $22.73, about what we spent on dinner last night. Granted, we were out of town for 10 days of the billing period (meaning everything but the fridge was off) - but still, not bad, not bad. Running everything we'd default to, we use less than 10 kw-hrs per day without thinking about it.
Of course, if we were depending on solar alone, we'd have run a major deficit - as on a super sunny day, our 200 watts of solar panels can only generate about 1 kw hour per day (we can store about 2.7 kw hrs in our battery array). Which, we can work with that, especially with supplementing with power collected during towing, being far more conservative and running more stuff off propane. And if we did need to be totally off grid and stationary, our propane generator tops off the batteries nicely.
It's nice to have the confirmation that our setup is pretty power efficient, even at what we'd consider a 'full load'.
You can listen to the interview and/or read the transcript at:
http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/02/li
Pretty good interview that gives a glimpse into our life. Enjoy!
Profile
- serolynne
- Cherie Ve Ard
- Serolynne.com
Syndicate
