Reflections on being digital nomads, one year in

Katherine:

Our one year digital nomad vagabonding anniversary came and went the day before yesterday unacknowledged. This time last year we awoke to our new tabula rasa life in a BnB in Camden, London having just flown in the day before. I think a little reflection is in order.

Then

On the 31st May last year I wrote this in my notebook:

“Come Sunday evening a melancholy befalls in the realisation that I have to go to work tomorrow and the next day and the next day and so on and so forth. Well, this is officially my last Sunday of mourning the weekend for hopefully a very long time, if not forever. This week is my last week of work before I take annual leave and then move to Europe with Mike to re-evaluate and re-invent out lives. I never again want to have a job that makes me mourn the end of the weekend. I either need to have a job I love or a job that takes up as little time as possible”.

A note to the people of seaac (my previous workplace), if you are reading this: I still love you and seaac! I thought I wanted to be a social worker since before I knew what a social worker was – in fact, I even talked to Steve, our beloved leader, about all of this in my exit interview. Turns out I’d prefer to be holed up in a little studio day and night drawing and painting strange but beautiful fictional characters and designing yummy collage papers and patterns! Who knew?

Now

I’m working on the marketing side of things for A Tasty Pixel, Mike’s software development business. I’ve learnt how to use Photoshop so I can design my own collage papers and surface pattern designs and have plans to learn how to use Illustrator as well. I’ve designed over 100 of them and even had a hand in designing Mike’s new website! Hopefully Mike’s next iPhone app will do well enough so that we can hire someone to do the marketing next time and I can focus on what I love. Until then, I don’t mind this type of work. At the end of the day I have complete autonomy and that counts for so much. What I would love to do is sell my collage papers, surface pattern designs, textures and brushes online as downloadable files. I’ve pretty much got it all worked out, now I just have to find the time to do it!

Then

A couple of weeks after arriving I wrote this in my notebook:

“The world is full of wonders and we’re going out to see them. This is probably the most amazing thing we’ll do in our lives and this is the beginning. It is all ahead of us. I’m really excited about spending TIME, precious, preciuos time on art. Learning, learning, learning. The thought of learning has always grabbed my imagination with all of its connotations of possibility and the unknown”.

I also remember updating my facebook status with something like this: “I have dallied for too long: Too many paintings left unpainted”.

Now

I’m still really excited about seeing the wonders we have yet to see. Scotland is our next super exciting destination. I dream about being in a remote Scottish countryside surrounded by dramatic mountains, achingly pretty lochs and at the mercy of fierce weather.

I would still like to spend more time on art. It’s funny, for the first time in my adult life I’m neither studying nor do I have a “job” but I am busier than I have ever been. Sometimes when I think about all the things I want to do and learn I feel overwhelmed. I think it’s a pretty good problem to have. Now that I’ve found my passion it’s gained its own momentum. It’s as if it was waiting, dormant, and as soon as a shaft of light fell upon it, everything that was already there, in waiting, unfurled and is growing bigger and bigger the more light it gets.

To round off, some things I know now that I wish I knew then:

1. Put some bamboo mats and towels under your mattress or you will be re-constructing your bed in 9 months because a dirty big patch of mould is growing there.
2. Driving the entire length of France on toll-ways will cost you a small fortune, which you could use instead to buy a small island or put towards your firstborn’s university fund.
3. One month in Ireland is NOT enough time – not even close – and indeed three months in one country is not enough (unless it’s Tunisia) – slow down!

Some things I never anticipated:

1. Learning how to use Photoshop – those familiar with the mutual animosity between myself and all things computers will appreciate the enormity of this
   
2. Starting a small business and being self-employed – not something I ever envisaged for myself but now I wouldn’t want it any other way. Also, knowing a great deal about running an online business – didn’t see that coming.
3. Having a blog and meeting kindred spirits online – I used to think blogs were rather self-indulgent, pointless things and I was even quite sheepish about telling people that I had one to begin with (ditto for twitter)
   

Some things I’ve learnt:

1. How to have an argument – Mike and I live together, travel together and now work together all in a 6×3 metre space! We need to be able to resolve arguments and we’ve gotten pretty good at it.
2. I can wear a pair of socks (light use) 5 – 10 times before they start to smell
3. I don’t think I ever would have dreamt of, let alone done, any of this – the business, the design, the blog – If I had’ve just stayed in Melbourne working 9-5 Monday-Friday with 4 weeks off a year. Not a chance. There’s something about drastically changing your entire life that opens up boundaries you didn’t even know were there and lets you begin to imagine that things can be different, very very different.
   

Michael:

My mother made this comment about our experience just recently, but it’s worth repeating because I find the fact of it really remarkable: That this thing we’re doing is totally multifaceted. The travel stuff is wonderful – one of my top priorities for my life – but equally valuable is the creative side which has been really rewarding (although not quite financially rewarding, yet – we’ll get there!).

The most awesome aspect of this is Katherine’s artistic journey, and I’m loving seeing her artistic side prospering. Plus, the glee she gets from art supplies is a thing to behold.

Personally speaking, I’m loving the indie software developer lifestyle to pieces. It’s a creative outlet that suits me perfectly, and I love designing software and putting the pieces together just so – which satisfies both my creative side, and my OCD side. My mother used to joke that me, working (tapping studiously away at a keyboard), was rather similar to me taking a break – party time (tapping studiously away at a keyboard). It’s pretty much that way still, and doing this job means I basically never work, and am in fact constantly playing. Doesn’t get much better than that.

Actually, the one thing that does get better than that is having a beautiful, changing view out of the window that we can go and explore from time to time, at our leisure. When we started out, we didn’t have a clear idea of how the travel thing was all going to work, but we’ve sorted it out and found our pace. We love being in the country, fields, woods, mountains, and really enjoy hiking (although not for too long!). Cities have their appeal too, but our hearts lie in the wide open horizons, or the deep green (or preferably, orange and yellow!) of woods.

One thing I never anticipated was the people we’ve met along the way. I certainly hoped that we would make connections with people as we went, but given that we’re not exactly gregarious (I almost wrote ‘egregious’) people by nature, I wasn’t sure how successful we’d be. Don’t get me wrong, we like a good pub, maybe once a year. For a few minutes.

However, we’ve met some really interesting people and made some wonderful friends, always in unexpected ways: On the side of a volcano, in the back-alleys of an ancient Tunisian marketplace, in the car park of a little Italian town, and through my involvement with writing WordPress and iPhone software. A great adventure still to come will be spending some time living in Padua (and learning Italian!) and getting to know our wonderful new-found friends there, who I originally met via my product Loopy.

The online side of this mobile social life has been fascinating – we still have quite a number of people we’ve met online to catch up with some time: Users of software I’ve written, other bloggers, and other people who’ve come across us online (or vice versa). We’ve made some great friends who are currently cycling across Europe (actually, they’ve just bought a little red car and are heading towards, and then across, Siberia), who we discovered while doing a bit of travel research in Tunisia, and we dearly hope to meet them in person one day – then kidnap them and keep them all to ourselves, in our enclave of ‘favourite people’ that we will one day build. nothing

The last thing that I find surprising, in spite of my ever-overly-optimistic self, is just how feasible this thing has been. Okay, we had some fantastic help to begin with – some great, long house-sitting appointments that meant we went almost a whole year rent-free – but apart from the initial, mostly recoverable outlay (Nettle), we’ve generally been living on less that it would’ve cost us to live in Australia – particularly with the horrendous housing situation there lately. My blithely optimistic anticipation of this whole thing has been actually pretty spot-on. We can do this for a lot more time yet, even if this indie software thing doesn’t take off.

So, in more ways than one, becoming ‘vagabonds’ (‘technobonds’?) has been a real enabler for us to pursue the things we really want to do with our lives, travel aside. It’s taken us away from the distracting, (albeit dubious) attraction of a steady income and jobs about which we’re ambivalent, freeing us up for the more important things, while actually lowering our living expenses to make our ‘buffer’ last longer.

That’s pretty cool.

Things I am glad I now know:

1. What Katherine says is right. (Katherine’s note: this is a work in progress)
2. Taking a wrong turn or getting lost never matters – relax, go with it.
3. It’s probably not a good idea to wild-camp in a big city, and especially not a port. Just…don’t.
4. It doesn’t matter how much you don’t like marketing/PR stuff, or how much you’re too engrossed in developing a product: Do it!
5. Don’t look too closely at how your motorhome’s put together, especially the raised bed (or as I like to call it, flimsy-sleeping-platform-of-death).
6. If you run out of food, you can make pancakes with flour and water! (Although they’re not so good if you’re out of water too)

Here’s to another year of technomadding!

Sitting in a field, watching lambs frolick in a village called Wootton

Dover’s now-familiar white cliffs approached, and with some anticipation we drove off the ferry and were waved past the immigration officials — Katherine remembered what side of the road I’m meant to be driving on at the last minute, so that was convenient.

England! Ah, England.

Our first stop, via an unsuccessful initial attempt to book into a site for a few days, was the local big Tesco Extra supermarket. Words simply can’t express our excitement at the range of things we found in that cornucopia of plenty — one of the benefits of being in a multicultural society: There were bagels and muffins, chai tea, the great curry powder we’d missed, cider, coconut milk and Thai curry paste, peanut butter (even Vegemite, to our delight!), and most exciting of all, cheddar cheese. Good times.

Stocked up and excited about the meals to come, we found ourselves an available CL site (basically a field with the bare basic facilities for campers) in a tiny little village delightfully named “Wootton”. Our drive there involved wending our way along a little country lane past a vast bright yellow canola field, through cool, shady woods, past fields of deep green grass and sheep, with views over the gentle hills in all hues of green. What a beautiful country.

The CL (how we’ve missed these!) was a grassy field, beside a paddock of sheep and little adorable frolicking lambs. We parked with a view out our main window over the lambs — “lamb view”, many times better than TV or sea view — and watched them chase each other around, running and springing, as the ewes patiently abided the lambs’ aggressive lunges at their undercarriage for milk.

Our stay began at about a week or two, then rapidly lengthened to almost a month. While pondering our finances, and running some numbers, we initially thought that our finances were going to last only another 8 months! With that fearsome possibility, we decided it was as good a time as ever to stop travelling for a while, and focus on developing some products and getting a more steady income stream established. Then, I realised I’d not incorporated current earnings from app sales, after which it became clear we had enough money to last us three years. Certainly not breaking even and saving money yet, but that’s quite a substantial difference!

Despite that realisation, however, we’d become rather attached to the idea of stopping for a while and having a break from travelling. We get an equal amount of joy from creating as we do from travelling, and the thought of devoting all of our time to it was quite appealing.

The decision carried ramifications for our previously planned schedule — three months in the UK, then back to Europe — so, we did a little re-thinking of our plans. In theory, at least, time isn’t a particularly important factor; as far as we know, even when our 2 year UK visa expires, we still have the Schengen visa available for 3 months out of every 6, and the remaining three months can hopefully be spent in the UK on a tourist visa, or perhaps even in an eastern-European country. So, we fairly relaxedly decided to postpone our prior plans and spend a bit longer in the UK.

We set up shop in Wootton, working at our laptops from about 10 or 11 in the morning to around midnight. I was steadily redesigning the interface for my new app, developing a beautiful vintage appearance with Katherine’s guidance. Along the way, we realised just how much work the non-programming aspects of the project really are — the social networking, research, assorted PR and marketing activities. The likelihood of taking the time to do it properly, and ever actually releasing a product seemed slim, so along the way, Katherine decided to lend a hand, devoting the time she’d been spending on setting up her art business to helping me get Cartographer released. I was really touched by the faith that she put in my work and the generosity in giving up that valuable time. I love that girl!

Aside from “working”, we had a bunch of errands to complete. Our bed, badly prone to condensation, had developed a veritable forest of black mould which had rotted away some of the base — we were sleeping in the “guest bedroom” in the meantime. So, over the course of about two or three weeks, we found a carpenter who was happy to cut a new piece of plywood to size, sourced an appropriately sized piece of ply (not an easy task, given that the standard sheet size was too small!), dismantled the bed and delivered the new plywood and the old base as a template, found an upholsterer and sourced some vinyl to replace the covering, transported the newly cut base to the upholsterer and painstakingly reassembled the beautiful new creation. A vast amount of work, but we’re very pleased with the result — and are taking new measures to make sure we never have to do that again! One side-effect of the process was that it took us a long time to trust that the bed wouldn’t collapse under us, after seeing how it was constructed — just 25-or-so screws around the outside. The edges of the base don’t even rest on the frame — they’re screwed onto it from underneath! Ignorance was bliss, there!

Along the way we also took Nettle in to have her wheel alignment fixed up (which ultimately made no difference to her gentle rightward drift — she just likes to go right, is all), fix our leaky tire, and spent a truly vast amount of money on some entirely insignificant minutiae (very, very slightly wobbly headlight, and something about a fog light on the wrong side) getting Nettle’s MOT (the annual registration/checkup) done for the year. Whew. Oh, and I finally got a haircut!

We paid a visit to the rather charming town of Canterbury, and spent a while wandering its streets shopping (his and hers: I got my first hands-on with an iPad, which I was rather besotted by, and Katherine found some much-needed shoes). I got some cool pictures of the Cathedral and the Christ Church gate, and the Old Weavers’ House, dated 1500 AD!

So, we wrote code, designed interfaces and got the marketing ball rolling. The lambs played and napped out the window; we attempted to assist every now and then when one of them got a head stuck in the fence. At around the same time every day, they’d all start making a huge racket (we called it “baa o’clock”), and sure enough, a minute later a car would pull up and the farmer would bring some pellets, wrestle a sheep or two to give it an immunisation, and bring a little black-faced lamb out for its daily bottle, which it would attack with glee. The local pheasant, who we named Monsieur Squark-and-Flap after his routine and his rather uppity bearing, would roam around and, well, squark and flap. Grey squirrels and rabbits were our other entertainment while the work continued.

It’s a good life.