A common misconception about our technomadic lifestyle is that we’re on an extended vacation. I think this comes from just how engrained the concept of travel is with being in vacation mode.
Vacation: a respite or a time of respite from something
We’re not taking a respite from anything, nevermind something. Instead, we’re designing a lifestyle that combines developing our careers, family & community, volunteerism, play and travel. In other words, just because we’re traveling full-time does not mean we’re on an extended vacation, taking a gap from otherwise ‘normal’ life or retired from earning an income.
What happens in Vegas..
This really hit home for last summer when we decided to route a rendezvous with some friends who were vacationing in Las Vegas. For us, it was just a normal day – working, running errands and exploring somewhere new.
For them, it was something they saved up and planned for. They were on respite from their daily life and where there to relax, party and indulge. They ate decadent meals three times a day, saw expensive shows nightly and bought souvenirs.
We found we had to quickly set boundaries for ourselves and make it clear – we couldn’t keep at their pace in spending and calorie consumption.
How a traveling lifestyle differs from vacation
Some other relevant distinctions between our lifestyle and a vacation might include:
- There’s no concept of being away from home when we’re visiting some place or people. We’re always home, and have everything with us to make us feel at home.
- We can’t devote our entire visit to being a tourist or hanging out. We have work to accomplish, chores, relaxation, exercise and errands to attend to. We don’t have a room attendant making our bed, or room service handling our meals and dishes. We don’t have the paper on hold to catch up on our news later, or our kitten being boarded and fed. We don’t have all our work calls going to voice mail or being handled by a co-worker.
- We can’t always be eating out at favorite restaurants and having big meals every day. We have a budget and a waistline to be aware of.
- We don’t want to only go to touristy spots. These are occasional indulgences in our budget and time allocation – and besides, we’d much rather feel a city like the locals do.
- Our life is not one of constant leisure. While we may have an awesome and always changing view, we’re not constantly lounging on a beach reading a good book and sipping fruity drinks served by cabana boys.
- When we visit a place, we’re not just there for fun. Sometimes we’re helping family and friends through a major life change, sometimes we’re working insane hours on a project, sometimes we’re sick in bed, sometimes we’re volunteering on a project.. and yes, sometimes, we have fun too.
Sound familiar?
Our life is awesome, however!
Our lifestyle does afford us some amazing differences from what is considered a normal life. Such as instead of going to a movie or dinner with friends after work, we might be hiking the Grand Canyon, driving through the Petrified Forest, or getting a hot springs bath. Instead of working in a cubicle, we might be working on the banks of the Mississippi River or in a lush forest on a picnic table.
However, our travels are definitely not a respite from everyday life.
They are our everyday life.
And yes.. we do take vacations too.
We had our own introduction to the “not an extended vacation” mindset. We only vacationed in our first RV. We were still working and had 1-2 weeks for the usual time-off jaunts. Our travel plans always included selecting overnight rest-areas based on which had the closest Cinnabon or Paradise Bakery! It became abundantly clear, once we were fulltiming, that this could not continue! It was when the clothes began to feel tight that we finally got it: get with the usual home-based eating and sleeping program.
Ha! This post explains perfectly what we find it so hard to articulate to family, friends and former work colleagues. We always get the question, “So what next?” or “Still looking for work?” or some other question that implies we can’t live our current lifestyle forever! In other words, stop being silly and get back into the 9-5, kill yourself with stress and continue on the crazy over-consumption treadmill.
We always find it hard to explain to people that we’re not being lazy and that every day is not a holiday and that actually, we really don’t want to get a regular job again. Maybe in the future we can just forward them to your post and that’ll settle it once and for all. Thanks!
Thanks for stopping by, Adam! So true too, we get many of the same questions. I think it’s difficult for people to see outside of their own experience, and many assume that traveling full time is an expensive luxury.
Looking forward to exploring your site!
During a 19 state 2 1/2 week road trip last fall we stopped in a park in a small town in southern Tenn. and cooked burgers while listening to a football game. My wife looked at me and said why arent we living this life all year. Both in our late 50’s we decieded to gear our life in that direction. Your site has been an inspiration. thankyou.. tom & helen
Thank you so much for stopping in and sharing your story… we look forward to catching you out on the road and following your journey to a mobile lifestyle!
It sounds like you have a good balance between work and play. Though I work from home and we’re not on the road all the time, I do approach life in a similar way. Making time to enjoy your surroundings is so important. That’s what’s so nice about working from home. I can spend the whole day hiking then get some things done at night.
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Excellent post and topic. People think it’s all about going on a vacation, but you still have to eat!
I would find discovering the local “color” of a place the most important — things that are off the tourist route and the real people that live in a place that would be the most satisfying if you were living on the road. some of my favorite travel shows where when the host discovered what can’t be seen by a tourist
Our post thoughts really are so similar. Each time I go off on a nomading adventure with my kids we have to do a little reality check. They have experienced vacations and they have experienced nomading trips. The difference as I have seen it has been in the length of the trip and whether I work while we are away. When we do long nomading trips and I am working it’s important for me to talk with them up front about how this is going to differ from a “vacation” in terms of spending both time and money. On a “vacation” everything seems concentrated. You try to see what you can, because time is short, and in doing so you tend to spend money in concentrated sums as well. Nomading, is a different story. Much more like a continuation of daily life only in amazing places. Yes, we see all the wonderful things we might see on a vacation but the experience is spread out, relaxed, and there’s a lot of regular living, working, playing, that happens in between. I really prefer nomading because you can enjoy destinations as locals do, learning the area and getting to know people a bit.
Carmen’s last blog post..How Does a Nomad Get a Vacation?
This post will definitely help when explaining to others, especially family members, what it is that my wife and I would like to do.
The way I like to look at it is this: Why do you need a vacation? Your life shouldn’t be something you need to escape from.
Sean’s last blog post..5 Ways to Slow Down
Funny, but we have been on the road since 2006 living a traveling life on 4 continents as a family, and we DO see it as an extended vacation or permanent vacation. But, perhaps it is semantics, because I also understand most of your points.
I’ve never really understood those “2 week millionaire” style vacations where one suffers for a year just to blow loads of money in two weeks. I’m too frugal for that. Don’t get me wrong, I loooove to live large and adore luxury, I just like to find out how I can do that for as little money as possible. I hate wasting money.
Yes, life goes on with this type of lifestyle, and we work, go to the dentist, clean up, homeschool our kid, cook, shop for groceries, make beds etc, but MOST of our time is spent like a permanent, extended vacation.
Perhaps part of the difference is because we are out of our home country and visiting many countries. One of the things most rewarding about family travel is just doing ordinary things in extraordinary places.
I know that holds true for you as well, but being in a foreign land where we often do not speak the language it just ups the ante a bit, and always makes us aware that we are on an extended vacation of sorts. We also purposely always stay in spring or summer type good, mostly sunny weather.
I’m reminded of this Bill Bryson quote ( which is one of my favorites):
“To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.” — Bill Bryson
I am sure you have the same experience ( as I once traveled the US for 6 months from Boston to Key West to SD to SF), but I think it is more intense outside of one’s home country.
I love it that we always have a heck of a time remembering what day it is or what time it is. We no longer have the same reference point to time. I love how this lifestyle keeps one living in the “now”.
I don’t think life has to be one of constant leisure to feel like an extended vacation. Our life is “our” idea of a vacation or “heaven on earth” as we call it. I bet yours is too!
Soultravelers3’s last blog post..6 Month European Family Road Trip ’09!
I can see that if one redefined the definition of vacation to not be a respite from normal life, and instead being any form of travel for personal pursuit (as opposed to business travel) – that yes, our similar lifestyles could be considered extended/permanent vacations. However, I’m not attempting to redefine the definition… and using vacation to specifically mean a respite from normal everyday life. 🙂 So I do think it’s just coming down to semantics.
Most folks don’t experience vacation like the way I suspect either of us experiences extended travel as a lifestyle. And I don’t think where you travel is necessarily that much of a difference (both Chris and I have extensive foreign travel under our belts as well… Chris actually lived as an expat for 4 years in Indonesia and doing world travel, and I’ve done extended travel throughout Russia.) Whether or not you’re living outside the culture you grew up in isn’t a defining point between vacation and travel – at least, not in my mind.
There is a difference between those types of travel. On vacation, you put the rest of life on hold. You don’t work, you don’t schedule doctor’s appointments, you pre-pay bills due, you board the pets, you have someone water your plants, and you can really just let go and not worry about all of the things required to ‘live’. And then you come back to a stack of mail to catch up on and resume everything else that is normal in your life. We do experience and schedule vacations in this way, even amongst our traveling lifestyle.. time where we don’t work, where we go out of touch and concentrate more on leisure and less on living. It’s a subtler distinction of course than before we were living on the road.
We also often forget what day it is and have redefined a lot of what living is like as a result of our traveling lifestyle. But it’s not a vacation to us.. because it is our lives. Not a break from it. One could almost argue that going to a conference or other event that is very schedule and location focused is much more a vacation for us than before 🙂