7 Links Challenge

With thanks to Erin & Simon of Never Ending Voyage, we were nominated to participate in the 7 Links Challenge hosted by Tripbase.  They provide 7 categories, and we’re supposed to dig up old posts from the archives.  A bit of a blogger chain letter style trip down memory lane.

Sounds like a nice break from all the bus stuff lately – and wow, what a challenge going through 5 years worth of blog posts!

So, here goes…  let us know if you agree with our selections:

1) Your most beautiful post

As we don’t consider ourselves necessarily travel bloggers, we don’t aim to create pretty travel posts about the places we visit.  So, I just randomnly selected one of our photo posts from our winter in St. John, US Virgin Islands.

This one was our underwater post.  Our waterproof camera broke shortly after this post, so it’s our only water post from our 5 months spent in the Caribbean.

St. John Underwater

2) Your most popular post

With over 50 comments on it, a post we did answering Facebook & Twitter follower questions has been our most commented on post.  Folks asked us everything about running our business on the road, handling logistics to personal hygeniene as travelers.

Answering Your Questions

3) Your most controversial post

A few years ago when this blog moved from being just our personal journal for family & friends to becoming more visible to the public, we noticed a lot of terminology being tossed at us to describe our lifestyle. From nomad, vagabond, location independent professional. NuNumad, NuRver, digital nomad and lifestyle designer.  And while we think that a rose by any other name is still a rose (in other words, labels really don’t define who you are), we attempted to find the subtle distinctions between these terms by building a matrix.

We also compared them to our chosen term, technomad.

The post was met with a mix of applause and support from fellow travelers, and some critical feedback from academics about the anthropological use of words like ‘nomad’.  Basically, we were told it’s technically incorrect to call ourselves ‘technomads’ and that really, we’re just ‘hyper-mobile’.  Whatever.  We still choose technomad.

Digital Location Independent Lifestyle Designing NuNomads

4) Your most helpful post

We think it’s difficult to make claims as to what is our most helpful post, and we do generally try to mix in posts sharing what we’ve learned about navigating some of the logistical challenges of hyper mobility. So we have a lot of content to choose from… posts ranging from finding campgrounds, mobile internet solutions, getting rid of your ‘stuff’ and an entire series of posts that we turned in an eBook answering the common excuses.

But we asked on Facebook yesterday what folks considered our most useful post.

It was a toss up between:

Two Years Shampoo Free (Which, by the way, I’ve been poo-free since 2007.)

and…

5) A post whose success surprised you

When we bought our Oliver Travel Trailer back in 2008, we decided we didn’t want to carry a separate fuel source for a generator.  We found a conversion kit to make a Honda 2000 generator run off of propane.  Chris eventually did a write up of the conversion, and amazingly, this post still gets quite a number of hits.. and we still get comments and e-mails on it.  And to our further surprise, one of our Facebook followers referenced it as our most useful post.

Go figure.

Propane Powered Generator — Honda EU2000i + Propane Conversion Kit

6) A post you feel didn’t get the attention it deserved

While this post did get a number of responses and awesome stories shared, we just didn’t feel that our challenge to invite serendipity into your next trip got nearly the staying power it could have. We’ve designed our life to follow serendipity as much as possible, and this has lead us to amazing things.  We fully embrace that experiencing without an agenda can create a completely different kind of encounter with the world.

So, we invite you again to..

Take the Serendipity Challenge

(And you have taken the challenge, don’t forget to write us and tell about your experience!)

7) The post that you are most proud of

When Chris first told me he was going to write a post about our month of traveling in a borrowed 1986 Winnebago Le’Sharo after we sold our Oliver, I thought he was nuts.  Who would want to read about a bunch of mechanical break downs in an old RV?

But once I read his initial draft, I couldn’t wait to share it.

He so seamlessly weaved the Nigerian Sharo rite of passage ritual into every mechanical issue we had.  We passed the Le’Sharo with a smile on our faces, which gave us the confidence to embark on moving into the expected challenges of a vintage bus.

The Le’Sharo Right of Passage

So, now.. we get to nominate some other bloggers to post their 7 links…

1) The Pixel Diaries (you can wait until you get back from your cruise)

2) Our Odyssey

3) Wheeling It

4) LiveWorkDream

5) Vagabondians

What’s up for us?

Since we keep getting folks inquiring what the rest of our summer plans look like..  we’ll make it official.. we have no plans.  This includes, no decision made if we’re going to Burning Man or not.

We’ve spent the last week in Lake Havasu City, AZ with our amazing friends who have been helping us perfect the house systems on the bus.  Tomorrow we’ll head a few miles north to see a bus guru who has offered to go over our bus’ engine and teach us about care and feeding of 2-stroke diesels.  We’re very much looking forward to that.  After that.. we haven’t a clue.  We do need to get back to St. Louis and pick up Kiki (we may fly out for that).  We’ll play it all by ear. We do know we’re craving some time in cooler temps focused on things other than the bus.