It’s the end of another year, and a time to reflect back before moving on. This annual tradition of posts has become part of the fun of sharing.
2021 wraps up 15 years on the road for us together. An amazing number to ponder. We began dating in late 2006, and our entire relationship has been while nomadic together – exploring by RV, boat and other adventures.
After a year of relative home based hiatus from active nomadic, this year we kicked ourselves back into travel mode and set some pretty big life intentions for the year ahead.
First here’s our 2021 interactive travel map:
The map is created by a WordPress plugin called Nomad World Map. It allows us to easily tie locations, dates, future plans and blog posts together as we go – creating a much more interactive experience. Use the arrows to scroll to different locations and/or click on the points. We didn’t write a post for every stop, but many are linked.
Video Version
Here’s an archive our our live video broadcast recapping our year:
Travel Re-Cap
We rang in 2021 at anchor in the middle of Lake Monroe – just feet from our dock in Sanford, Florida.
We were full of anticipation for leaving 2020 behind, honoring as many New Years superstitions as possible to better the odds. Like many, we had unrealistic expectations that by simply turning the calendar over, all would be normal again.
Of course that didn’t exactly happen.
January 1, 2021 might as well just been called December 32, 2020.
The beginning of the year didn’t start off the brightest for us, especially as the one year anniversary of the pandemic encroached.
For us, our year has been learning how to adapt and getting back to living life within new understandings and risk tolerances.
Our antidote was continuing to find ways to travel, explore and safely spend time with those we care about.
For the first half of the year, we enjoyed many van adventures launched from Sanford – particularly once our eBikes arrived. Hitting many of the amazing trails in Florida was a wonderful way to keep things interesting. We were able to include lots of safe feeling quality social time with friends too.
By the end of spring, we had managed to say we’ve visited every state park in Central Florida with RV camping (there’s 27 of them!).
We also got the boat out for lots of secluded anchoring out to enjoy our new hot tub on deck.
We finally became eligible for vaccination in spring time, and for a brief moment in time, our world was full of hope. COVID numbers were down, we felt safer meeting up with more people, we dined indoors a bit and we even took the boat for an extended trip to Jacksonville along the fabulous St. Johns River to attend the symphony.
Ahhhh.
But how soon hopes were crushed. Delta emerged as a dominant strain, and cases were rising.
So we listened to our gut – the road was calling. We just didn’t want to spend another summer in the heat & humidity hunkered down.
As soon as Kiki was done with her radioactive iodine treatment for hyperthyroidism, we left the boat behind in the safest harbor in the southeast we know for the peak of hurricane season.
And hit the road we did, with no plan or agenda. Would we be gone for a few weeks? Or a few months?
It was exhilarating to launch into wandering!
We headed to the Blue Ridge Mountains, and enjoyed relative solitude for a couple weeks as case counts climbed. It was an amazing exploration, where we also enjoyed cooler temperatures.
We then made our way into New England, ironically to evacuate for not one, but two, tropical systems. We loved our time exploring in areas with lower case counts and better safety measures than Florida – connecting with friends and family. And attending to a business relationship that will play a big role in our year ahead.
We then decided to intersect Chris’ parents in the St. Louis area before they headed south for the winter, and wait out the peak of hurricane season to plan our next move.
With the hurricane season being rather light and no sign of activity of concern that would require us returning to Florida – we opted to continue west. We were on a roll, after all, and we have a vintage bus in Arizona we hadn’t seen in nearly 2 years.
To keep it interesting, we routed through Colorado before colder temps would set in and enjoyed several social visits.
And then we arrived back to our beloved Zephyr at our lot in Benson, Arizona. Zephyr, who just turned 60 years old, was as perky as ever and happy to see us. She fired right up.
We close out the year enjoying our time nesting, visiting with a trickle of friends passing through, exploring around us and attending to way too much work catching up from months of being in hyper motion. My mother even made the trip out earlier this month to get a taste of what we love about Arizona.
Travel Stats
This year, we thought it might be interesting to calculate how many nights we spent in each of our mobile vessels:
- Van: 146 days
- Boat: 143 days (115 at dock, 28 cruising)
- Bus: 58 days
- House: 18 days
It’s incredible to think that we’ve spent the most number of nights traveling in Blooper!
We really do love our van, and the agility it adds to our current style of fleet management. I gave up tracking travel mileage versus daily driving in the van, but we’re just about to pass 12,000 miles since we got her in November 2020.
For the boat, we managed 295 miles of cruising in 2021, bringing our cumulative mileage on the boat since we bought Y-Not almost 5 years ago to 2277. (Woah.. almost 5 years?!?!)
For the bus, we put about a quarter mile on Zephyr this year moving her from the storage lot at our co-op to our lot. We just didn’t feel like going through a full safety inspection to feel road worthy for any bus adventures this winter.
Work Life Transitions Ahead
At the beginning of the year, the words ‘we can’t do this anymore’ were muttered more than once. And ‘this’ meaning working so much.
2020 was brutal for us work wise, and it has continued to be this year. With rapidly evolving technology to track at the Mobile Internet Resource Center, and so many hitting the road – it feels like we can never keep up.
Our down time is constantly interrupted with breaking news stories from the cellular carriers, Elon tweeting something about Starlink or manufacturers being impacted by supply chain issues.
Or having to spend time on our personal travels testing bunches of gear.
The changes just never end, and we have to document it in such a way to reach a wide range of technical comfort levels.
We started MIRC back in 2014, at a time in our lives that we were already financially ready to early retire if we kept a frugal lifestyle.
Running MIRC was supposed to be a part-time side hobby type thing so we could help our community and delay needing to dip into our savings quite yet.
It’s been over seven years now of MIRC being front and center of our lives pretty much 24/7. Definitely not the part time thing we envisioned. It’s exceeded the goal of avoiding dipping into savings and a lifestyle no-one would call frugal.
And it bridges our passions of technology, travel and helping – it’s been fulfilling to create it.
However being involved in every facet of the daily operations has shifted from fun to burden. We’ve had too many moments of teetering on burn out. So it’s time to make some changes to regain our quality of life.
Choosing a membership model for funding has kept us from having to constantly chase revenue generation of affiliate sales, advertising algorithms, SEO, selling stuff – while keeping us focused on helping our community. We love being able to guide based on someone’s needs.
But it has a downside. Every single day we accept a new member or renewal, we are committed for one more year.
Even though we have an incredible team helping us, so much is still centered on us. Our faces. Our bylines. Our voices. Our credibility. Our analysis. Our understanding of how the website, content and model all comes together.
So we set a goal earlier this year, and announced it last month to our membership.
By Chris’ 50th birthday next November – one way or another – we will be stepping back from daily operations. We’ll still be involved, we’re not going away. Just no longer having our lives revolve around it, and hopefully being able to work on our own terms on the parts that bring us joy.
That means the year ahead will be hiring & training more staff to take over daily roles, shifting the resource center to be less focused on us and seriously evaluating everything done at MIRC for ways to make it sustainable to maintain.
We’re kicking it off by teaming up with our friends Erik & Kala at MobileMustHave.com (they sell Pepwave gear, which is a current option many bandwidth dependent nomads are choosing) in an official capacity.
For several years we’ve supported each other behind the scenes, especially during the pandemic as so many have hit the road working remotely. Instead of us continuing to duplicate efforts in education and technical support – we’re going at it together to hopefully give more to our community in ways that don’t burn out our teams.
We have so much more ahead of us personally and professionally in the year ahead to reach our personal goals.
(PS. If you’re interested in joining our team – we’ll be looking for tech savvy folks for written and video content creation – do be in touch!)
What’s Next?
We’re currently still in Benson, and had been setting intentions to attend Xscapers NYE and Bash before heading back to Florida in the van.
But, there’s of course a new bump in the road, Omicron. We’ll make the decision soon based on whatever data is available and however our own personal risk threshold responds to interacting with a firehose of people at once.
But regardless, we anticipate by the end of January we’ll be back to the boat – we’ve been seriously missing life aboard Y-Not and Sanford. And projects are awaiting us.
And we know many will ask – will we be resuming the Great Loop this year?
Our focus in the year ahead is our business transition. It’s going to take a lot of our time and energy to accomplish. A slow pace will be key to having sanity during that.
We’ll likely get in some cruising this year, maybe even making some headway on the Loop. But active pursuit likely won’t be our goal. And also incorporate in RV travels too, with intentions of returning to Arizona by year end.
The Great Loop seems like just the adventure to officially resume once we’ve accomplished our goals of achieving the semi-retired life in 2023.
Thank you for coming along virtually on this adventure –
we so enjoy sharing this space with you!Wishing you ALL the best in 2022!
Our past year end wrap-ups:
2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012,
2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020
Happy New Year all year !!!
Marvin and Collette
Very much enjoyed the live session on Monday. Glad to hear Kiki is doing well. Best wishes for your new business plans. Look forward to your posts next year. I love traveling virtually with you and sharing your everyday activities.
Happy New Year !!!
Despite COVID, it looks like it was an awesome year. Stay safe. Safe travels back to Florida.
I’ve felt like I could feel your burnout across the Internet. I’m so glad you’re taking these steps for your health and happiness. Wishing you smooth transitions!
It makes me so happy to see your interactive map again and to read the summary of your year. Then, of course, your intentions for 2022. Reading it all feels normal and good -brings forth best wishes to you both for a 2022 that’s just what you envision. Hard work but huge payoff by the last part of the year. Carl and I are working on the same. Happy New Year! Thank you -Laurenne
Happy New Year, you guys! As you state, 2021 was another weird one, hopefully 2022 will start to look like ”old times.” 🙂
What a great recap of your travels! Having left the road in Mar 2020 “for a few months” and now being completely ensconced in our house in the Hudson Vally, it’s reading this that makes me want to get back out there. Your plan sounds great and I wish you strength, luck and good health to get it done. Happy New Year
Despite COVID you guys had an amazing adventure filled year. May 2022 be even better!