2019 was a year of constant motion for my wife Kayla and I.
Once we quit our jobs in January and February, we started taking trips and renovating our house. Once the renovations were wrapped up, we packed up all of our stuff into a storage unit (actually our one car garage) and rented out our townhouse. Once we left Fort Collins in early June, we’ve lived a nomadic life. Throughout the year, I took note of – and built a spreadsheet to track – where we slept each night. I also calculated how many miles we traveled during 2019. The numbers are crazy!
We traveled 64,509 miles last year! That’s equivalent to 2.6 times around the world.
111 days during the year, we would sleep in a different place than the night before. We slept on a total of 74 different beds, floors, couches and patches of ground. We spent the night in 17 US states and 18 foreign countries. We stayed in 18 hotels and 10 AirBNBs. From a Caesar’s Palace room overlooking the Las Vegas strip to a small apartment in Montenegro, we averaged spending just 1.93 nights per rented room. We were moving all the time.
3 nights were spent in airline seats 30,000+ feet above the surface of the planet. One chilly night in March was spent speeding across Texas on a road trip back from New Orleans. 13% of our nights were spent on pull out couches, which meant 48 very stiff mornings. We setup and packed up our tent 9 times and visited 11 national parks. The pace was maniacal at times and it was exhausting.
From the time we packed our house and hit the road to the time we got back to Colorado 6 weeks later, we moved 25 times over 45 days. We averaged just 41 hours in each place before moving on. We slept on the floor of friends apartments, in a tent in Olympic National Park, in an airline seat over the Canadian Arctic, in a caravan in on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast, in a tiny flat in Paris and our uncle’s house in Sandpoint Idaho. So when we pushed our twin beds together in Cabin 7007 aboard the MV World Odyssey, it finally felt like home. We spent 24% of the year – 89 nights – sleeping on the ocean. 67 of those were spent cruising at an average of 12 knots across 2 oceans and 11 seas. That beautiful German cruise liner became our most consistent sense of home after we left Fort Collins.
The craziest statistic from all of this tabulation is that 29 different friends and families opened their homes to Kayla and I last year. Several friends even gave up their own beds so that we could sleep comfortably. They showed so much hospitality and love in those interactions, we tried to repay them with cooking as many meals as we could. These interactions allowed us to be a part of intimate family events across the world: the Orthodox christening of a niece in Bulgaria, birthday parties for a friend’s mother in Pittsburgh and several more on the ocean, an Orthodox wedding in Romania, a non-religious US ceremony, a Muslim wedding in Morocco and the loss of one of our tour guide’s father. We felt so blessed, so fortunate and so happy to be a part of those events.
We also felt unsettled at times. The constant motion allowed us to experience so many distinctive cultures, landscapes and events but we missed the creature comforts of home.
Some days we just wanted to know where we were sleeping that night, instead of having to figure it out once we got to a new city. The traveling took a toll on my body too. Jet lag and exhaustion – I can’t sleep on planes or buses – compromised my immune system and a chest cold persisted for six weeks. My back kept giving me issues after sitting in cramped buses, sleeping on different beds and road tripping in a car for 8 hours a day. Stomach bugs from a variety of meals flushed out the system a handful of times. The lack of routine made it more difficult to exercise consistently and eating was… all over the place. From the keto diet to a French onslaught of carbs, the scale went up and down and back again.
Please believe me, these are not complaints. Rather, they are real feelings of being on the road.
Somedays, we had to accept that homesickness was real. I missed sitting on my couch and watching Netflix. I missed Finn. I missed going to the gym and playing basketball. I wished my friends and brothers could enjoy things alongside me. I missed firm beds and a good pillow. The pressure to make the most of places finally submitted to these feelings in hilarious days: watching Keeping Up with the Kardashians for an afternoon in Romania, binge watching Youtube videos in Costa Rica and watching Dallas Buyers Club three times in as many days on the ship.
It’s been a real journey of self-awareness and self-respect. We’ve realized that traveling is not always:
‘AWESOME!’
‘FUN!’
‘EXCITING!’
Sometimes traveling is tough. Sometimes you just want to be home. Sometimes you just want a Chipotle burrito. The best thing to do is… listen to your body and mind. Don’t feel guilty for taking a day to lay on the bed and do nothing. The next day will be that much better for it.
With that said… We’re back in Colorado but don’t really have a home, at least not until June. It has been a weird transition to be in the same place for 10 days, not moving. My mom has graciously hosted us in her basement but it doesn’t quite feel like ‘home’. So, we will move again and continue our nomadic life in just 5 days when we head to Tubac, Arizona to help with Kayla’s father’s ranch.
And so we move again…
– Lane
