Deciding to Go Nomad

The blog started right after we got to our first stop here in Panama, but the dream and the planning of going nomadic began about six months prior.

I think Todd’s reasons for going are similar to mine, but I’ll speak for myself for now.

Traveling has always been one of my favorite things. Ever since I was fortunate enough to go to Taiwan when I was 13 (Thanks Charlie!), I had the bug. Not only to travel, but to go off the beaten path. Honduras is more appealing than San Francisco.

For many years I’d go on a cruise or two every year with my friends, Jonah being the most regular compatriot. I loved two things about cruises – being totally removed from the millions of things going on in my life, and getting to see many new places in a short period of time.

Last year Todd and I were in the office, waiting to go to a movie nearby. We had an hour to kill.

“Hey, check out this video!”

Todd showed me this video :

“Doesn’t that just make you want to travel?” he asked.

Yes, it does. We agreed that we’d go on some random trip somewhere and would buy the tickets before we had to leave for the movie.

We searched around and found good prices on Tokyo and Morocco. Tokyo won out for no reason in particular. We bought our tickets.

We flew to Tokyo with no plans. We had nowhere to stay, nothing to do, and knew no one there. It turned out to be fantastic.

I had a big realization when we were in Tokyo : The United States isn’t definitively the best place on earth. In fact, I preferred Tokyo.

I had always grown up with the idea that the US was the best and everywhere else could only hope to be second place. I still believe that the US is the best place for some things, but it’s not the undisputed champ of the world.

Still, the trip didn’t make me want to move to Tokyo. It made me want to see EVERYWHERE. Surely there was somewhere I’d like even more than Tokyo.

Meanwhile, the US continued its decline under the wise leadership of Bush. Freedoms began to go down the drain and our international reputation started to become a joke. Ron Paul came along as a glimmer of hope, but the was totally ignored by the mainstream media.

In short, other parts of the world were pulling my attention and the US was pushing it away.

Without actually committing to going, I thought I may as well plan a trip. I wrote down a list of all of the countries I wanted to go to. Then I went online and looked through almanacs to see when the weather was best. Local festivals and events were considered too.

It had to be sustainable so that it could be “Life Nomadic” and not “Vacation Nomadic”. I narrowed down the list so that I could stay in the same place for a couple months at a time.

I was hanging out with Todd at the time, so he helped me plan things. By the end we were both commited to going. It was his idea to get tiny backpacks and bring almost nothing. We liked our style of just going without planning anything.

We randomly picked a day, January 7, 2008, to leave. If we didn’t just commit to a day we knew we could put it off forever. There’s never a perfect time to disrupt your whole life and build a new one.