Overcoming Homesickness, Overwhelm, and Travel Challenges: Life as a Full-time Traveler
As full-time travelers, we look forward to eating exotic foods and checking out famous UNESCO sites, but we know that with those cool experiences come the inevitabilities of homesickness, overwhelm, and various travel challenges. We’ve crafted strategies to help us swiftly navigate through these tough spots, allowing us to get back to savoring our travel adventures.
Staying Connected
One key approach to staying connected is to minimize friction in communication for the important people in our lives. It may cost a little more, but we have international roaming built into our cell phone plan. We land in a new country and we are immediately up and rolling. We can text our children as soon as we land to let them know we’re safe. If they’ve texted or called us when we are on a flight, we know before we even disembark. By not needing a local SIM card, we don’t have to send anyone our new number because our number never changes. Although FaceTime and Skype don’t require cellular service, both chew up data and there’s a greater risk of poor connections and disconnects, which can be frustrating enough to be a reason for even friends to not want to deal with the hassle of making phone calls to us.
Time zones can be confusing and it’s even harder when people aren’t exactly sure where in the world we are at any given moment. Also it’s easy for our loved ones not to reach out because they’re worried they’re interrupting an excursion or our sleep or our dinner. Of course it’s likely never a bother to us, but we’ve found that we might need to be the ones to initiates contact a good portion of the time. I wear an Apple Watch with a display of two additional time zones beyond my own local time. By automatically providing the times in two other cities, I don’t have to do the math.
We try to be in touch by texting links to interesting articles we’ve read, knowing birthday information for everyone and sending good wishes by phone or text. We take note of family’s weather and check in if we see it’s been extra hot or wet or snowy. We follow the social media of our friends who use it and read, like, and comment on their posts. It’s an easy way to be looped into what’s going on in their lives. We have friends who have routines with their grandkids or parents where there is a certain, consistent time of day where they check in for a video call.
Of course the easiest way we keep in touch is by coordinating planned visits home once or twice a year so that everyone can protect those dates. The other option is arranging a meetup in some cool place in the world. We look forward to anticipating and planning the details of our visit, our time apart passes more quickly, and it’s one more thing for us to connect about in the interim. While it was hard to say goodbye to our daughter when she visited us in Japan, we minimized the sting with a plan to reconnect in Italy. We lived in separate states before we became nomads, so it's not as though we saw her more than a few times of year anyway. It helps to know we’ve prioritized time to see family. By staying in frequent, regular contact, we also don’t lose track of the day-to-day little things that are important in the moment.
We also have far-flung people we rarely saw when we were living more conventionally because too many miles separated us. We’ve deepened those relationships by detouring into their city en route to somewhere else or by making that one of our destinations. We’ve been surprised at how many old friendships we’ve been able to reignite because we’re able to visit them more easily.
Managing Travel Fatigue
To counter exhaustion or the feeling that being away from our loved ones is too hard, we decided to slow travel. We’ve found that it’s easy to be more emotional when we don’t get enough rest. In the same way that a little candy is a treat but too much makes our stomachs ache, we’ve found that moving around too much is stressful. Staying in one place for a full month is our sweet spot. During that month, we try to limit how many all-day or multi-day excursions we book. If the bed’s a little uncomfortable or the shower’s too small, a month isn’t such a long time that it’s unbearable. It’s enough time for us to explore and have downtime while still allowing us to travel to a dozen new countries or cities in a year that are also on our wish list. We download books to our phones and have an Apple TV for evenings when we just want to chill with a movie. We remind ourselves that this is our new way of living and not merely a vacation, and that it’s important to have time to recuperate. We weren’t on the go nonstop at home, so we’ve reframed our expectations of traveling to match our energy levels and protect the time we need to recharge.
There is a lot of planning and decision making that goes into traveling. Choosing the right cities or countries that have the best weather with the fewest number of tourists while still being affordable, determining the most efficient and straightforward transportation methods, selecting the most interesting activities while you’re there, and picking accommodations central to everything you want to see and do can feel impossibly challenging. Slow travel means we can make fewer decisions while still keeping things fresh.
We also choose to stay in the same basic region for several months so we don't have a lot of tiring, long-haul flights. Not only is this cheaper, but it allows us to explore more of a section of the world and see how nearby places have influenced each other. We’re more likely to experience similar lifestyles and cultures, which are easier for our brains to process versus getting acclimated to vastly different parts of the world from one month to the next. We deliberately build in down time for after we arrive so we can give our minds time to adjust. We often wait until we arrive to see how we feel before jumping into any formal tours just so we have a chance to decompress a bit from the stress of travel.
Even though we save money by cooking versus eating out at every meal, we give ourselves permission to eat out for the first few meals in a new place so that we don't have the overwhelm of finding a grocery store and trying to scope out familiar foods or navigating how to cook in our new surroundings with potentially limited utensils, especially when we’re probably hungry. It took some time but we learned to give ourselves grace if dinner ends up being a burger or some other Western comfort food. Since we’re staying for a while, we know we’ll be eating plenty of local foods once we get settled a bit.
Simplified Travel Planning
Skyscanner app (or use desktop version)
We sketch out our travel nearly a full year in advance so that we can make arrangements for meetups with family and friends, but we keep our schedule flexible, too. We reserve refundable Airbnbs and lock in early only our long-haul flights. Activities and deep dives into our locations can wait until we’re closer to the time of arrival. This gives us the freedom to pivot if there’s an opportunity somewhere we don’t want to miss. Skyscanner.com allows users to choose "everywhere" as a destination, so if we want to go somewhere on a whim, it will provide the cheapest flight location near to where we are. It’s a great way to add spontaneity on the occasions when we prefer not to over plan.
Routines and Connectedness
When we’ve had moments of sadness, we eventually recognized that it’s often caused by feeling invisible or lonely. We counter that by establishing routines. Frequenting a great, cozy coffee shop and making friends with the waitstaff is one of our favorite ways to feel more connected to a place and its people. We enjoy the comfort of familiarization, and it’s heartwarming when our server knows our order or their faces light up in recognition when we arrive. And we enjoy seeing familiar faces, too. We like learning their names and having them reveal parts of their background and their story. Consistent exercise keeps our dopamine levels high and stable and has the added benefit that we run into people who also have parallel schedules to our own. We feel “seen,” and that’s been important to us. Making friends across dinner tables or in the elevator and then meeting up later are ways to enhance the experience of our travels. Having shared experiences and learning about other people is part of the reason we travel. We also try to have a reasonable and consistent bed time so we aren’t overtired and to protect our health. We choose Airbnbs over hotels so that we feel less transient. Our Airbnbs typically have a small kitchen and kitchen table, a couch or chairs and a bed. It feels like we are living in a home and having a more relatable experience to the people around us.
Communication is Key
There have been a few occasions when Kevin has struggled and felt “this is too hard.” One such occasion was when we arrived in a very poor part of Egypt, which we learned to love after we gave it a little time. Another was when we were hit with freezing weather in Lecce, exacerbated by inadequate indoor heating in our Airbnb in February. To battle these feelings, we tell ourselves that we're only in this place for a month and we can put up with a lot for that short amount of time (actually Lecce was just two weeks, so that was even easier). But when we weren't feeling it in Ho Chi Minh City, we decided to cut our losses and shift to Hanoi, which totally redeemed our time in Vietnam. We try to be kind to ourselves and be tuned into what we need, and whenever possible, we make adjustments. Life is too short to be miserable.
It’s unproductive to keep our unhappiness bottled up. We’ve started talking through our discomforts instead of burying them so that we can work on reasonable solutions. That's how we ended up in Hanoi. Kevin mentioned in passing a few times that he was unhappy in Saigon. Rather than just wait it out, we agreed it made more sense to cut our losses and look past the sunk costs we’d invested in our Airbnb. We haven’t had to make a shift like this before or since, but it’s freeing to know that we can find an alternative to our current situation if it’s not working for us.
Gratitude and Adaptability
Most of the time, though, we pinch ourselves that we get to live this lifestyle. When we step outside our Airbnb and we're near Greek ruins or impressive temples or medieval buildings, etc., we’re very grateful that there's rarely a dull moment, even when we're doing absolutely nothing but sipping aperitivi in Torino! It helps that we've worked hard to choose places to travel to that really excite us. We weren't sure how well we were going to like Southeast Asia, so we didn't plan very far out in case we wanted to pivot. Surprisingly, we've been really enjoying it and have extended our time here. Now we’ll be Southeast Asia for over seven months! At one point in our planning for 2024, I wasn't feeling energized by some of the destinations we’d chosen, so I gave myself permission to make adjustments.
Support among Fellow Travelers
We built our La Famiglia forum so that there would be a safe place on the internet where fellow travelers could congregate and connect. It’s not easy to find people who completely understand the unique feelings of full-time or extended travel. We’re here for you if you need it at any step along the way! If you’re not part of our forum yet, here’s the link to join!
