We are just completing our Seattle summer back at home. We have spent 3 months seeing a lot of friends and family and getting reconnected after spending most of the year in other countries. The summer flew by but we did have many opportunities to spend some time with people that we really missed. We had a great time connecting back to our neighborhood and city. We saw all our favorite Seattle festivals, music in the parks, baseball games, favorite walks and hikes, and came back to our fav neighborhood restaurants. But what we really wanted to see was the people…. not places. This has been a difficult thing for us in our first years of nomadic life. If we leave for 3 months, 6 month or 9 months…. will we still be able to keep the relationships with our friends and family?
We really like our travel life and it seems that the conversations with everybody this summer after a couple of beers inevitably leads to us pleading “come travel with us!!!”. We are happy with our nomadic lifestyle but at times we can feel a bit lonely on the road. When the only people you talk to all day are your partner and the waiter and a bartender….. it can eventually seem a little isolating. 2023 technology makes it easy to contact people but we tend to just use social media and this blog except for our regular efforts to contact parents and our kids. It would be great if people can some visit us but that isn’t reasonable for many of the people we are close to. Not everyone has the luxury of long term travel windows.
Our kids are just getting started in work life and don’t have unlimited vacation. Why would they want to use their vacation weeks and money to go see their parents on the other side of the world? To get to South East Asia or Europe from Seattle, it takes a full travel day and a lot of money. I can’t expect them to choose to see us over much cheaper and shorter trips closer to Seattle that are still a lot of fun.
Mexico seems like a great connection place and we have spent over a month in Bucerias, Mexico for the last 3 years. There is a direct 5 hour flight from Seattle to Puerto Vallarta and this year we were able to have a few different visitors. We always rent a 2 bedroom Airbnb with the hope that we can make it easy for our friends and family. But, we are a little bit boring in Bucerias…. we just sit on the beach and eat at our same fav restaurants. I have a volunteer job working at a Mexican school and it makes it difficult to prioritize friends and family when I also want to see my students. We really enjoyed our visitors this year but I’m not sure that they will want to return to our adopted Mexican neighborhood. We have booked a 2 bedroom for May of 2024 and hope we people can visit us but will also be happy having our adopted Mexican town to ourselves.
Traveling with people is also not always easy. Everyone has their own structure and ideas of travel. Some people are happy on cruises and all inclusive resorts. Some people are happy in hostels where you can meet new like minded people. Some people want to see everything in their 2 week vacation and prioritize moving to a new town every couple of days. We love walking, biking, and public transportation and realize that some people aren’t really into that. We have our own comfortable zone of staying in Airbnb’s a week or more and it sometimes doesn’t mesh with our friends and family. We want to be flexible to encourage our friends and family to visit us but sometimes it isn’t the way we really want to roll.
We have connected with the traveling nomad community and have begun to meet people that are doing a lot of the same travel as us. We have had meetups abroad and have attended some in Seattle with people that are spending most of their year or all of their year traveling. Next week we are even hosting a meetup in our Columbia City neighborhood. We hope to meet a lot of like minded people so we will have people to talk to all over the world. We love talking travel and it is easy to have conversation with people living the same way we do. We are always on the look out for new places to go and the Facebook groups have really helped us out in travel planning. But it has also brought us new friends and I hope to keep running into those people all over the world.
We do miss our family and friends but we are starting to realize that we need to prioritize our summers in Seattle. We can have a great time with a our friends at a wedding, a house party, a restaurant, our Columbia City deck, or a weekend at our family place on Stretch Island. We need to prioritize people instead of places. I don’t really need to see my friends and family in Thailand…. I am just as happy hanging with them on Stretch Island in Washington State. M and I have our own travel comfort zone and we are happy doing our own thing at our own pace. In our traveling in the next year, we will be joined by M’s brother and sister in law in Spain and my brother and sister in law in Costa Rica. We really looking forward to both of those trips but realize that it isn’t going to happen all the time. Traveling doesn’t need to be our connection to friends and family. We will continue on making our summers in Seattle a jam packed visitation with everyone that will keep us going all year. I’m already looking forward to seeing everyone next summer.
Looking forward to meeting this afternoon!