What do you do all day?

In my working career, I went to a LOT of retirement parties. I never liked them much because I was always jealous, but I was interested in the questions that usually got asked of the new retiree. What are you going to do all day? I like hearing about other people’s hobbies, and where they wanted to travel. But I was always surprised by the amount of people that didn’t really have much to say about their retirement goals. I think we are all curious about what people do all day when they don’t have to go to work every morning. For some reason, people are even more curious about retired nomads. What do people do when they don’t have gardens to care for, cars to rebuild, houses to maintain, friends to hang out with, or grandkids to babysit. Things are a bit different when you are always traveling; and many folks assume nomads or semi-nomads are in full-time “vacation mode”.

I believe retired folks should focus on some basic things every day/week to be a happy healthy person regardless if you are traveling full time or not. I will try to organize what we do into these categories.

1. Exercise your body, 2. Exercise your mind, 3. Be creative, 4. Do the needful, 5. Have hobbies, 6. Be social, 7. Help others

Exercise your body – I had envisioned my traveling retirement as riding bikes in many different countries. That hasn’t really happened much. I do rent bikes once in a while, but it usually isn’t very cheap. Renting a bike for 2 weeks is sometimes more than the bike costs. I do bike shares often, but those don’t fit me enough to bike more than 10 miles. So biking isn’t my main form of exercise, currently. While traveling, walking and hiking is my go to physical activity. I do waterfall hikes, walk on beaches, or just walk around town. We are averaging about 11,000 steps a day for the past year which happens naturally for us by seeing new places. I enjoy being outside in a foreign country rather than finding a hotel or resort gym to work out in. Our upcoming fall travels will include 2 bouts of thru-hiking in France, we’re very excited for this.

Exercise your mind – I still read online the local news back home every day. I also try to understand the news of the places I’m at, have been, or will be going. I am very interesting in international politics and how different countries operate. My wife reads a lot of books, but I am usually more interested in shorter non-fiction info that I find online and rarely get into novels or nonfiction books. In addition to reading stuff online, I play a lot of puzzle games on my phone. I have been playing Words with Friends (Scrabble) for years now and usually have about 20 games active.

Traveling is also a great way to continue learning. We go on many city tours, visit a lot of museums and historical sites, and I have learned so much about history, architecture, archeology, anthropology, art history, and just different cultures. I really enjoy it and I get a little antsy if we spend weeks just hanging out on beaches. Although sometimes it is nice to take a break from “my life of world learning” and just sit on a beach for a week or so.

Be Creative– This one is a bit hard for a lot of nomads. It is tough to travel with musical instruments or art supplies (although some people do). M sometimes carries a travel watercolor set to capture some of things we see as a painting. I think about doing that… but I haven’t yet. And yet, we’re committed to being carry-on only people, and space (and weight) are at a premium. I take a lot of pictures and I suppose that could be seen as a creative outlet. But to me, it is mostly just taking pics as a record of where we have been. My creative outlet is this blog. I enjoy writing about the places I have seen and including my favorite pics of the things we see. In addition to being a travel blog, I often write about the ins and outs of our semi-nomadic lifestyle for our retired nomad community. I like sharing my thoughts about our crazy life and adventures and I would call that being “creative”.

Do the needful – We are retired but we do have some “work” to do once in a while. Life maintenance, if you will. We still pay bills and have to do our taxes. We have regular investment reviews to ensure we are still on track. I still need to do things like get haircuts which can be a little challenging because of language differences. Laundry still needs to get done. If we don’t have a washer in our Airbnb, then we need to find a laundry service (which is usually pretty easy). I do a lot of grocery shopping, although I really do enjoy the challenges of foreign grocery stores. Also planning for future travel, although this overlaps as a hobby :-).

Hobbies – Our hobbies are a bit different than if we lived fulltime in one location. Our hobbies are mostly portable. Things like snorkeling, biking, kayaking and hiking will depend on the location we are in but I usually find something physical to do. Birdwatching can be done almost anywhere and you really only need some binoculars and a smart phone. Here is a great vid by my fellow nomads Robb and David about birding while traveling. We usually stay in Airbnb’s rather than hotels because we enjoy cooking which I would consider a hobby. We just started a Facebook group called Nomadic Cooking to share our creations with other retired nomads. My biggest hobby is Travel Planning. I spend a lot of time reading travel blogs, watching youtube travelers and researching new places to go. I really like planning out transportation and accommodations and developing a digital post-it note board with our plan for the next couple of years. I enjoy the challenge of trying to get credit card points and then using them for free travel. We used points to pay for many of long-haul flights, including our upcoming business flights next fall from Athens to Mexico City.

Community – One of the difficult parts of our life is being away from a lot of friends and family for most of the year. We love when they can come visit us on the road but that can be difficult to make work with people’s schedules. So, we are really interested in our online retired nomad community. We share our locations and often have meet ups all over the world. We have had over a dozen meetups in the last year. Most of our interactions are online sharing travel info but we hope to develop better friendships in the next couple of years.

Volunteer – Many retired nomads incorporate volunteer stays into their travels. I have been tutoring at a school in Bucerias, Mexico during our longer stays the last couple of years. I am really going to miss those kids and will probably figure out a way to return for a 5th stay in Bucerias although it might be a while. Besides helping kids, we are also interested in volunteering for animal and environmental causes and have visited some places in different countries. We are also considering volunteer opportunities to help folks who are practicing and perfecting their English-language skills. We tend to only spend a week in locations so we need to slow down a bit to make time for volunteering. It is another reason to stay longer in a town.

So that is a bit of what we do… but what do our nomad friends do? I think a lot of them are like us but as I said in my last post, we are a very diverse group. A lot of people are into cruising between continents to save some money using repositioning cruises. We haven’t tried that out because of environmental concerns but we might in the future. Lots of people are scuba divers which we have also not gotten into yet. Some people love fishing all over the world. We have also talked to many people that have done long hiking treks like the Camino de Santiago. We are going to try that out this fall with a couple of 5 day hikes in France. Some nomads are very adventurous and do a lot of African Safaris, Amazon boat trips or travel in out of the way places in India, China, Africa or South America. Some people just stick to the big cities and stay in the bigger hotels. Many nomads are house sitters so they spend a lot of time taking care of pets and walking their dogs during the day. Some nomads we know, are way better writers than I am, and can finance some of their travels with their travel articles or books. Many people have blogs or vlogs as hobbies to share their travels with the rest of us. Just like my last post, nomads, like most retired people, are too diverse to have a definitive answer. We all have our own way.