Traveling full-time is one of those things that seems very complicated and mysterious because we don’t have realistic examples of how it works.
In reality, it’s not necessarily more or less complicated than living in one place. When I’m feeling frazzled about my life of travel, I remember the stress of difficult neighbors, plumbing explosions, unpredictable commutes, and office drama and feel grateful that whatever I’m dealing with has an automatic expiration date. In a few weeks I’ll switch locations and whatever is not a good fit for me will be staying behind.
My key to full-time travel is house sitting. It dramatically reduces my expenses, introduces me to locals wherever I go, and provides a sense of structure I find helpful.
As anyone who’s tried pet sitting as a way to avoid paying for a hotel can tell you, it’s not for everyone. Staying in other people’s homes in foreign cities can be wildly disorienting. Moving from one apartment to another — and getting used to pets and routines in each place — becomes exhausting. Planning things for each destination transforms from fun fantasy to drudgery. Last minute schedule changes and gaps in the schedule cripple people with anxiety.
People who are just starting out as house sitters often express disbelief at how anyone can do it for so long, since after a few weeks they’re ready to book the next flight home. I understand what they’re talking about because I’ve experienced the same things. Here’s how I’ve shifted my travel to be meaningful, rewarding, and sustainable.
I travel slow
Despite my daily Instagram posts, people still imagine I spent a big chunk of my life on an airplane. This isn’t the case at all. I flew a lot more before I became a full-time traveler, since I was always flying back and forth to my home base. Now most of my trips are one way bus tickets.
I prioritize long sits and fill in the gaps with shorter sits. Those short sits are either in the same area as where I’m coming from or going to or somewhere in the middle. I’ll spend weeks or months traveling distances people would think nothing of driving for a day trip. I’ll spend weeks or months hopping from one neighborhood to another in the same city. This slow pace means I’m spending most of my time in familiar areas, surrounded by familiar faces.
My life of full-time travel looks nothing like someone’s 12 countries in 10 days European vacation or their week on the beach at a resort in Mexico. This isn’t a break from my life; this is my life. Moving my self and my things from one place to another is a disruption that would make it difficult to keep up with my responsibilities. By prioritizing long sits and spending a long time in the same area, I minimize how much time I’m spending working from airport terminals or worrying about flight delays.
I pack light
I hate carrying things. To a degree that’s irrational. I much prefer being a little chilly occasionally to carrying a sweater I might not need. I hate how there’s always something in my bad I never end up using.
The only time I’ve really regretted this choice was when I did not take the opportunity to bring more things with me on my way to Calgary, as the headlines filled with warnings about the pandemic. Still, being a stranded traveler whose four outfits were turning into rags while all the “nonessential” shops were closed and online shopping stopped working forced me to solve problems without relying on my credit card. Discovering how eager people were to sort through the things they’d Marie Kondoed from their closets and deliver them to my tiny house hideaway was heartwarming.
I’m amazed by the things people imagine I need to carry with me. I need very little because I’m staying in other people’s homes. I use their spices and condiments. I use their standing desks or improvise one with a stack of cookbooks or board games. I watch their TVs with their HBO accounts. I use their beach towels, picnic blankets, and spare water bottles for long hikes. They dig through their hall closets to find rain gear, mittens, snow shoes, and muck boots that fit me.
I adapt my diet to the house and not just when I’ve promised to not bring animal products into someone’s vegan kitchen. If the people I’m house sitting for have a kitchen set up for a certain type of cuisine, that’s what I cook, too, while I’m there. I’ll buy all sorts of ingredients for long sits, but most of the time it’s easier to embrace what’s there.
Of course, I’m wearing my own clothes. I’ll hand wash things every day or two so I always have clean clothes and put everything in the machine when I wash the sheets. If there’s something I need, I can buy or borrow it. When I’m in one place for a long time my wardrobe slowly expands. It’ll shrink back down to fit in a personal item with a trip to the donation bin before my next flight.
This means that packing and unpacking is not a big affair. It also makes it much easier to keep track of things. I generally keep my things gathered together in a few spots — all my clothes on a windowsill, my work things on the kitchen counter, my tote and shoes by the door — to manage my natural absentmindedness.
If you are concerned about using someone else’s sheets and kitchen sponge or have specific standards for how you want things done, I highly recommend you not house sit. This is why RVs, boats, and vacation homes exist. If you want your things, your way, recognize that about yourself.
I have “home bases”
People often tell me how as much as they love traveling, nothing beats coming home to their own bed. I am a bit more polyamorous in my notions of home. Quite a few places feel like home to me. I do a lot of repeat house sits and it very much feels like coming home to have people who’ve become close friends open their doors to me. I know the names of the neighbors’ dogs and the way to the shops. My hands find light switches in the dark without a thought.
I do have an apartment in Toronto full of my things. It’s rented out, so each time I go “home” my things have been rearranged a bit. My dishes and plants may or may not be the same ones I left. Some of the furnishings are things from long-dead family members and other items of sentimental value. Others are things I hastily ordered from IKEA and picked up at HomeSense after my ex-wife and I separated. As much as I know it’s my apartment — I don’t need to tell anyone if I drop a glass and I can paint the walls if I feel like it — it feels a lot like staying in the home of a family member or former roommate.
The big thing that makes a place feel like home is having a community there. I have that where I grew up in New Jersey. I have that scattered across New York City. I have that in Toronto. I have that in Lisbon. It’s no surprise that I have plenty of friends who’ve moved to other cities or are also travelers, so I have friends in a lot of places.
Spending time each year in the same cities also makes traveling light more sustainable. I can stash out-of-season items or things I’m tired of wearing in a friend’s closet and grab it a few months later when I’m back in town.
I embrace where I am
Part of embracing where I am means not spending every free moment on the phone with family and friends in other places.
I moved to Rochester to attend RIT right around when long-distance phone bills stopped being a thing. I thus spent a huge amount of time on the phone with my girlfriend and friends back at home. I ended up dropping out of RIT after a single quarter, which gave me an accidental A/B test of two three month periods of living far away from everyone I knew, since I’d also just spent the summer in Germany on a study abroad program. At the University of Konstanz I relied on the computers in the library to email people at home. This being in the Friendster era, I’m pretty sure I set up a blog to keep in touch with people, since there was only so much time I could realistically spend in the library or internet cafes.
Comparing these two experiences, one after the other, I regretted how much of my time in Rochester was spent mentally at home in New Jersey. This made it easy to decide, a few years later when I was getting ready to go back to Europe, not to figure out how to get my cell phone to work abroad and not to bother lugging my giant laptop around.
These days my phone is practically an appendage to my body. Still, I’ll go long periods without checking messages, where I’m using my phone as a map, a camera, and a notepad. When I’m spending too much time mentally tethered to my family and friends in other places, I’m prevented from connecting to the people and places there in front of me.
I prefer to stick within walking distance of wherever I’m staying. I’ll hop on the metro or drive to do something special or visit friends, of course. Most of the time, though, I’m content to enjoy whatever’s nearby. Having a dog to walk and traveling without a car makes this inclination seem more socially acceptable.
I have big projects
The people most likely to quit their job, sell everything they own, and set off for a life of full-time travel are people who are totally burnt out. They need a few weeks or months of laying on the beach, lingering at cafes, and enjoying long walks to recover. After that, though, they’re struck by malaise.
The same thing happens to many people who retire, regardless of whether they’re staying at home, moving, or traveling. People are not meant to just relax and enjoy themselves forever. A life of ease, where everything goes smoothly, is not the route to happiness.
When we stay at home, it’s easy for our days to fill up with meaningful work. We help out by providing childcare and helping our neighbors in other ways. We get involved with the community garden, the CSA, and local activism. Travel is great, but touring your hundredth palace this year is not going to provide you with a sense of purpose in the way that being enmeshed in your community does.
A lot of people stop traveling and settle down in a new place because they’ve discovered a project that speaks to them or found a community that feels like home. People who keep traveling long-term have projects that keep them busy with work that feels meaningful and provides them with a sense of community that either aren’t location specific or require that they keep traveling.
I’m fortunate to have a job that feels meaningful — running an online community for people involved in care work, The Caregiver Space — that allows me to travel. Spending time in other places gives me the opportunity to understand how people’s experiences of care work differ from place to place. During long sits I embed myself with local care support programs to understand how they work and see their impact. I’ve spent the past few years obsessively researching the history of care work. Traveling allows me to visit archives, tour relevant historic sites, and meet with historians.
My work ties me to my laptop for a certain amount of time, while being flexible enough to allow me to travel. I can schedule meetings around when I’ll be switching locations. I don’t need to be online for specific hours, so I can enjoy a long hike when the weather is nice. My job is important to me and I can directly see the impact of my work, so it’s easy to find the motivation to get things done, no matter where I am. Traveling is a lot less fun when you’re unable to enjoy the area because you’re dealing with back-to-back calls, frantically troubleshooting unstable wifi, or stressed out from dealing with coworkers you dislike.
Other projects I’ve found meaningful have been volunteering with the Crisis Text Line and Speak Social. These projects are quite different, yet all of them give me the opportunity to have deep interactions with people, continually learn new things, and feel like I’m contributing to the greater good.
Having the opportunity to work and volunteer online provides me with sources of meaning flexible enough to continue as a travel full-time. I also have a steady stream of little projects and goals for different sits.
But we all need an address
A lot of life admin requires me to provide an address. People often insinuate that no matter what address I put down, I’m committing fraud. This seems silly to me. How many people leave their own beds empty while they spend every night with their significant other? There’s no law requiring you sleep at the address listed on your ID a certain number of nights a year.
Depending on the circumstances, I’ll use the address of a friend or family member where I could stay at any time. They have a spare room that “has my name on it,” have a box of my things in a closet, and will let me know if something arrives in the mail. I can also use my address in Toronto, which remains my permanent address since a) I bought it to be my primary residence b) all my things are there, and c) I own it, even if it’s currently rented out so I can’t actually sleep there.
Unless you want to move abroad and live in one place for at least a few years, I would not suggest you get residency in another country. Moving to Canada was a huge amount of work. If you want to travel full-time, don’t do what I did! If you want to spend a year in Europe, I suggest you learn the Schengen shuffle. You can easily save yourself endless hassles and travel the world for years using tourist visas automatically granted upon entry.
Will I settle down?
I’m as surprised as anyone that I’m still traveling full-time. I didn’t set out to become a full-time traveler; it just sort of happened. My apartment is too expensive to leave empty, so I rented it out for a trip. Near the end of the trip, my tenant wanted to stay and I realized it was easier for me to find a house sit in Toronto than to find another tenant as great as him.
I bought my apartment with the plan to spend most of the year living in my apartment and part of the year traveling, but it hasn’t worked out that way. The timing of my research, opportunities to do incredible house sits, family obligations, and my tenants’ plans — oh, and the pandemic disrupting everything — have meant that I keep being unable to actually stay in my apartment. In the meantime, I’ve been enjoying traveling full-time, so I don’t have a ton of motivation to figure out how to get things to align.
Still, I can’t imagine I’ll want to travel full-time forever. This means I need to keep my apartment in Toronto. Decades of government policies that treat housing as a financial instrument first and homes second have resulted in skyrocketing housing costs. Like many people locked-in to their current housing, I can’t afford to pay market rate rent in Toronto and certainly wouldn’t be able to buy a new place in the future.
Ontario’s housing regulations assume all owners are rich, all renters are poor, and everyone wants to live in one place from the day they become adults until the day they die. There are a ton of people who need medium-term housing in Toronto as they complete medical fellowships, study abroad programs, temporary work assignments, and working holiday visas. Lots of people don’t want to be locked into a lease as they get settled in a new city or go through another life transition. Medium-term housing options have vanished in the world of AirBnB and the latest housing laws, so it’s easy to find tenants but unclear what the regulations actually are for something that’s longer than 30 days and less than lifetime tenancy.
Traveling full-time requires a baseline level of health and a source of income that isn’t location dependent, two things that are very much not guaranteed. Settling down after life as a nomad will bring its own challenges. In the meantime, I’m enjoying this incredible experience.
