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As many of you know, for a longtime I’ve been a proponent of the digital slowmad lifestyle, where you essentially have a home base that you stay at for most of the year and spend 2 – 6 months of the year traveling. In the last 8 weeks however, I have been considering ending my apartment lease in Denver & turning to traveling full time.
Today I sent an email to my apartment complex asking them to formally terminate my lease, but why did I do this?
While I can list out a few reasons, this change largely came about from an emotional desire to go back to full time traveling. My heart or soul, or neuro-chemicals [-or-insert your philosophical belief about the “soul” here] don’t feel the way they used to about Denver. Furthermore, I’m excited about adventures again! I have plans to go to Uganda, Ethiopia, Egypt & France in the upcoming 6 months! For a long time, Denver felt like home, I got excited at the end of trips with the thought of coming back home, but lately that feeling has been replaced with agony.
On the plane trip from Athens in July 2021 I cried about leaving, (check out my epic bike trip on that trip here). I was dreading going back to Denver at the end of my time in Dominican Republic in October 2021 and now I’m in January of 2022 sitting in a cafe in Cape Town, and I hate the idea that I have a return flight back to Denver in March, which is two months away!
While there is undeniably a large emotional link to my choice to travel full time, I can point to some catalysts and contributing factors in the last year or two that lead me to this decision
- (90% of) My clients are okay with me working from wherever I want
- This is a huge part of my decision, I feel confident that I won’t lose my clients if I’m traveling regularly. A big part of this is through figuring out how to best work in different timezones
- I’ve figured out some pretty sure-fire ways to find fast wifi anywhere
- I realized I’m really not that close to people in Denver anymore
- I have incredible friends in Denver, people I want to keep in touch with for the rest of my life, but my sister has recently left Denver, my mom’s not too keen on staying there and one of my best friends is married now and pretty committed to building his own family. So my social circle in Denver has faded a bit, this is certainly a part of losing that emotional tie to the place
- I’m better at getting plugged into a new community
- I love hostels and if I could get fast enough wifi at every single hostel I stayed at, I’d stay at them longterm because you invariably build a community at them. It’s easy to make friends, and the staff is much warmer than a proper hotel.
- Also, now that I’m a digital nomad it’s a bit easier to find like-minded people in most countries of the world, it gives me a group to easily plug into in at least half of the places I find myself (note to self – write a blog about how to get connected to new places you travel to).
- I want to practice my f***ing foreign languages with people, face to face
- Putain de merde, it’s difficult to find French and Mandarin Chinese speakers in Denver!
- I’m not super interested in the dating pool in Denver
- I’m not into white chicks and Denver is mostly white people – I’d like to word it more eloquently than that, but it’s the truth 😂