I Dream of Cyprus
The life of a digital nomad amid WW3
It is March in Iowa. The weather does not know what to do.
Whenever I talk with my daughter about storms, I minimize the drama as though they’ve been making up their tornado stories.
Twice this month, we have cycled from below freezing to 70F and back. We had a tornado warning. I learned thundersnow is a real thing. And a few days ago, we added a blizzard on top of it.
It is 20F as I write. On Saturday it will be 87º.
I Dream of Cyprus
This is a far cry from the weather we had hoped for this winter. Since returning to the United States last summer, we have labored hard to secure a remote job, so we can continue to zigzag around Europe and the US.
Our most recent goal had been to return to Cyprus after Christmas.
Paphos was the second stop of our inaugural European tour. We spent Christmas 2022 through February 2023 there.
In many ways, it was more work for us than our first stop in Albania. Our original Airbnb was terrible, so we had to get a refund and find a new one. I got sick, which required time spent at specialists. And we missed the nomad friends we had left behind in Sarande, Albania.
Though these struggles were hard, they taught us essential skills for this lifestyle. We had amazing experiences and made a new dear friend: Lesia!
Now that we are more experienced nomads, we thought it would be fun to return in January.
A Changed World
Everything changed on February 28th, 2026. Israel and the United States launched their bombing attacks on Iran. Over the next few days, Iran retaliated with a drone strike on the British air base in Cyprus.
While it caused minimal damage and no casualties, it sent shock waves through the residents who scrambled to seek shelter. And it rocked Deana and me.
She quickly confirmed our friend Lesia was OK.
Our next concern was Yaron. He is one of a handful of Israelis we met at Swiss Nomad Fest ‘24. He quickly became a close friend and frequent political sparring partner at my breakfast table.
I wasn’t worried, because last I knew, Yaron was in Tblisi, Georgia.
Deana encouraged me to message him on Whatsapp, and ask where he was.
You’re not going to believe it.
He had recently returned to Israel for a bar mitzva before Israel bombed Iran! And was now stuck! It took him a few weeks to safely leave.
Stay Safe
The global situation emphasizes a phrase we regularly get when we travel:
Stay safe.
The under-my-breath reply is always:
You too!
Every European country and city we lived in has fewer homicides, and violent crimes than our home country. Less obesity and addiction. And most of them rate higher on hapiness indexes. We explicitly choose the countries we travel to based on safety.
And yet, had we been in Cyprus or Greece when the United States joined Israel’s crusade against Iran, our family and friends would have been (justifiably) worried.
It happened three times before:
An earthquake devastated Turkey when we were in Cyprus.
A passenger train collided with a freight train between Thessaloniki and Athens while we lived in Greece.
We were living in Georgia when Hamas attacked Israeli citizens.
Today, I live comfortably alongside the citizens of my home country. But if I was there, you would be telling me: Stay safe.
My friends in Europe don’t have that luxury.
It stirs pangs of grief and anger in me, that we are afforded this luxury despite our country participating in the chaos they are living through.
We started Zigzag Along, with the overt purpose to connect you our friends and readers with the global community:
We believe a sense of connectedness is vital in these perilous times. We hope this newsletter can become a tool to extend our global community to you and include people who haven’t (yet!) traveled.
This newsletter is your chance to share in our sense of wonder, connect with people we meet along the way, and perhaps learn more about yourself in the process. 1
Wherever you are in the world, when you read the news of conflicts, remember people like our Ukrainian friend Lesia living in Cyprus, and our Israeli friend living in Georgia.