The Four (+1) Stages of the Digital Nomad
Turning a Page | Back in America | Plus Two Recommendations
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Live From America 🇺🇸
Zigzag Along with Deana & Jeff debuted last October 23rd, 2023.
We had just returned to Eastern Europe after spending four months in America. We started Zigzag Along on the arrival side of world travel with the theme: “This is what it looks like to live in a new land after leaving your home country.”
Change Places
Today marks the first free issue of Zigzag Along sent from America!
It’s been a little delayed, because we’ve been a bit busy from the holidays, and reorienting our lives.
A few weeks before Christmas, we assessed our finances and job prospects, and determined our time in Georgia had come to an end. We made plans to return to Washington state where I could return to substitute teaching and she could work in healthcare. I hastily secured airline tickets to arrive in Iowa just in time to surprise our grandchildren for Christmas.
Christmas
What a joy it was to spend the holidays with our daughter Brit and her husband Nick, our grandchildren, and son Zechariah and his girlfriend Rae. Unfortunately, I unwrapped Covid-19 under the Christmas tree, and then Deana rang in the New Year with a positive test. Thankfully, we recovered quickly. A few days after our grandchildren returned to school, we boarded a plane, and returned to our home in Moses Lake, Washington.
This is not the first major travel transition we’ve made in December.
The Journey (so far)
A year ago, in December, Deana and I left our first nomadic destination: Sarande, Albania. This was a bittersweet time for us. Our months there had brought about a whirlwind of changes. We were reborn in this city along the shores of the Ionian.
We learned what it is like to adapt to a new culture and new language
Our bodies had changed. We’d lost a few pounds, and our cardio health had improved as a consequence of walking everywhere (always uphill, and three flights of stairs) frequently carrying groceries and bottled water.
We were relaxed in a way we had not been for years as the stress of our careers subsided
And I fell in love with these flowers!
Something about them conjured a vibrant revisiting of my childhood.
They did more than take me back to my youth.
They became a new childhood.
Experiencing a foreign country for the first time stimulates your brains in the same manner a child experiences their world for the first time. The new sights, smells, and sounds of Albania created new neural pathways in my brain not dissimilar to the neural pathways made as an infant and toddler when I experienced the world for the first time.
I was reborn in Sarande.
Now that we were preparing to leave we each experienced a huge amount of grief and anxiety.
Sarande had become home to us. We travel with “home” in our suitcase. We unpack “home” and set “home” up.
This was our first time repacking home. We sold our yoga mat, and gave away food and spices.
We were sad to be leaving. Something inside each of us wanted to stay. And we could have! Albania allows Americans to stay for a full year without a visa.
And yet, forces compelled us on. For well over a month, we had been living with the sounds of construction on the street below and the apartment above us. As fall progressed, the weather had gotten cold, windy, and rainy.
In front of us lay the island of Cyprus. But to get there, we had to say goodbye to the comfortable city of Sarande, where we had been reborn.
This transition formed a mind-frame that informs us today.
The Four Stages of Digital-Nomadding
Stage 1 - Leave our home country
Stage 2 - Leave the first country we visited
Stage 3 - Return to our home country
Stage 4 - Leave our home country again.
We had already accomplished stage one. But if we stayed there in Albania, we would be expats; tourists who settled in a new country. Nothing wrong with being an expat. But we had determined to make continuous slow-travel our lifestyle for the immediate future. And that meant we had to move on.
And so we packed up, boarded the ferry to Corfu, and flew to Paphos, Cyprus where we had new adventures.
As I’ve gone through each stage, I’ve reminded myself, “you have no experience doing this whatsoever. You’re gonna be learning.”
We continued this cycle from Cyprus —> Greece —> Bulgaria until we completed Stage Three in July of 2023 and returned to the States and began touring the country visiting family.
During those four months, I posted regularly on social media with the hashtag #americannomads. We were still in motion, doing continuous slow-travel throughout the United States. We visited most of our children; first in Moses Lake, and then in Des Moines, Iowa, Austin, Texas, and Bremerton, Washington. We even met up with Deana’s aunt and cousin in Dallas for the first time in decades!
And then, this October, we completed Stage 4. We left the United States and settled in the Republic of Georgia for an undetermined amount of time. Our original hope was to return to Thessaloniki, but we left the trip in God’s hands.
The Unexplored Fifth Stage
When we announced to our family we were returning to Washington State, my son, who rents from us, asked if we wanted to return to our home. He has been renting from us since we left, and one of his roommates had moved out.
So today we are living in our old home; an unexpected addition to my four stages of digital nomadding.
When we left our house, we assumed we would never return again. We sold most of our belongings. We still have a bed. But no bedside tables. No dresser. No bookshelves.
We are working at our former jobby jobs. I’m a substitute teacher, and Deana has been rehired at Samaritan Healthcare.
How Are You?
I am frequently asked how I feel about this transition.
First, we trust our plans have been in God’s timing throughout the past two years. He has been making us who He wants us to be. We believe we are living in God’s will wherever he has us. And right now, that’s in our house in America. So we strive to be receptive to what He has for us here.
I may be prone to sounding more idealistic and poetic than it actually feels. Nonetheless, it’s what we are trying to live out.
Second, while we enjoy continuous slow travel, it would have been the exception, not the norm, had we sustained it indefinitely without the need to come home for a period to regroup and redefine. This is the end of a season of travel, but not of travel itself.
Lastly, having traveled throughout the European Union, we had set a goal to become a citizen of an EU country for retirement purposes. But we hadn’t nailed down where and how. This return to our home country has forced us to slow down and start working those details out. It will likely require visas to stay in a country for longer than three months, and you simply can’t accomplish those tasks while living abroad. There are too many tasks that require us being in the country of our birth.
The Future
For a season, this newsletter will come with a change in perspective:
“This is what it looks like to live in our home country while preparing for new adventures.”
I am applying for remote work positions and building a remote-first business. I have found that since leaving the reservation of job security I've become an object of curiosity and questioning from people who want to do the same. So I will use this newsletter to talk about that process for people who are interested in the same possibilities.
And we are sitting on a treasure trove of stories and photos from the last year and a half. We look forward to taking the time to reflect and look back at where we’ve been, and share that with you.
Finally, we would love to hear from you! What questions do you have for us? What would you like us to write about?
This Week’s Recommendations
Please note some links in this email lead to affiliate websites where we earn a small commission for your purchases at no additional cost to you.
👨🏼🍳 Jeff’s Kitchen Addition
Moving from one AirBNB to the next, you never know exactly what to expect in the kitchen. After Sarande, we learned not to assume we would have everything we relied on for everyday cooking, so we began accumulating a few utensils.
Regardless of country or apartment, one appliance could always be counted on: the trusty electric tea kettle. Some places didn’t have microwaves. Twice we lived without ovens. But we always had a tea kettle.
Every morning, I would rise before Deana and start brewing coffee with the 2 cup portable french press we picked up at a Starbucks in Corfu. And then settle in to read and pray.
We’d never owned an electric tea kettle in America. I always microwaved water to make morning coffee.
As we settled back into our former home this month, I returned to the microwave to heat water for my morning. It just didn’t feel right.
So the other day, I picked up an electric tea kettle from Grocery Outlet, and I have to say it feels good to return to my morning routine from the past 18 months.
🎧 What’s in Jeff’s Podcast Player?
If you’re curious about remote work, there’s no better primer on the topic than this interview.
We first heard Liam Martin discuss remote work in August 2022, a month before our trip, on an episode of Kristin Wilson’s Badass Digital Nomads. I immediately snatched up his book Running Remote, which is insightful about both the challenges and solutions to remote work. What a pleasure it was for us last summer to hear him speak in person at Bansko Nomadfest. He was gracious enough to answer a few questions afterwards.
Give it a listen. If this topic intrigues you, Liam is the expert.
What a refreshing thought! To be reborn even in the midst of all the chaos going on around us. Through the 6 senses of humanity. As long we make room to flow like water we can be reborn into a fresh way of living!