Five years of travel and interacting with other full-time travelers have shown us a pattern about Nomad Life that bears a share. Granted, this life cycle shows a five-year arc, and your version may be a different timeline, but I think the phases are the same. For us, each phase lasted about a year.
We’ve seen this pattern with ourselves, and we’ve seen it with scores of fellow full-time travelers. The pattern for those taking the long-haul view of a full-time traveling life, it goes like this:
First Year of Nomad Life
It’s fun. Exciting. Thrilling. You make tons of mistakes, but you don’t care. They add to the adventure. You’re working on your bucket list. Whether you’re traveling slowly or quickly, you’re loving it. Gelato in every town. Free walking tours abound. You don’t miss things at home yet.
Second Year of Nomad Life
The grief hits you. All of a sudden, you realize that your new life of full-time travel isn’t a vacation. You’ve genuinely left a life behind. The excitement has worn off, and you understand that you’re no longer an Engineer, a Mother, a Community member. You’ve become an Empty Nester, a Retiree, and a Wanderer. Your titles change and you feel grief for the life you left behind.
The same is true for the loss of your things, your house, your car. You may have given them up voluntarily, but grief doesn’t ask permission. Unless you’ve consciously grieved these losses, the grief will catch you.
Third Year of Nomad Life
Routines get established. You have a better picture of what Nomad Life looks like for you and what it actually costs. You’ve got two years of experience with your family and your finances and how they function on the road. You’ve knocked off the urgency of your bucket list and now you’re seeing patterns emerge. Maybe you’ve decided you like fast travel or you want to slow it way down. You like cruises and you don’t care for flying. You’ve discovered who “you” are as a Nomad living a life of full-time travel.
Fourth Year of Nomad Life
In the fourth year, you start framing your mind around intention. What’s the purpose of what you’re doing? In years one and two, the answer was the bucket list. But now the original bucket list is checked off, so why are you traveling? Maybe you need to use a tool like Jo Barnes’ Travel Challenge Cards (we love them) to keep you engaged at the latest centro/cathedral boredom fest.
You’ve seen the reality of “living like locals” and “getting to know the culture.” Have you actually done it? Do you take transit everywhere, stand in line at the post office, and pay your power bill at the 7-11? Have you broken through the service bubble and actually made friends outside of the expats and nomads you’ve met along the way?
What is your intention now?
Fifth Year of Nomad Life
In the fifth year, you start to experiment. You need new news. Airbnb was the answer to every accommodation need, now maybe hotels are the way to go. You’ve grown bored of repositioning cruises and you’re ready to figure out Business class on points. Maybe you’re thinking of getting long-term leases, using a bolthole as a base for trips from rather than living as full-time travelers.
What was working before has become routine and, ah, boring. Your need for new has a higher threshold. Maybe this year is when you try the countries you’ve avoided in order to chase an adventure high the familiar can’t deliver anymore. Uzbekistan anyone?
6th Year of Nomad Life
We are just starting our sixth year of Nomad Life, so I can only guess what this year looks like. But it’s certainly a year where we’re thinking about what life looks like if we were to come off the road. If we do, we know for certain we’ll come off the road in a slow way—a bit at a time and with an eye towards a home in a country where we are not from.
We have changed so much since we left the USA in 2021, which is the whole reason we never wanted a storage unit or to keep our home. We knew we’d be different when we decided to slow down, and we knew then that living in the same place where we started wouldn’t fit the people we’d become.
If you’ve been on the road for five years or more, what advice would you give to those traveling “behind” you. Or if you’ve been on the road for less time, have you been through all of these phases?
Please comment and let me know.
Chris
Might also add YouTube phases for a nomad couple. After a few years, what else is there to say?
I'm about to finish my 4th year of full-time nomad life. I've been through all of the first four phases to varying degrees and appear to be moving into phase 5. I've been to enough places now that I'm seeing patterns develop about what makes a place my kind of place. And I'm realizing I have a list of such places that are ones where I feel comfortable and feel at home, that vibe with me and are like visiting old friends. My "best friends" I can see myself returning to perhaps every year. Other "friends" I will return to but less often, say every other year or every third year. But they're still friends I'll enjoy spending time with. I'm also wanting to keep a few open spaces in the calendar each year for discovery of new places, to enjoy the newness of the experiences and maybe make a new "friend" I will want to add to the ones I periodically visit. One thing (among many) that I love about this lifestyle is that the more you do it the more you evolve. And when you are open to evolving and changing things up, you find that it just keeps getting better. Four years on I'm even happier than when I started!