Our Digital Nomad Story – What We’ve Learned About Full-Time Travel

Hi friends! Lauren here. It’s been a long time coming, but I think it’s time for me to get a little bit more personal and share my and Jason’s journey with full-time travel and content creation. From how it started to how it’s going, the balancing acts that we’ve had to adapt to and the things we’ve learned about ourselves through our digital nomad journey.

But before I get into it, I just want to preface by saying that it’s still a HUGE work in progress. We’ve been taking it one day at a time and are open to any opportunity that arises that may pull us in any other direction! So far, nothing is off the table, and our lives as digital nomads are what we’ve got going on now.

How It Started

Apart from a few months of the year, we have been living out of a suitcase and sleeping in a hundred different beds across four different continents (so far!). It all started back in September of 2021 when I left my cushy corporate job as a mechanical engineer and Jason phased out of his share of the marketing and media company that he started with a uni friend. We booked our first one-way ticket ever and it was Jason’s first time ever stepping foot in Europe!

It was the first time we ever let cheap flights determine where we would go. Aside from our few days in Paris and our major trip to Iceland with our first ever international partnership, we had no plan for where to go next and no idea when we would fly home. The trip ended up being only six weeks, but it was the beginning of dabbling with the unknown, working on the go and releasing consistent content! 

After a few shorter trips with brand partnerships and our two-month long honeymoon, we knew it was time to take our journey to the next level and test our aptitude for full-time travel, with days of exploring for content and days for editing and publishing said content. In 2023, we spent seven of the 12 months outside of Canada. With the first half of the year spent in Southeast Asia, the fall in Central Europe and the end of the year in South America, we were starting to realize a life of digital nomads. 

How It’s Going

It hasn’t been easy but our career choice has been growing nonetheless! We have you, our readers and viewers, to thank for supporting us as we navigate this tricky world of travel content. There’s so much to learn out there and it is constantly changing. 

But just this month, I well surpassed 10k monthly pageviews on this blog and our YouTube watch-hours saw a 25% increase from the last month! Our YT and blog ad revenue is constantly increasing as well as our affiliate income through both streams thanks to you! We have our down days but many more up days since the start of 2024. It’s not much of a nest egg yet but it gets us by and allows us to keep exploring, creating and sharing with you!

Currently, as I write this post, I’m sitting outside our room at the Surfari in Bocas del Toro, Panama. We’re taking a slow day after doing a tour yesterday and taking our night bus back to Panama City tomorrow. And that’s how it goes! An affordable stay, a day of exploring with our cameras and a day of working behind a screen before we’re off to the next place.

Jason and I have been talking about taking it slower to really soak in and appreciate a place more, but to also reset our bodies and minds between all the lengthy travels. It’s been a little bit too “go go go” recently because we’re trying to fit in so much of each country within a shorter burst of time. I just want to be able to see everything! Sometimes I forget that we can always come back to a place to do what we missed.

Balancing the Need for Stability and Desire for Adventure

It’s definitely a struggle to find that balance. I want to be able to experience the majority of what a destination has to offer so that I can be better equipped to share firsthand knowledge with you guys. I don’t want to talk about things I haven’t done and places I haven’t visited! 

But the more I’m out there trying to experience this and that, the less I have time to put pen to paper and crank out the content. There’s definitely a huge backlog of blog posts I need to chip away at – and I am starting to, I promise! 

It’s a learning curve when you only have yourself to depend on and no set deadlines, apart from the deliverables we have for some of the clients we take on throughout our travels. We also sometimes experience temporary burnouts and just want to unplug ourselves for a bit and get into a stable daily routine akin to what we have at home. This is when we’ll book a cozy and clean Airbnb in a large city that gives us a sense of “home” when we’re away from it!

But sleeping in a bed that’s ours, having our own work desk, being in one consistent timezone, and spending quality time with our friends and family on a weekly basis… These are things from our stable life that we have to sacrifice when we’re on the road. But we sacrifice them temporarily for the once-in-a-lifetime adventures we get to share between the two of us.

Keeping a Sense of Community and Connection

No matter how much we love spending every waking moment with each other as husband and wife, life on the road can still get lonely! We make sure to stay in touch with our friends back home with our various Facebook and WhatsApp groups. It sucks missing out on big life moments but we still feel like we are a part of them because of how much they share with us in conversation! 

Within our content creator community, we are constantly engaging with them and having private conversations. They’re going through the same motions as we are! So it’s super helpful bouncing off each other, sharing our struggles and the highs of this nomadic creator lifestyle.

But even so, we still crave social interactions in person and love meeting new people! How do we do that? Well we haven’t yet dabbled in the hostel life to meet new folks. But we love meeting others on group tours we do! We’ve met some incredible couples throughout Asia and South America that we still keep in touch with to this day. We’ll actually be meeting up with some friends we met a year ago in the Philippines when we go to Peru in April!

This is honestly why I’m so grateful for social media. You never feel like you’ll fall out of touch with the friends you meet along the way. And you somehow always feel like you know them! Meeting some friends I hadn’t seen in 15 years once again felt so fluid and natural and as if I just saw them last week! All because I stayed connected with them online.

Adaptability and Optimism

If I could think of two traits I’m thankful I have that have helped me through this journey, it would be my ability to adapt to my circumstances and my optimism for what’s to come. Y’all, if you tend to be stuck in your ways and often to look for the worst in your situation, you’ll be sure to have a miserable time living out as a digital nomad. Or mind you, travelling and going through life in general!

I thank my parents for starting me early with worldwide travel and experiencing various cultures and environments. I’ve also thankfully always been a “glass half full” kind of gal. If things don’t work out, it’s still okay! I might bum around and dwell for a bit, but once there’s nothing I can do about it, it’s time to move on and make the most of what I’ve got going for me.

Throughout this digital nomad journey, I’ve had to work on my gratitude a lot. Be grateful for what we have – we’ve got a roof over our heads, never have to worry about when our next meal is, our safety is always taken care of and so is our health! In spite of a few stomach issues here and there. And if anything went awry, we know we have our travel insurance to rely on! SafetyWing’s Nomadic Insurance allows us to loosen our grip on our reality a little and gives us the peace of mind if things didn’t go as planned on our travels.

Being Open to the Unknown 

The biggest lesson we’ve had to learn throughout this world of nomadic living is being open to the unknown. Relinquishing control over the things we truly have no control over, and being okay with whatever we’re thrown with, is number one.

You don’t know if a flight is going to get cancelled due to bad weather and no one notifies you until you’re sitting at the gate (happened to us in the Philippines). You don’t know if your e-Visas will come in time to make your flight and you’ll be forced to miss it (cue having to extend our Bali visas for a month because we couldn’t make it into Vietnam when our visas came in a day late). And you don’t know if your luggage might not make it to your destination, or if your stomach will react poorly to the local food or if you’ll be stuck somewhere due to horrible flooding.

So much can happen and it was important for us to expect the unexpected. It honestly gave us a huge, new appreciation for when things worked out wonderfully!