If you have dreams to see the world, you can travel the world as a nomad. There are many ways to nomad, whether you’re a digital nomad, an active senior nomad like me, a solo nomad, a couple nomad, or an expat living a nomad life.
Us, we’re active seniors who travel the world full time as nomads. What’s that mean? In May of 2021, we sold our house, our car, and everything we owned to get down to two carry-on bags and matching day packs. We started with a collective 50 kg of stuff; after four years of travel, we’ve gotten our total weight down to under 40 kg completely.
What Is a Nomad?
Personally, I define a modern-day nomad as someone who chooses to live a life without a permanent home, carrying all of her possessions with her, moving about the world in a manner she sees fit.
Although I use the word nomad often to define myself and the niche I write about, I prefer full-time traveling nomad, but that’s a mouthful. I’m actually not a fan of the word “nomad” because I feel it’s a bit disrespectful to traditional nomads, people who travel the world also without permanent homes and with all of their possessions, but they also might be managing animal herds, following weather for crops and food, or moving about due to political strife.
If you have a better word, please share! In the meantime, I’ll continue to use “nomad” to describe the life that Steve, my husband, and I currently lead.
How to Be a Travel the World as a Nomad
When we launched in 2021, we had no idea about “how” to be nomads. There were few books, fewer blogs, and a tiny network of nomads who were all trying to figure it out. So we kinda came up with “our way” of how to travel the world as nomads, thinking that our way was the right way to travel full-time. But since then, we’ve met all types of people traveling around the world in the styles that they like the best, which are often very different than our style of chasing 72 degrees, one month at a time.
What Type of Nomad Are You?
Some nomads are like us; we try to stay one month at a time in one location, moving around the world as slowmads. We catch global repositioning cruises to transition from continent to continent, rarely taking long-haul flights. In between months, we’ll “fast travel” for 2-3 weeks catching up on tourist sites.
Others travel even more slowly, getting three-month leases and moving when their tourist visas expire.
Some nomads travel the world more quickly, dashing about a few days to a couple of weeks at a time. Solo travelers may move about on their own. Couple travelers may keep by themselves.
But eventually, it seems, we all tend to find each other as we travel the world. We all seem to be looking for the same things; good weather, good people, and affordable living. Yet, then again, there are luxurious travelers, extreme budgeters, ultralight packers and folks who must carry their favorite things, and more, with them.
Who Are Nomads?
Despite how we travel and what we carry with us, there is a common braid that weaves through the nomad community.
We are curious.
We want to experience how the world works, we gather experiences not things, and we thrive on the chaos of something different every day.
Unlike expats, we aren’t necessarily looking to settle down. We may or may not return to our hometowns to live in the future. We might live outside of our home country in the future, but we aren’t looking for a place to live. Yet. We might.
Do Nomads Have Exit Plans?
We may not even have an exit plan for our nomad life. Why should we? We love our lives the way they are, why would we stop living our lives on the road, experiencing its different joys every day?
How did we all launch our nomad lives? No one has done it the same. We’ve sold homes. We’ve given away stuff. We’ve kept things. We have storage units. We don’t have storage units. But the one thing every one of us did; we circled a date on the calendar to leave. It may have been a few weeks away, or it might have been a decade. But we all had date to depart.
What’s the First Step to Nomad Life?
If you’re wondering if you’re nomad material, you might want to read this post: What Makes You a Good Nomad? It’s a bit of tongue in cheek, but it’s also very real. Yes, you’ll need to love being passengers in the backs of cheap Ubers, you’ll have to be okay pointing at food to order what you want to eat, and you’ll really have to know the intricacies of how to use your phone. The truth is, anyone can be a nomad, but only a few actually make the jump.
Before you get into the nitty gritty of your first step of what to do next, you have to do the first step before the next step. Open your calendar, circle the date.
After that, you too can determine exactly what being a nomad means to you. And then you, too, can start living the life you’ve dreamed.
Chris Englert, the Walking Traveler, believes walking is the platform for life. Wanderlusting since the age of 5, she’s since traveled all 50 US states and 62 countries. Chris shares her love of walking while traveling via blogs, books, and presentations. A natural storyteller, she invites you along as she explores the world, one walk at a time.
Currently, Chris and her husband, Steve, travel the world, full-time as nomads, with just their two carry-ons. They’ve been traveling since May, 2021.