My nomadic wanderings has four distinct periods. The two earliest episodes were sixty years ago bumming around Europe in the 60s and fifty years ago living in a VW bus in the 70s. The thirty years between 1980 to 2010 were lost to work, relationships, material excess and wealth accumulation. All of that is ancient history. The third and fourth episodes of wandering are more relevant to my present nomad lifestyle.
The third chapter of my nomadic life began with retirement on August 10, 2010 and ended the first day of COVID lockdown in Cape Town on March 17, 2020. These ten years started with several attempts to relocate to the my ideal retirement location. My initial picks were based on weekend and holiday experiences I had during my working years. I discovered there is no ideal location. Every place has pluses and minuses. The biggest factor for me was weather which is ideal year-round in very few places.
I also learned how burdensome material possessions are. I started out with a large house, three cars, a sailboat, and etc. The “ball and chain” grew smaller each time I moved. Purging useless possessions preceded slowly. I didn’t feel free until I sold my last real estate holding on April 1, 2014. I have not owned or leased a home or had a real physical address since then. I keep a small van that spends most of the time in a storage lot somewhere in the USA. It doubles as a storage locker and camper for North American road trips. The van currently costs $60 a month to insure and store. It is my largest fixed expense.
I mastered the mechanics of nomadic living in the ten years between retirement and Covid. Most of the time I lived out of a day pack and a carryon roller bag. I felt comfortable and confident continuously traveling around the world following good weather to interesting places and warm sunny beaches. My basic migration route was two 5-month global circumnavigations each year. I tried to spend May through September in north temperate and south tropical latitudes. November through March were spent in south temperate and north tropical latitudes. October and April were pitstops in the USA to take care of medical, financial and legal stuff.
All was going well until March 17, 2020 when COVID slammed on the breaks. I was in Namibia. I caught the last plane to South Africa before the border closed and spent a month in locked down in Cape Town. I was lucky to get out of Africa and spent most of the pandemic on a Caribbean Island – a story for another post. My travels got going again after my first COVID vaccination on March 22, 2021. Things did not go well. Unbeknownst to me, my latent pre-diabetes had evolved into full blown of type 2 diabetes. I thought I had come to the end of the road and began looking into assisted living facilities. Fortunately, I was easily cured by a low-carb diet. At 76, I began my fourth chapter of nomadic living.
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