Our next chapter

Back in November 2019, I saw a tweet where Sailing La Vagabonde was sharing their departure from New York to bring Greta Thunberg to COP25 in Madrid. I can’t really find that tweet anymore, so not entirely sure how that made its way into my feed, but below is the picture that got my attention…

I clicked the link to learn more about this story and found Riley and Elayna, an Australian couple documenting their journey traveling the world by sail. Their story inspired us a lot and led to the discovery of other couples and families like Gone with the Wynns, Sailing Zatara and lately Sailing SV Delos, who travel the world as way of living.

We have been super into travel blogs and documentaries but haven’t had any interest around boats or sailing in particular. We had once spent a weekend on a motor yacht, but didn’t find it particularly appealing to glide over the water with roaring engine noise. Sailing might be a complete different experience and is definitely something that we would like to experience for ourselves to see if that’s something on the future horizon to pursue more seriously.

While these are all greatly inspiring stories, what got really sparked during the discovery of those world traveling couples and families was our desire to travel and explore the world, no matter what way of transportation.

For example, Gone with the Wynns started out with an epic road trip around North America with an awe inspiring trek around Alaska which took them six years before they switched their home from a RV to a catamaran, continuing there world exploration on sea.

Another example of creativity that we discovered was Mogli and her boyfriend and filmmaker Felix Starck with their project Expedition Happiness where they traveled the US and Canada in a converted School bus.

We don’t currently have the financial means to get a motor home and definitely not a sail boat, but we can live our daily life in different places and call them home for a little while before moving on to the next one and explore the world that way.

In order to make this world exploring travel reality, two areas of our live need to be aligned, one is our work and the other one is our home.

Work

I’m currently working as remote CTO for a technology startup in New York City and my long term goal is to build my own SaaS business, which I have been working on during my free time for almost a year now.

For the last year I have been working either from home or from coffee shops and co-working spaces, which is for me so much more productive than working from an office.

From this point of view, there is nothing that limits us in terms of location as long as I have an internet connection and a place to focus on my work.

Home

We have been living in London for the last 11+ years, and every time we were traveling we had to continuously pay our rent, which has been the most limiting factor for more / longer periods of traveling.

During this last weeks of getting super excited about the possibility of traveling more, we asked ourselves why we wouldn’t just give up our flat here in London and leave this kind of limiting constraint behind us.

We started to research different ways of short term renting in different locations that we would like to visit, and it turned out that every single one of them was below our current budget and some destinations would be a fraction of our current living costs, which motivated us to hand in our notice to terminate our tenancy agreement.

What’s next

Having given notice to our landlord, we have now a defined date where we move out of our flat. We have booked a one way ticket to our first destination, which will be in the same time zone in order to make the transition with my remote work easy, and not adding any complications like change of work time during that time.

The next challenge is to limit our space for all our belongings from a flat to two holding and one carry on luggage, which will be all we take with us on this journey.

We are excited about this next chapter in our lives and while we have no idea where it will take us, we do believe that it will help us to grow, personally and professionally.

Inspired by all the shared examples mentioned earlier in this post, we would like to share our journey to hopefully be an inspiration for others to creating the life they love. We are currently exploring various ways we could do that and I’ll update on this in one of my next posts… stay tuned.