We had a great blog post planned detailing our current renovation project, but, as renovation projects tend to go, this one isn’t finished yet. We forgot that flooring needs to acclimate for 48 hours before installation. So…we wait. Next week we’ll have some great before and after pictures for you!
In other news from last week, I (Steph) got poison ivy from weeding the shade garden. It started on my right arm and has now spread to pretty much all of my torso. It made sanding and painting a real challenge this weekend. As I type this, I am literally covered in calamine lotion and prescription ointment. So we’re switching up the post schedule a bit. Life happens. We’re rolling with it.
Where are we going first?
We talked a bit about the travel schedule we have planned out in Week 118. We want to stay nearby for the kid’s first year of college, whatever that may look like. But we will also be eager to get out there and start nomading.
So, for year one, we are going to base here and do a few month-long trips throughout the year. This allows us to dip our toes into the Airbnb life slowly, like starting at the shallow end of the pool. We feel like a month is long enough to immerse ourselves in a community, but short enough to be able to be there for the kids, our family, and our friends, if we are needed.
And the winner is…
We’ve talked about this a lot, and decided we want to start in some place familiar. By the time we start traveling, we will have been to Belize (3x), Puerto Rico, Costa Rica (that trip is in January, more on that later), and probably one more island yet to be determined. We also have trips planned to Spain this summer (see Week 110) and Scotland next summer, but those places, while lovely, don’t meet our criteria for long term stays (see Week 114)
After some discussion, we landed on Hopkins, Belize as our first destination. We have been there a few times, and it is familiar to us. A friend of Gene’s from college and his wife run a B&B there and we know where the good bars and restaurants are. The people are very friendly and welcoming and housing prices are very reasonable. We have a few options for long-term accommodations available to us that we know will be very comfortable for a long stay.
Going somewhere familiar makes sense to us for a one-month stay. We feel like we need at least 2-3 weeks in a new place to really feel a part of it. If we chose some place new, we would be leaving just as we started to get comfortable. With someplace like Hopkins, we can settle in to eating at good restaurants and visiting with friends within the first week.
A good test of minimalism
Another good thing about starting in Belize is the lack of availability of “stuff.” Amazon doesn’t ship to Belize and there are no big box stores. A month in Belize requires us to think about what we will need and pack for every eventuality. If we forgot it and they don’t have it at the local store, we’ll just have to do without. The concept of making do without something will be a change for us. Right now, we think of something we need, and it arrives from Amazon the next day (or even the same day, it really is amazing that we’ve become a society that needs such immediate gratification). It will be good for us to live without constant access to shopping for a little while. More often than not, that will be the norm once we start traveling for three months at a time.
One potential wrinkle.
The one thing we need to nail down before we book accommodations is the Wi-Fi capabilities of the house/apartment. We will both need to use Wi-Fi to work, and it needs to be able to handle regular video calls without lags or crashing. Airbnb has a Wi-Fi tester that we plan to ask potential hosts to use to verify their signal strength. We will wait until we are ready to book, as we know that Belize is working on attracting digital nomads, so we are hopeful that they will continue to upgrade their Wi-Fi capabilities throughout the country.
That’s the plan for now, but as I learned with my recent heavyweight bout with poison ivy, everyone has a plan until they are punched in the face. Flexibility is the name of the game for the next 100ish weeks. We’ll just keep rolling with it.
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