After a few months of soul-searching after our last blog post, we’re back with lots of news to share with you all! We apologise for the hiatus – it’s amazing just how busy life can get when you fall back into your old routines!
In our 12 Months on the Road blog post, we shared with you that we’d come home for a visit in order to take a step back and look at our travels moving forward. We wanted a better balance with travelling and allowing time for the things that are important to us – doing what makes us happy, slowing down, practicing mindfulness to a greater degree and focusing on our health.
So we’ve spent the last two months putting all our energies into figuring that out (regular readers may have noticed we missed ’13 Months on the Road’ – sorry!) and we’ve come up with a new game plan. Without further ado, here’s what we’ve been up to!
1. Meet Ghost
We got a new car! Why would we need a new car when we travel so much, you ask? Well, as part of our plans to slow things down and pay more attention to Mike’s fatigue levels, we’re going to be exploring much more of our own backyard – spending Mike’s shorter breaks off from work back in Australia rather than overseas.
Mike took his dad away on a boys road trip not long after returning home, and had an epiphany whilst doing so – it dawned on him just how much there was to see in our own backyard. He came home full of ideas, and whilst initially I was a little hesitant, over the following days we began to realise that there really were so many benefits to spending more time in Australia (lower travels costs, more time with family and friends, slower pace and less flights for Mike, etc).
Fast forward a week (we move fast when we get these ideas in our head!) and we acquired Ghost! Our beasty, white, 2013 Mitsubishi Triton (Game of Thrones fans will get the reference….). After kitting him out with everything we needed to go camping, we took Ghost on his first camping trip.
It’s the first time we’ve ever gone anywhere with no itinerary, nothing booked and no real plans other than to just enjoy each other’s company and stop wherever we felt like, for as long as we wanted to. It has been a seriously relaxing few weeks and is just what we needed. We’re so happy with our decision to incorporate more travel through Western Australia into our plans to live a nomadic existence and can’t wait to explore more of our own backyard.
Our camping escapades will be up on the blog soon!
2. I’m going to be an expat in Thailand!
Before deciding to spend more time in WA and travelling locally, we were seriously considering to rent an apartment in Thailand – Phuket specifically – to base ourselves in next year. With a low cost of living and plenty of time to focus on pursuits like our health and fitness, it seemed like the ideal place to do so.
With more time being spent back in Australia, it no longer makes sense to rent an apartment, however it does still make sense to be based in Thailand – for myself anyway. It’s visa-free for Australians, incredibly well-equipped, Bangkok is a great hub for cheap flights and it has a much lower cost of living than in Australia – even taking into consideration flying back and forth to Australia.
I’m looking to action this from next year, and will use Thailand as a base in between road trips and our overseas adventures. There are so many other expats doing the same so it will be a great opportunity to meet new people as well.
I’m now considering Chiang Mai as a hub for myself, so if you happen to know of anyone who has lived there or of any forums and groups I should join, please let me know!
3. It’s time to be a #girlboss….
One of the challenges I’ve personally had over the last year is that of income. Yes, I saved up a lot of money before I left. Yes, Mike has still been working and yes, that is the reason that we’ve been able to travel as long as we have. But we both know that we can’t keep going like that forever, especially as there is no ‘end date’ to our travels.
We both want to keep exploring the world as long as we possibly can, and for that to happen we both need to be contributing.
I’ve spent the majority of my ‘free time’ in the last 12 months building this blog, but I’m now going to be taking it to the next level and look at ways that I can make it an income source for myself.
I’m also going to start venturing into the business of writing for others, as well as get some small-business ideas kickstarted. Being a digital nomad is all about diversifying your income streams, so I’m going to be putting 110% effort into this so that we can continue to keep travelling like this for as long as possible, and to continue providing inspiring content for you to read!
So that’s the latest with us! A little different to the full-time travels of the last year, but we’re really happy with the new direction we’re taking and motivated to live bigger, more fulfilling lives and work towards our goals together.
We’re off to the Philippines in October for a month, and still planning a jaunt over to Europe later in the year. In the meantime, we’ve got lots of China blogs still to come as well as the first few tales from our very first camping trip here in Western Australia.
As always, we appreciate your incredible support in reading our blogs, sharing our articles and all the comments. If you’re not already, we’d love for you to follow us on Facebook, check out our travel photos on Instagram and subscribe to us on YouTube for all our travel videos. I’ve been a little quiet on Snapchat lately, but will get stuck straight back into it when we head off to the Philippines so make sure you’ve added me to follow along (nomadsmikenamy).
Til next month,
Mike & Amy
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