Our 6th & 7th Years of (Getting Back to) Travel: The Highs & Lows

I used to always write an annual review post, marking our “travelversary” in late-January. But I got off track in 2020 (for some reason), and now I seem to be doing an every-other-annual review?

My last one was all about how we spent the first two years of the pandemic (entirely in the U.S. and largely in Montana). What a contrast these last two years have been!

Throughout 2020 and 2021, we held onto tremendous gratitude for the experiences we were able to have and the silver linings we were able to find. But of course, nothing about those two years was normal.

Well, at the beginning of what we consider the sixth (!) year of this journey we’re on, things took a turn for the slightly more normal. And while we still grimace at overly-crowded indoor spaces and cringe when we hear someone cough (and maybe always will?), the past two years have been a lot more like the Before Times.

The Past Year

So, where have the past two years taken us?

6 countries: U.S., Portugal, Spain, U.K. (England & Scotland), Austria, Hungary

11 states: Montana, Massachusetts, Nevada, California, Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, Ohio, Vermont, Pennsylvania, Connecticut

We kicked off year six in Montana and made the most of a Montana winter, before traveling east for the first time in two years. After amazing stops in Boston and the Azores, we headed to Portugal to fulfill the long-time dream of walking the Camino de Santiago. Afterward, we spent a few months housesitting in the U.K., before heading back to the U.S. for a fall road trip in the PNW and Christmas in Montana.

Year seven looked…remarkably similar in many ways. Winter in Montana, spring in Washington, a road trip to the Northeast, walking the Camino (yes, again!), and housesitting in the U.K. (also again), before visiting two new-to-us countries: a long stay in Hungary and a quick trip to Austria.

The Highlights

It seems like this highlights section has some similar themes every year, and these past two years have been no different. Spending time with friends, attending amazing events, returning to places we loved, getting to know new favorite spots, teaching yoga, and spending time outside – all show up on this year’s list, too.

Walking the Camino de Santiago (and Doing It Again)

Walking the Camino de Santiago – a network of ancient pilgrimage routes in Europe, all ending in northwestern Spain – had been on our bucket list for a very long time. We’d read books, watched movies, listened to podcasts, and had so many people recommend it to us.

The spring of 2022 seemed like the perfect time to finally make this dream come true, and it felt like just the reset and adventure we needed after the two years before it. Out of the eight or so main routes of the Camino, we chose the Portuguese Route for the chance to experience two different countries and strike a balance between being crowded and being isolated.

And while it was challenging, we fell in love with it. The routine, the simplicity, the adventure, the community. We loved spending most of our time outside, being pushed mentally and physically, getting to explore offbeat towns and countrysides, and having just one thing to focus on every day (making it to the next stop!).

We learned on that first walk that many people who walk the Camino end up going back to do it again (and often, again and again). And after talking about it for the following 16 months, we returned to walk a different route last fall! Our return to the Camino was everything we’d been imagining it would be – and I have a strong feeling it won’t be the last.

Attending the Edinburgh Fringe Festival

Sometimes you plan on doing things for years in advance, and by the time you go, you feel like you know everything there is to know about it (see: the Camino). Other times, you just happen to be in the right place at the right time to do something you’ve vaguely heard of, and you go into it with no idea what to expect. That was our experience with the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

Long curious about visiting Scotland, we were thrilled to land a three-week housesit in Glasgow in the summer of 2022. (And geez, we were not aware of the Brits’ unfounded disdain for this city!)

We coincidentally happened to be in Glasgow while the Fringe Festival was happening in Edinburgh, just 45 miles and an easy day trip away. We traveled separately to Edinburgh on different days, so one of us could stay home with the pups in our care in Glasgow, and we both had just a fabulous time.

What even is this event? It’s an annual three-week-long city-wide celebration of arts and culture, with over a thousand shows and performances to choose from every day. There’s comedy, theatre, music, dance, and poetry, not to mention tours and art exhibits, plus street performers on every block. And many of the performances are free or by donation!

Returning to the Azores

In 2015, when we were still living in Boston, we traveled to Sao Miguel in the Azores for Christmas – and while we were there, we got engaged. In the spring of 2022, when we left the U.S. for the first time in two years, it was, first of all, to return to the Azores.

This little group of Portuguese islands in the North Atlantic is just magic. The lush green landscapes make every photo look like a postcard, the bubbling hot springs give an other-worldly vibe, and the colorful buildings and décor are not the kind you see just anywhere.

Our return to the Azores was everything we’d spent the previous seven years imagining it would be, and everything we needed it to be after making it through the two years that came before it. We hiked the same trail as in 2015, returning to the spot overlooking the Twin Lakes where Ryan proposed and passing by the famous abandoned Hotel Monte Palace.

We could not have asked for a better way to relax after the first two years of the pandemic or a more special way to celebrate returning to some semblance of regular life.

Returning to Vermont

Another very special-to-us place we hadn’t visited in almost as long – since we eloped there in 2016! – is the great state of Vermont. We also finally had the chance to go back last fall, even if it was just for an all-too-quick three days in Burlington.

We spent our time there camping on an island, SUPing on Lake Champlain, visiting our old haunts, and just strolling around a town we stole away to so very many times when we lived in Boston.

Ryan’s Train Trip Across America

In April 2022, the first time we headed east of Montana in two years, Ryan got there an unusual way – on the train! Yes, he rode Amtrak from Havre, MT, to South Station in Boston, something he’d long dreamed about doing (and something I knew I liked the idea of more than I would actually like doing, so I flew there and met him at the end…).

Here’s what he has to say about it:

“Sitting on a train for over 50 hours isn’t everyone’s idea of fun, but I think it’s an experience we should all have, once. When flying, you go from one city to the next without ever seeing how you got there. The wide open spaces. The towns with just a bar and a gas station. The deindustrialized cities no one visits anymore.

On the coasts, people call it flyover country. They dismiss it as inconvenient space on the way to places they actually want to be. It’s most of America, though, and I think it’s worth seeing. Plus, with Amtrak, you arrive and depart from the middle of the city rather than an airport several miles away, you skip the indignities of security, and a glass-roofed observation car beats a cramped airline seat any day.”

Driving Across the U.S.

Flash-forward to summer 2023, and we traveled across the country in a very different way. Our nine-day drive from Montana to Boston in our trusty old VW Jetta (turns out it’s not that trusty: scroll down to the Lowlights) was not exactly the Great American Road Trip. But it was a big adventure and an epic opportunity to see so much of the country.

Some of the highlights were visiting Makoshika State Park in eastern Montana and Cuyahoga Valley National Park in Ohio, seeing friends in multiple cities on our route, passing through cute towns in almost every state, and discovering great food, coffee, and campgrounds all along the way.

To be honest, I think we also realized on this trip that the Upper Midwest is not our place, even though we loved visiting and there’s a lot more we want to do there (hello, Isle Royale National Park and Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness!).

While there are some great towns with fun things to do and amazing lakes for kayaking and camping, a place with harsh winters, humid summers, long driving distances, and no mountains maybe doesn’t check as many of our boxes as we thought it might. But we’ll need at least one more trip to make a final determination!

Volunteering at Amazing Film Festivals

We love attending all kinds of festivals anywhere we go – music, film, cultural, you name it – and we’ve been lucky to participate in festivals from Bali to Montana to India over the past several years.

But more than just attending, we’ve found that actually being a part of events like these adds so much to the experience and is a great way to meet cool people. At a lot of festivals, it’s pretty easy to join the volunteer team, usually in exchange for free admission and often meals, swag, parties, or other perks.

And we got to do it twice last year, at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival in Missoula and again at the Seattle International Film Festival, both amazing events in their own right. At each one, we got to see a bunch of great films for free, meet lots of interesting people, and feel like we were a part of something – a feeling that’s usually a casualty of living this kind of lifestyle.

Seeing Friends All Over the Place

One of the other big casualties of our lifestyle is not having a lot of strong connections or a consistent community, since we’re never in one place for very long. But since our friends live all over the place, the flexibility we have and the travel we do actually allow us to see many of them far more than we probably would otherwise. And that’s possibly never been truer than in the past two years.

One enormous highlight has been connecting with new and old friends in Montana – from meeting yoga teachers and students across the state to having regular Scrabble nights whenever we’re in Great Falls to running into an old friend from my high school debate days at a state park last New Year’s Day!

We also got really lucky more than once and were able to meet up with old friends when we just happened to be visiting the same place at the same time, whether that place was Great Falls, Seattle, or England. And our travels have taken us through several cities where we’re fortunate to know people, including Reno, where we got to spend Thanksgiving with a high school friend and her family.

Plus, spending time in the Northeast has meant more than one mini-reunion of my Peace Corps group – including seeing a fellow volunteer I hadn’t seen since we left Rwanda in 2012!

And maybe the best yet, we’ve recently gotten to meet the partners and children of several of our long-time friends, which has gone a long way toward making us feel more connected to their lives.

Experiencing The Sound of Music in Austria

I don’t know if I’m not really into filming location tours, or if I’ve just never had an opportunity to do one for a film I cared about. In any case, The Sound of Music is probably one of the films I most care about, and it’s also the main reason I’ve always wanted to visit Austria. And when our housesit in Budapest at the end of last year meant we were in a neighboring country, we couldn’t pass up the opportunity.

Much of The Sound of Music was filmed in and around Salzburg, which is the setting of not only the movie but also the real-life events that inspired it, including the Nazi takeover of Austria during World War II. We walked to many of the filming spots in town, went on a bus tour to others out in the countryside, and even took an apple strudel baking class – and it was all super interesting and just incredibly delightful. 10/10 would recommend to any Sound of Music fans or history buffs.

And beyond that, Salzburg was also one of the most stunning places I’ve ever been, especially in the snow.

Getting to Know Washington State

Washington has really cemented itself as one of our favorite states in the past few years. Every time we go back to Seattle, we find more to love about it, from incredible food and great people to fun events and sandy beaches (yes, really). We’ve stayed in many different Seattle neighborhoods and loved them all, and I even got to teach classes at a yoga studio when we were there last summer.

We already knew San Juan and Orcas Island are some of our favorite places ever, but we also learned last year that Olympic National Park is one of our favorite parks. And the rocky Pacific Coast, the quaint towns of the Olympic Peninsula, the other two national parks (Mount Rainier and North Cascades), and the many islands in Puget Sound all make Washington one of the greatest states (if you ask us), and we’re thrilled to have gotten to spend so much time there recently.

Teaching Yoga Online & In-Person

I still maintain that Zoom yoga is one of the best silver linings to have come out of the pandemic. I was incredibly honored when a teacher I met at a yoga festival asked me to join her online studio in the fall of 2021 – and more than two years later, our classes are still going strong.

Teaching online to a group of mostly regular students every week has been an amazing connection to a community, even as we’ve been traveling all over. And it’s been a huge opportunity for me to grow as a teacher alongside them. I’m also so grateful to have found a place where my approach to yoga feels like such a good fit.

And getting to meet some of those students in real life last winter was one of the highlights of my whole year!

Ryan’s Run in the Golden Gate Half-Marathon

Of course, Ryan doesn’t teach yoga like I do – and I don’t run like him. (Or at all.) He’s run two marathons and quite a few half-marathons over the past several years. But the 2022 Golden Gate Half-Marathon in San Francisco was the most memorable one yet.

Here’s what he says about it:

“Back when we lived in Boston, I tried to run a big race every year. (If you’re looking for an amazing race experience in New England, I can’t recommend the marathon in Burlington, VT, enough!)

I really cut back on running when we left for Southeast Asia and never did any races over there. I just can’t do long runs in 90-degree heat and 90% humidity. My second Burlington marathon was actually called off midway through for exactly that sort of weather.

But since we’ve been back in the States on a more regular basis, I’ve been able to get back to it – and the Golden Gate Half Marathon in San Francisco is easily one of the best races I’ve ever done. Running beneath the bright orange bridge towers and looking out at the fog-covered hills is an incredible motivator, and I clocked a new personal best there. The problem? How do you top a race like that? Where am I going to find an even better half-marathon to enter?!”

The Lowlights

We’re always torn about how much of the lowlights of our lifestyle to share. On one hand, our lives aren’t easy or perfect, and this lifestyle isn’t always all it’s cracked up to be. We don’t try to pretend that it is, and it’s important to us to be honest.

On the other hand, nobody who’s stuck in a soul-sucking office job (or worse) really appreciates hearing about the difficulties of globetrotting or the downsides of a lifestyle we freely chose. But, we’ve dealt with struggles each year ranging from health problems to travel disasters to work issues, often not unlike the ones anybody else might face.

When We Almost Quit the Camino

The first ten days of our first walk on the Camino were plagued with a pilgrim’s nightmare: blisters! Yes, I had trained; yes, I had tested my hiking shoes. But what I didn’t know is how much your feet can swell from walking all day. Less than a week into our Camino, and my shoes were basically too small – which left me with a dozen blisters on each foot, and they were getting worse every day.

Blisters might not sound like a serious problem, but bad ones can lead to a major infection – I’ve even heard of one woman on the Camino who nearly ended up having to get her foot amputated because her blisters got so infected.

Halfway through our eleventh day of walking, well past the point that every step was excruciating, it became clear that continuing was not a possibility. We got a taxi from the village where we’d stopped for coffee and drove into the closest city, where we booked a hotel for a couple nights to figure out our next move.

I was beyond heartbroken. We’d been planning and training for the Camino for months. I’d been dreaming about it for years. And the blisters (and extreme heat) aside, I loved it. I also…would say that I don’t give up on things very often (even in cases when I probably should, honestly).

And then Ryan floated the idea that maybe I could look for new shoes. Quality outdoor gear is hard to come by in Portugal, but we were in one of the country’s largest cities. We headed over to a mall, where we explained the situation to a bemused employee at a small sporting goods store, and I proceeded to try on basically every shoe they had. I finally settled on a pair that, while not ideal, seemed like they would work.

We spent two more days resting in Coimbra. I tested out the new shoes, and we even went on a great kayaking trip nearby that we would never have had the energy for otherwise. And then we got back on the Way, and had an incredible rest of our Camino.

The Proliferation of AI

AI software has been around in many forms for a long time (hey, Siri), and plenty of people before us have lost their jobs due to technological advances. But nothing could have prepared me for the consequences of Chat GPT, the free software introduced in November 2022 that can do…practically anything.

Within a matter of weeks, companies that previously hired freelancers like us to write their articles and newsletters, create social media posts, do research, and so on had turned to AI to do all these tasks for them. At the same time, brand new websites appeared overnight, pumping out AI-generated articles by the dozen – and competing with our own sites. Never mind that AI articles are usually full of glaring inaccuracies and comically bad writing?

Combined with the lingering impacts of the pandemic and a less-than-stellar economy, the opportunities to make a living writing about frivolous things like travel are quickly drying up (except, like most things, for those at the very top).

It’s not only communications work, either. Chat GPT can also create workout programs, meal plans, yoga sequences, and I’ve even seen a deep fake of a “yoga teacher” giving a lecture on yoga philosophy. While AI hasn’t yet replaced yoga teachers and personal trainers the way it’s replaced writers, it’s starting to feel like it’s only a matter of time.

Beyond the impact on our own opportunities, though, the idea of a world where books, movies, and art are created by computers, where most people are simply no longer needed because AI can do their job, and where anybody can create photos and videos of someone doing something they never did is incredibly bleak. And until November 2022, I would never have guessed we were anywhere near a world like that.

Inflation Run Amok

It’s obviously not so much a personal lowlight as a major issue affecting everyone, but we’ve certainly felt the effects of inflation these past two years. While we fortunately aren’t in a position to need to pay rising rent prices or buy a home in an inflated market, we’ve seen the costs of groceries, restaurants, accommodations, and attractions skyrocket in many of the places we’ve visited, especially in the U.S.

Suddenly spending a few nights in a hotel because a housesit got canceled has gone from an inconvenience to a significant expense. Having to shop at the “nice” grocery store because the affordable ones have no branches nearby has gone from an annoyance to a noticeable hit. Ordering takeout because we got in late has gone from feeling like a little luxury to a not-so-little waste.

For us and for everyone, it’s hard to pay more for the same thing, especially when wages aren’t keeping up with price increases.

A Flooded Tent in Redwoods National Park

On a much less consequential note, another recent lowlight was our ill-fated camping trip to Redwoods National Park.

Now, there are a lot of great ways to visit Redwoods. But, as basically anyone could have told you before we did this, tent camping in November is not one of them. First of all, the sun goes down by 5:00, which means spending hours in the dark at camp. Evening temperatures are in the 40s, making it pretty chilly to hang around outside. You could start a cozy campfire for both light and heat – except it also rains incessantly.

And it had rained so much before we arrived that we basically pitched our tent in a bog, believing the tent to be waterproof. Fast forward through a few hours of rain, and it turned out to very much not be waterproof. We had zero excuse for not having laid a tarp under the tent (I mean, have we ever been camping before?), but it was far too late at that point.

So we spent one night with water seeping into the floor of our tent, saw zero redwoods, and decamped for a hotel the following morning. Redwoods, we’ll be back for you!

Being House-less & Car-less in Connecticut (and a Strange Airbnb)

With housesitting, there’s always a risk that the owner could cancel their trip at any time, leaving them with no need for you to come take care of their pets – and leaving you with no place to stay. On the morning we were supposed to start a week-long sit in Hartford last fall, our host contacted us to say she’d just tested positive for Covid and wasn’t going on her trip. Which left us in a bit of a bind.

We camped for a few nights at a state park outside Hartford, which actually turned out to be a really nice camping spot. But not willing to live in a tent for a week straight, we were contemplating booking an Airbnb for the rest of the time. And then as we were driving through the small town of Waterbury, our car broke down.

Yes, our old VW Jetta with 155,000 miles on it that had just driven all the way across the country decided for some reason that it’d had enough. Which left us in an even bigger bind. And Waterbury, CT, is…not really the nicest town.

So suddenly we had no place to stay and no way to get around. But we were very lucky that there happened to be a VW mechanic right in this random town. We panicked when they said they wouldn’t be able to fix it until after we were supposed to fly from Boston to Portugal. But we lucked out again when they actually managed to fix it in just a couple days.

We also counted ourselves lucky that a nice, not-too-pricey Airbnb happened to be available in Waterbury starting that same day. But we winced when we arrived to find that it was the top floor of a house shared by…a very odd mix of characters, who seemed to have a very odd collection of visitors at all times. We sighed when we got locked out of the house because the keypad wasn’t working. We bristled when the bathtub leaked and flooded the bathroom floor.

And we almost lost it when Ryan’s hiking shoes (which he was going to need on the Camino the following week!) went missing from the shoe rack. They were returned shortly thereafter with a lot of smiles and profuse apologies by one of the characters living in the house, who claimed to have taken them to his room by accident (?).

The suite itself was actually really lovely and comfortable, and would have been a wonderful place to stay if not for the chaos downstairs. But we made it through five days, got our car back in working order, and were elated to get out of there and back to Boston for our flight.

An Infected Piercing in England (but the NHS!)

Right before we left the U.S. for the first time in two years, I decided to celebrate [what I thought at the time was] our long-awaited return to normalcy by getting a new ear piercing. It was nothing fancy or complicated, I followed the care instructions, and it was completely fine for a few months, including the six weeks we were walking the Camino.

But while we were housesitting in England, it got infected, although I’ll spare you the details. I went to a piercing place in Sheffield to see if they could tell me what was going on – and the piercer who very graciously looked at it said I needed to see a doctor. That left me no choice but to visit an urgent care, and since it was a weekend, only a couple (and only one that looked decent) were open.

We arrived at an urgent care inside a hospital, expecting to experience the long waits they tell Americans are the horror of universal healthcare. Five minutes later, I was talking to a kind nurse in a clean room, and she quickly cut the earring out of my ear.

Then we left. Without paying. Or promising to pay, or providing insurance, or being told to expect a bill of an unknown amount in the next week or year. It felt like shoplifting, but it was just universal healthcare.

The Next Year

I’m writing this from a housesit in England, where we’re spending about a month and a half with two great kitties. And then we’re basically doing last year’s trip in reverse! Flying from Europe back to Boston, driving from Boston back to Montana, and eventually heading to Washington this summer.

We have several housesits lined up, and I’ll be teaching yoga in Montana and Seattle. We’re also hoping to visit some national parks, meet up with friends at several stops, and finally finish visiting every county and every state park in Montana. And who knows where the fall will take us?

What’s the best thing that happened to you in the past two years? Tell us in the comments!

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