What We Do All Day
You may be wondering if we get bored living in AirBnB’s or on the many endless sea days while crossing the Pacific Ocean for a month. It’s true—you can’t “tourist” all the time or you’d die of exhaustion. And in spite of not having the same responsibilities we had with a house, jobs, and the maintenance of an American lifestyle, we do still spend a chuck of time each week just managing life.
For example, as soon as we disembarked from our transpacific cruise, in Sydney, we hopped on a plane to Brisbane, Australia. It’s an amazing city and we’ve loved exploring it for at least a few hours most days. That is also our main form of exercise, walking 15,000 or so steps up and down hills until we’re ready to drop—at which point we usually stop for some food and drink to replace whatever calories we burned off and then some. This isn’t a great picture of me but it’s very honest and I’m all about transparency—clearly I need to walk more, eat and drink less!
But as you can see in this picture, we have “life work” to do. Laundry. Financial records and bills. Grocery shopping and meal prep. Cleaning up. Trip planning, buying tickets, figuring out public transportation options, etc. Getting money. Getting SIM cards to have phone data. Packing and unpacking. And solving technical problems with wifi/routers/vpn/firestick/sim-cards etc. These things are not hard and honestly we enjoy most of them, but they add up to a chunk of time, like daily chores.
Our main priority upon arriving to Brisbane was to sign up for the ACA Marketplace Insurance for 2024, since we no longer have employer insurance. Even though we likely won’t use it since it only works in Snohomish County, Washington, and we’re spending most of this year in Oz, NZ and SE Asia, it’s important to have as a fall back should we get a non-emergency serious illness or injury (our travel insurance only covers emergency medical). Because we now live on a small pension and savings, we were thankful to get a silver plan with no premium, so at least we’re not paying for a plan we likely won’t use. But that took time to figure out and sign up for. Tomorrow I’ll help our youngest son TJ (using WhatsApp video calling on our wifi) to sign up for his own plan in New York.
We’ve had a ton of fun in Brisbane that will be covered in a future YouTube video. Yesterday we saw koalas and kangaroos in the wild with their babies—that was a treat of a lifetime for me! We also saw other wildlife and hiked a lot. I even killed a Huntsman Spider that was in our sink (small compared to most), then found out they kill bad bugs and most Aussies let them co-habitate in their homes. Hmmm. Not quite ready for sharing house with a large spider. Quite a lot of time exploring has been with our fun nomad friends Chris and Steve whom we met on the cruise. They are also in Brisbane. That has been an unexpected and wonderful surprise that added to our enjoyment of this week’s adventures.
We pretty much spend time the way we expected. When we are tired from exploring and life chores are caught up, we play a bit of cards in the backyard of our AirBnB—not terribly different than when we lived in the U.S. other than distinctly different bird sounds, which is nice. We watch a little Netflix. Tim edits video for YouTube and I might write a blog post or keep up on Facebook and Instagram posts (be sure to click on those logos to follow us on the day-to-day). We are doing these things for fun, not making money, so we only do them when we want to and try not to ever let it feel like a “job.”
On the 18 days at sea while crossing the beautiful Pacific Ocean, there were scads of fun activities to do on the ship—from dance and exercise classes to trivia and other games, from pickleball tournaments to bible study. We should’ve done some of them! But honestly, this was the perfect rest time after a life of work and responsibilities. We did our stretching video in our cabin most mornings, had our own separate spiritual time and internet time, video chatted withour kids, ate meals together, had frequent talks and laughs with our nomad friends Blair and Susan in the wine bar, played games or plotted island adventures with our nomad friends Chris and Steve, and chatted with the 2 other nomad couples we met, or crew, or random strangers. On beautiful days we layed in the sun by the pool, dipping in and out, listening to music or watching the movies playing on the big outside screen. On rainy or sunburned days, or in the evenings, we played cards inside, listened to live music and utilized our drink package a bit too much. We rested. We enjoyed. Okay, we were flakey. Sometimes that is good and healthy.
Tomorrow we embark on 19 more days of cruising, to the Great Barrier reef and Papau New Guinea—with no wifi and no drink package—lots of great ports and very few sea day. We’ll let you know how that goes. We’re hoping to snorkel a lot. Maybe we’ll hit the gym. Or not.
Are we ever bored? Not so far. We are learning to slow down and observe and enjoy, treasuring the little things like watching insects and city lights. We talk a lot. We process all the changes in our life. And every moment of every day we are surprised, thankful and blessed to be living this life of full-time travel together with each other.
