“What’s that?” I said out loud to myself as I plucked a half-eaten plastic bottle top from under Bailey’s leg.
Bailey is the gorgeous 3-year-old German Shepherd–Husky cross we’re currently house sitting in Vancouver.
She was laying across my bed looking slightly sheepish.
I walked out to the kitchen to see if I could find what the lid belonged to, left it on the counter and went to get dressed.
As I walked back into the bedroom, I suddenly spotted the chewed-up white bottle of my antihistamine stash.
Approximately 10 x 10mg tabs were no longer in the bottle, or anywhere on the bed.
I looked in horror at Bailey. I knew exactly where they were!
Two hours later, a visit to the emergency vet and some induced vomiting had averted disaster, and Bailey was, and is, absolutely fine.
NB: She’s a clever sod, as she’d seen me take one the night before and had a sniff, but I said no and screwed the child-locked (evidently not dog-locked) lid back on. Sneaky girl... 🐶
But thems’ the joys of house sitting!
Thankfully, that’s been the most dramatic event here in Vancouver (other than losing the Wifi for a couple of days).
The rest of it has been really fun actually, and mostly because the house we’re in is minutes from downtown.
Every morning I get up, make a cuppa, and get out.
I’ve wandered Gastown and Chinatown, caught the Seabus to work from a table beside the water at the Shipyards, mooched around Granville Island, spent 4 hours wandering around Capilano (and recorded a couple of articles on my phone while there!), and had fish & chips on Kitsilano beach.
There’s also a good coffee shop 20 minutes’ walk away that now knows my order.
And somewhere between the ferry rides and the coffee runs, I finally admitted something to myself that’s been brewing for months.
I’m Not a Slow Traveller (Yet)
If you read anything about travel for the over-50s right now, slow travel is the darling of the movement.
Stay a month. Stay three. Live like a local, learn the market stalls, let the days stretch out.
Sip your coffee slowly while the rushing tourists miss the “real” place.
It sounds idyllic, and I thought I’d naturally start to slip into that rhythm the longer we were on the road.
However it hasn’t happened yet. In fact the opposite is true.
When I get asked about nomadic life, it seems that everyone assumes the hard part is the moving. The packing, the flights, the journeys, the constant goodbyes.
It turns out, that for me, the hard part is the stopping.
When we’re in motion, I feel truly alive! I’m excited, my energy is high & anything is possible.
When we ‘bed down’ as my husband likes to call it, we quickly fall back into years old expat routines & my energy & motivation go out the window.
One of my favourite recent memories was the journey to Jericoacoara in Brazil.
We’d done a long bus ride from Fortaleza, and when the bus stopped, the journey wasn’t over: everyone piled off and into 4x4s for a wild, bumpy ride across sand dunes to reach the town.
Rhett was beside himself with grumpiness, while I had to stop myself from whooping & cheering.
When we got there we found sand for streets, donkeys wandering about like they owned the place, and one of the most beautiful little towns I’ve ever seen.
And that’s me at full charge. 🔋
Buses, vans, a new place every few days, no idea what’s around the corner.
It sounds exhausting but for me right now it’s exhilarating!
The Pace I Didn’t Consciously Choose
But then something interesting happened. Despite knowing what sets me on fire, I looked up somewhere around week 20 and realised I was neck-deep in a slow-travel year I never remembered choosing.
I’m not sure how it happened. There hadn’t been an argument. Nobody was forcing me to do anything. There wasn’t some grand compromise I’d reluctantly agreed to.
I’d just taken my hands off the wheel.
When we first set off on our nomadic journey, I left first with my sister for a couple of weeks in Rio, before my husband joined me, and so I set the initial pace.
Up the coast of Brazil, into Colombia, buses and vans and let’s-see-where-we-end-up. I can literally hear myself saying to Rhett before we left: “Don’t plan so much hun. Let’s just let the wind take us.”
Well, knowing my husband, I should have known the wind didn’t stand a chance.
Before I could blink, he’d planned Costa Rica, San Diego, Cabo, Canada, White Plains, Richmond, and pretty much the rest of the year.
House sits, longer stays, slower travel, more routine, more “bedding down” (his phrase) to get stuff done. If he had his way, we’d stop moving altogether next year and settle somewhere for 3 to 6 months minimum.
The silly thing is, he didn’t do it surreptitiously. He would ask, and suggest, and say this looks like a good idea - and because none of the plans sounded bad, I just went along with it.
Which is exactly how so many of us end up living lives we never consciously design.
It’s not that someone else made us, or forced us into situations we didn’t or don’t want.
We just stopped checking in with ourselves.
What Gives You Energy?
One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned over the last few months of nomadic life, interestingly has nothing to do with travel.
It’s what travel has revealed. And for me that’s about paying attention to energy.
Not what you think you should enjoy, or what everyone tells you is “right” or sensible, or even what your partner enjoys.
Simply…
What genuinely lights you up?
For me it’s movement.
* New bus stations.
* Different coffee shops.
* Unexpected conversations.
* Ferry rides.
* Changing landscapes.
* The feeling that tomorrow could be completely different from today.
Other people crave familiarity or stability.
* The same café.
* The same walking route.
* Knowing where everything is.
* Routine.
Neither is right or wrong.
They’re just different.
We Don’t Always Notice We’re Living Someone Else’s Script
This doesn’t just happen in travel of course.
It happens in careers, relationships, retirement, even how we spend our free time. Nobody sits us down and takes our life plan away. We just drift onto autopilot, and other people’s perfectly reasonable preferences fill in the gaps.
Some people spend decades following a script they never actually chose.
* Go to university because that’s what people do.
* Stay in the job because it pays well.
* Keep working because everyone expects you to.
* Retire because that’s the age you’re supposed to.
* Buy the bigger house.
* Move nearer the grandchildren.
* Slow down.
None of those choices are wrong.
They just shouldn’t be automatic.
Sometimes we become so busy meeting expectations that we forget to ask one very simple question:
“When do I actually feel most alive?”
Because your energy knows the answer long before your brain does.
Your Body Knows Before Your Brain
If you can’t answer that question off the top of your head, the good news is you don’t have to figure it out by thinking too hard.
Your energy is constantly answering the question. You just have to start listening.
It reminds me of a note I shared a few Sundays ago.
I couldn’t have told you why it hit me so hard at the time. Now I can
That meh feeling I get by week two of a house sit, or the restlessness I start to feel at beach resorts? For ages I’ve been having a go at myself for being ungrateful. (I mean, who doesn’t appreciate a lovely house with a gorgeous dog, or gets bored sitting next to a pool?).
But it’s not ingratitude. It’s information. It’s my body telling me the pace is wrong for me. And the buzz I feel bouncing over sand dunes in a 4x4? Same source, opposite message.
Your version will look different. Maybe you light up in your garden, or teaching someone, or building something, or on a stage, or in a room full of strangers, or in a room containing absolutely nobody. Doesn’t matter what it is. What matters is noticing.
And you might need to experiment to find your energy sources, because autopilot doesn’t announce itself.
When I deign to do a yoga session (not as often as I should) I always choose “Yoga with Adriene”, because of her philosophy of ‘finding what feels good’. Choose you, your pace, your movement, not the perfect yoga pose.
So here’s a small assignment: for the next two weeks, just notice. When does your energy rise? When does it drain? When does your body tell you how you’re feeling before your brain does?
Don’t judge yourself or take any massive action (unless you want to), just collect data.
Knowing Is Great, But Choice Is What You Need.
There is a catch, though. Knowing what lights you up is only useful if you’re able to act on it.
Which is why I’m so passionate about building portable income, or an online business or a side hustle or whatever you want to call it. It all amounts to the same thing.
A regular monthly income you can generate from anywhere in the world, whether that’s a beach in Bali or your kitchen table, doesn’t equal world domination.
It equals choice.
Choice to travel fast or slow. Choice to spend three months in Tuscany if that’s your dream, or jump on a bus every three days through South America.
It lets you design a life around who you are rather than fitting yourself into a life you just kind of arrived at.
It gives you the option that when your energy tells you something, you’re free to listen.
Taking Back the Wheel
So that’s where week 24 leaves me: with a clear answer to the question, and some redesigning to do.
Or perhaps more accurately, some conversations to have.
Because this year has reminded me that I come alive in motion.
Maybe one day I’ll become that person happily spending six months in one village, chatting to the baker every morning and knowing every neighbour by name.
Maybe. But not yet.
Right now I’m still the girl who gets excited by overnight buses, ferry crossings and wondering what’s around the next corner.
So, over to you: when do YOU feel most alive? I’d love to hear it in the comments, and if you don’t know yet, your two-week assignment starts today.
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