It’s become a running joke with our friends in Seattle who try to make plans with us— “you free this weekend or are you out of the country again?” It’s true we’ve been living on the go, spending more nights than not away and our suitcases never fully unpacked.
Here we’ll answer some of the questions we get asked most often:
How do you afford to travel so much?
It’s no secret that the cost of living/renting in Seattle is high, so many people question how we afford to live there and still travel so much. A huge part of how we make this work is living with roommates! We live in a spacious 4 bedroom home with 3 others (and our favorite golden retriever) which makes our rent pretty dang low for the location and amount of space we have, compared to just renting an apartment together. This makes it easier to justify traveling for long stretches of time, while still paying rent in Seattle. Even though we aren’t there super often, it’s so nice to have a home base and a built in community with some of our best friends. Another bonus of having roommates is that our plants don’t die while we travel 🙂
Maybe one day we’ll be blogging/content creating full time, but at this stage in life we’re both fortunate to be able to balance our love for travel with fairly intense corporate careers. Ridley is a product manager at a finance company and I work in software sales. We do our best to travel hack with miles and credit card points.
Why do we travel so much?
Travel was a big topic on our very first date. Ridley grew up with dual citizenship in the UK and visited 21 countries before even graduating high school— largely thanks to a family sabbatical when he was 13. I also had the travel bug before we started dating— most notably sailing across the Atlantic with Seamester in college.
My family is split between a small town on Alaska and the island of Maui, Hawaii, so those are places I tend to go every year and now include Ridley in. With remote-flexible jobs, we make the most of these trips by staying for 2 weeks to a month at a time. While he does work remotely, Ridley does go to New York City at least once a quarter to work in the office with his team, and I often like to tag along to get some time in the big apple.
We’ve decided to prioritize travel in our relationship, especially at this point in our lives with relatively few commitments (no mortgage, no kids, etc) and with the remote flexibility we have at work.
Aside from having family in pretty neat places, in general, travel energizes us and gives us so much more perspective on the world. There’s something about landing at an airport you’ve never been to, in a country with a language you can hardly speak, and traffic patterns you don’t understand that stimulates the senses and shakes you out of the familiarity of home.
Don’t you get tired of being on the go?
Depends which one of us you ask…Ridley is energized by being always on the go and loves the fast pace of life. I, on the other hand, tend to be a little more of a homebody and crave routine after being on back to back trips. In that sense, we balance each other out. If he doesn’t have a flight booked at least once a month, Rid goes a bit stir crazy… This works out because of how frequently he can travel for work, sometimes hopping on the plane last minute to an event in California or NYC.
More about us:
Alpine lakes, coffee, scuba, Taylor Swift, tiramisu, rainy day runs, picnics > dinner dates
The Global Stumble 