Nomadic Lifestyle – Finding Our Ebb & Flow

We’ve recently celebrated our one year anniversary of ‘officially’ living a full-time nomadic lifestyle & are also approaching our one year anniversary of moving into our campervan, Barnaby full-time. At the time we decided to take this leap we’d already had our travel blog, Destination Addict, for 18 months & out of those 18 months we’d been travelling for a total of 12 months. Something, however, before we made this monumental decision in our lives made it seem that there would be an end to our adventures. We were at a kind of crossroads, with a lot of exciting but very tough decisions to be made…

Resistance Of Our Nomadic Lifestyle

It’s said that to make room for your new life you will have to sacrifice your old one & for us, this has been painfully true. Both of us have never lived totally ‘conventionally’ but I suppose there is always an expectation, whether that be from friends, family or society in general of ‘settling down’.

For us, this became even more real when we returned from a year of full-time travel after just a few months of being engaged. We have to be honest, a lot of people in our lives didn’t really get our lifestyle, with questions like “when are you coming back to the ‘real world'” being asked it made us really think about what we wanted to do & how we wanted our world to be.

Shedding The Old

Sadly, as we have evolved & changed, so have some of the relationships in our lives. One thing we have learned from our decision to be working nomads is that the people that really matter don’t care about how we fit with what they do – they support us unconditionally, free from prejudice & judgment because they love us & that is of course totally reciprocated. We wish everyone that we have ever known well but that doesn’t mean that we choose to surround ourselves with their negativity. We choose freedom, in every aspect of our lives & our biggest lesson in achieving this is that freedom is not only in the physical form but in the mental too.

Room For The New

Every cloud has a silver lining & we like to view ours with an added multi-coloured & magical rainbow, because really, that’s how we feel about our digital nomad lifestyle!

Don’t get us wrong, we’re not saying it’s not tough, our days are filled with challenges – from where we’re going to park up in our campervan to when we’ll next get to do laundry BUT working & adventuring from where we choose, every.single.day – having a life that we don’t wish to escape from, that is pretty awesome & we are proud that we have made it happen.

On the road in France…

Building Resilliance

Learning how to own ourselves & what we do has been a huge turning point in our relationship & has had such a positive impact on our nomadic lifestyle. We have found that the main reason that others don’t get our nomad way of living, is simply that they don’t understand it – that’s ok though, we now know they don’t have to, jeez, sometimes even we don’t get it ourselves!

What we really have learned though is to trust the process & carry on trusting that the universe will continue to give us what we need. That’s not to say we don’t take things seriously – we have got a lot better at managing our finances, our time & our energy as well as our relationships – we now run three online businesses which means that thinking of the bigger picture& the knock-on effect even the smallest thing can have on our lives is key.

Wondering what our three online business are? As well as Destination Addict we have our own organic & sustainable clothing range Nature Threads & offer digital coaching & support services at The Green Thread.

We do all of this from our tiny home on wheels which requires us to remain open to anything so rather though than adopt panic or worry when we face a hurdle (& believe us when we say there have been many) we choose resilience, we choose to find solutions & we choose to not let others doubts & fears seep in & destroy our dreams.

Winter van life required quite a bit of resilience…

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When you’re snowed in but the locals have your back 🙌 We’ve been hanging out in the beautiful little village of Posada de Valdeon, nestled right in the Picos de Europa National Park for far longer than planned ❤️ For us – this is the perfect spot! Mountains, remoteness, stillness & full 4G signal when we need to get some work done ✅ 😂 What makes / would make your perfect campervan spot? To see more of this winter wonderland, check out out story which we’ll be uploading to shortly 😁 Oooh & shout out to the people of this village who have gone out of their way to make us feel welcome & to Barnaby for keeping us warm in these sub-zero temps. We love our cosy, tiny home 🚐 • • • • • #villagelife #remotetravel #offthebeatenpath #posadadevaldeon #picosdeeuropa #picosdeeuropanationalpark #spaintravel #spaingram #vanlifeeurope #vanlifediaries #vanlifestories #vanlifecommunity #vanlifespain #vanlifecamper #vanlifeexplorer #thisisvanlifeing #findyourfreedom #freedomlifestyle #freedomlife #digitalnomadoffice #digitalnomadlife #digitalnomads #digitalnomaddiary #explorationinspiration #destinationaddict

A post shared by Van Life | Adventure | Freedom (@destinationaddict) on Feb 4, 2019 at 12:51pm PST

A Strong Support System Is Vital

Never have we known this more than we do right now. Making so many huge life decisions & choosing to live a nomadic lifestyle has really taught us that all of those positive quotes you see are soooo right! Surrounding ourselves with those who lift us up & people that encourage what we do is what helps to keep us going when things get tough!

Being on the road so much means we are not with the same people all of the time which means we feel very fortunate of all of the online tools that are available. The trick for us is to keep it as positive as we can do, we steer away from small talk, gossip & drama because we want our relationships with others to remain meaningful. From our close friends & family, our fans & followers to the travel blogging community – the love & support we have & continue to receive has been absolutely incredible & we are so thankful for it.

At our first ever travel conference – we were so warmly welcomed into the Traverse travel community!

Nomadic Lifestyle – What’s Next?

After spending our first few months of van life in the UK then driving through France, into Spain & then Italy – we recently got married at beautiful Lake Garda. Yes, we even planned a wedding whilst working & living in our campervan, Barnaby full-time! Making a lifetime commitment to each other has truly solidified us & what we choose to do together. We’ll continue to live full-time inBarnaby & work online but we’ll also remain open to adapting. At the moment Adam has started some live event work with Blue Dot Festival at the recently awarded Unesco World Heritage Site Jodrell Bank, so we are enjoying being in one place for a while with an awesome team of people to spend our spare time with!

As for Destination Addict, watch this space! As pictured above we recently attended Traverse Events 2019 in Trentino, Italy & it shed a whole new light to how we travel blog. We were asked a lot of questions about our lifestyle & how we do it so have decided that we will focus on a lot more of this, a lot more often from here on in.

If you have anything in particular that you’d like us to cover or anything you’d like to ask please leave us a comment below or feel free to drop us an email : [email protected]

We wish you all freedom & adventure in life in whatever form you choose that to be!

Kelly & Adam xx

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