About Me

In 2004, I quit my job as an editor at a travel publishing company in the San Francisco Bay Area to embark on a trip around the world. As my trip came to an end nearly nine months later, I spent a week on the beach in Thailand, trying to make sense of it all, and one thing was clear: this was not the end, but only the beginning, the first of many steps I would take toward creating my ideal life—my Nomadtopia.

Since then I’ve been working for myself as a copy editor and proofreader while living in a number of U.S. cities, road-tripping across the States, and exploring South America, especially Buenos Aires, Argentina, one of my favorite stops on my round-the-world trip and my home base since 2007. The funny thing is, despite my nomadic nature, I usually find it pretty easy to get comfortable and start doing homey things like cooking, gardening, and knitting… and I admit it, I started to nest a little bit.

But the pull of the road—dreams of taking off to rent a beach bungalow in Thailand or eat tacos every day in Mexico—started to distract me again. And then I met a super-hot Argentine named Roberto. Lucky for me it turned out that he, too, had long been dreaming of a life of travel and adventure, and of being location independent, long before he knew that term existed.

Together, we’re now plotting the course and putting the pieces together to create our Nomadtopia (oh yeah, and planning a wedding!). As with many things in a nomad’s life, the details are often hazy or in flux, but the general principles are pretty solid.

In our Nomadtopia, we will…

• Be location independent, supporting ourselves with multiple streams of passive and active income.
• Be able to live and travel wherever we want, whenever we want… perhaps spending longer stints in places where we can house sit, do home exchange, travel, volunteer, or visit friends and family.
• Find ways to enjoy hobbies like making art, gardening, cooking, and knitting while living a nomadic life.
• Keep our finances and possessions streamlined for simplicity and mobility.
• Keep healthy with exercise (especially yoga for me) and a mostly unprocessed, natural diet (mostly gluten-free for me).
• Create community wherever we are, and maintain our relationships with friends and family around the world.
• See the world and explore different cultures at a local level.
• Find a way to make a difference in this world.
• Continue to seek different points of view that encourage us to question the status quo.
• Make responsible choices to support the sustainability of our planet, especially by consuming less.

What does your Nomadtopia look like?