Independence Travel

Naomi and I just celebrated our 40th month of being on the road full-time and living a 100% location independent lifestyle. Looking back, it seems like a lifetime ago when we made that crazy decision to sell nearly everything we owned and adopt a life filled with travel photography. In a way, it really was a lifetime ago because we were completely different people back then living very different lives; two people with a dream of what could be, teeming with optimism, but with no real idea of how it would all work out in the end.

What most people don’t know is that it was an incredible struggle for us to get to where we are now. Success has not come easily and before we made the decision to become location independent, we had spent a few difficult years trying to cope with an impossible amount of debt, losing nearly everything to the housing crisis and eventually having to file bankruptcy. The video explains that journey and how those hardships ushered in a transformation not only to our lifestyle, but our priorities and a complete shift in our ideas of success. It’s weird to think that we had to lose nearly everything to gain what would become the greatest collection of experiences and memories of our entire lives.

After telling our story to Fstoppers during the filming of our recently released landscape photography video tutorial, they said they wanted to make a video that captured our story. So Naomi and I would like to thank Lee and Patrick for creating this video and helping us to share our story with the world.

I’m not going to lie to you. While the thought of location independence and full-time world travel sounds exciting (it is), it is also paved with challenges along the way. The first challenge is mentally preparing yourself to make the transition and being ready to do whatever it takes to make it happen.

You must be willing to let go

If you watched the video, then you know that Naomi and I had already lost our house before we decided to file bankruptcy and start over with a new outlook on life. In a way, that made the decision to become location independent easier, because we had already been forced to simplify our lives. Letting go of the rest of our belongings was easy when compared to what we had to let go of before. Either way, what can seem like a simple decision can often become the biggest barrier for people wanting to adopt this nomadic lifestyle. Some people simply can’t let go of a career, of certain possessions, of a home, or even more difficult, a family pet. Out of everything we had to part with, our cats who had been with us for 13 years were the hardest to let go of, but we knew we couldn’t let them be the reason we didn’t reach for our dreams (don’t worry, we found them great homes with friends and family).