Thanks for sharing this.
I'm curious – how did you decide where to put down roots, after all that travel? Someplace you visited and liked? A relationship or job?
I'm curious – how did you decide where to put down roots, after all that travel? Someplace you visited and liked? A relationship or job?
From there, I looked at weather. I despise being overly hot, especially (but by no means exclusively) if it's humid, but I don't mind the cold at all. I would miss snow if I didn't get it every year. That narrowed it down to about a dozen, if I remember correctly.
I prefer not to live in crowded places or dense cities, and this knocked a couple more places off the list (it's too dense for me almost everywhere within an hour and a half of JFK in NYC for example). I also wanted to be somewhere reasonably close to "stuff to do outside."
When I got it down to 6, I ranked them based on places I had some connection to and decided to go visit them all, looking for wherever felt like a good fit. I didn't make it past the first stop, though. I went and visited the place on the top of my list, which I had spent some time near before, met some like-minded people and moved three months later.
Ironically I'm not still in touch with the community I first wanted to connect with, but I got plugged into the area in other ways and made connections with other groups. After some immediate family chaos (several moves, a couple deaths, a divorce), my mom actually ended up moving out to the same area, and I think by now this has become "home."
When I was an adult, I tried traveling on the cheap, as young folks do. Backpack and train passes. Hostels and couch surfing. My friends kept insisting I would fall in love with it eventually, but I never did. I'm quick to make shallow connections, but slow to make deep ones, and "shallow" and "empty" land pretty similarly for me.
I don't remember having major expenses. I had started working when I was 14 (mostly officiating sports for younger kids, which paid 4x the minimum wage in my area) and I never had expensive hobbies, so I had a little money, but it wasn't expensive to travel.