By Andrew Blackman | Photography by Genie Austin
"Wow, you're living the dream."
I've lost count of how many times I heard this over the 10 years I spent living and working on the road. The freedom of full-time travel often seems to strike a chord with people who feel hemmed in by jobs and mortgages, family commitments and responsibilities.
I understand their reaction. I spent years dreaming of the nomadic life before I was able to make it a reality.
So why, after a decade of living that dream, did my wife, Genie Austin, and I decide to stop traveling and start building a house in rural Serbia?
I'd love to be able to pin the decision down to a particular moment, but big life decisions rarely work that way. Just as the start of our nomadic life was years in the making, so was its ending. And at the heart of both is the desire to experience something new.
As much as I love setting eyes on different vistas every morning, I'm now looking forward to the more-subtle forms of novelty that can come from staying in one place.
When I embarked on the nomadic life at age 38, I thought I had plenty of time to do everything I wanted. But now that I'm pushing 50, I'm more conscious of the need to prioritize. Building a life in one place -- Serbia, for us -- may not be as glamorous as full-time travel, but it's the experience that calls to us next.
A change of pace
The desire for a change of pace started back in 2020. We'd spent five years driving an increasingly battered Toyota all over Europe and North Africa -- from the Arctic coast of Norway to the deserts of Western Sahara, as far east as the Caspian Sea and as far west as the Irish Sea. We'd spent time in every European country, except for Russia. An intended journey on the Trans-Siberian Railway in mid-2020 turned out to be poorly timed.
In those five years on the road, we'd been working online as freelance writers and editors, earning enough to keep moving to the next place. We had no home and no possessions, except what could fit in our Toyota and a few boxes in my parents' attic in south London. For the first couple of years, our net worth hovered just above zero, but as our earnings increased, we started to set aside $1,000 monthly for emergency savings and our modest retirement fund. We loved the constant change of landscapes, cultures and people.
It was deeply rewarding and made us exceedingly happy. But it wasn't always easy.
When I wrote about the nomadic life in The Wall Street Journal in 2017, I mentioned some of the downsides of continuous travel, like precarious finances and not belonging anywhere. There was also the deep fatigue that comes from constant stimulation and processing of new information, and the lack of time for anything other than exploring and working.
When Covid-19 struck, we found ourselves in Belgrade, a city that we'd fallen in love with after our first visit in 2015. We decided to stay there and ride out the pandemic, exchanging a hotel room for a rented apartment and embracing a slower, more-introspective pace of life.
Establishing a base
That turned out to have a profound impact on both of us.
The feeling of a nearness of death in those early pandemic months made me think more deeply about what was truly important to me. If I became another statistic on those charts I was obsessively tracking, what would I be proud of and what would I regret? What did I now want out of the life ahead of me? What more did I want to express? I began to think less about unvisited places and more about unwritten novels.
With travel temporarily banned, I reflected on what it was about it that I loved so much. For me, it was never about the sights so much as the experiences.
I dutifully photographed the Leaning Tower of Pisa, for example, but what I remember most from that day is chatting with the African migrants selling selfie sticks in the surrounding streets. Discovering how the world looks from a perspective so different from my own is something I never tire of. Immersing myself in new encounters, being surprised and challenged by what each new day holds, discovering kindness and connection in unexpected places -- that, in essence, is why I put myself through the expense and hassle, the discomfort and the exhaustion that go along with long-term travel.
Serbia, it seemed, could offer me a similar experience -- along with some of the things I miss when traveling, such as community and time for my creative life.
Even in the strange isolation of the early days of the pandemic, when our only contact with our neighbors was the nightly ritual of clapping on our balconies in solidarity with healthcare workers, I experienced a sense of belonging that a hotel can't offer. Later, as we ventured out into the city, I loved discovering new places and developing relationships with local people, without the sense of loss that used to come from knowing we'd be hundreds of miles away by morning.
Another unexpected bonus: more financial security. Our monthly rent for a two-bedroom apartment in central Belgrade was 800 euros (around $925) and we had few other expenses apart from food and essentials. On the road, our spending had been around $4,000 a month. For the first time since we'd both ditched corporate life 20 years earlier, we began to get a glimpse of what financial security looked like.
Genie and I both still wanted to travel, but we loved the idea of having a base in a place that we both liked immensely. So on a whim, we began to look into buying a house in Serbia.
Neither of us had ever been interested in homeownership before. And based on our finances and the cost of real estate in our home countries of the U.K. and Barbados, we'd always assumed it was out of reach. But in rural Serbia, where house prices are kept low by an aging population and the constant exodus of young people to the cities and overseas for work, we found places we could afford.
After looking at a few options, we fell in love with a little old cottage in the northern region of Vojvodina. It offered thick but uneven walls and rot in the roof beams, but was cozy and quaint, with almost an acre of land. And the EUR8,000 price (about $9,260) was cheaper than the secondhand Toyota we'd bought in London at the beginning of our travels.
As important, our neighbors quickly embraced us, popping over occasionally with gifts of homemade "kulen" sausage or home-brewed plum brandy.
More financial security
Buying a home didn't mark the end of the nomadic life for us, but it did change the dynamic of our travels.
As we crisscrossed Europe again, the pace felt almost frenetic in comparison to those long, slow months in Belgrade. We explored the Middle East. We spent a year traveling around Australia, New Zealand, scores of Pacific islands and most of southeast Asia. It was an incredible time, but it was also when our energy and interest in full-time travel shifted. That's because immersion in different cultures and seeing life from other perspectives is fascinating but also physically, emotionally and mentally difficult to sustain.
We knew we were no longer up to traveling continuously. And other new realities set in. For instance, the professional landscape for a freelance writer feels more precarious in the age of AI. My parents in the U.K. are entering their 80s and are starting to experience health challenges, so we would like to be more available for them.
And we want to pay closer attention to our own health. We spent years leaving medical records scattered from Tonga to Iceland; it's time for a bit more continuity of care. As noncitizens we don't qualify for Serbian state healthcare, but private healthcare is very affordable. Doctors' visits rarely exceed $50, and we can get a yearly checkup and comprehensive panel of blood tests for about the same amount. We are looking into more-comprehensive health insurance to cover costlier treatments should we need them.
We've also doubled down on our Serbia investment by starting construction on a new house. It's on the same plot as our old cottage, with the same view over peaceful fields of wheat and sunflowers, but with a more-solid foundation, crack-free walls and better heating. The initial construction cost around $75,000, which used up a chunk of our savings, but we've stayed debt-free and will add the internal fixtures and fittings slowly, as we earn the money.
Retirement remains a distant prospect for us, but it's still something we want to ensure we are well prepared for. With no rent or mortgage, our only fixed expenses in Serbia are the utility bills, which total about $55 monthly. We can live quite comfortably on less than $1,000 a month, save for emergencies, and still put $3,000 or more toward catching up on our long-delayed retirement contributions.
The right choice
When we arrived back in Serbia with no further travel plans for the first time in a decade, I found an abandoned kitten under a pile of firewood in our shed. Even before we embraced the nomadic lifestyle, we'd avoided having pets because we lived in several different countries and didn't want the responsibility. But now we found ourselves bottle-feeding Hayden, as we named him, four times a day and later celebrating his successful use of the litter box like the proudest of parents.
I'm not generally a believer in signs, but Hayden's arrival feels like a confirmation that we have made the right choice. Any thoughts of travel will now have to be put on hold until he's at least old enough to be looked after by neighbors. And as he matures and becomes part of the family, I now find I wouldn't have it any other way.
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