Many of us know that a journey to nomadicity can be quite tricky, and everyone’s experiences can differ greatly. Unfortunately, the pandemic threw a brand new spanner into those works. We will continue to share our journey here, so be sure to stay tuned.
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It was mid-2019 when we decided to follow our dreams and travel to the U.K. on a working holiday. We had planned it all out, were applying for working visas, and Tiff was getting her uni degrees accredited so she could work in the NHS as a locum radiographer. Things were on track for us to leave at the end of March 2020 and then… the pandemic hit.
The world changed…
We stayed in Perth, both of us working front-line jobs. Tiff was a radiographer in 3 private hospitals and covered on-call in 4 hospitals at the height of the pandemic in Aus. Nathan was working for government housing, doing carpentry work, much-needed emergency repairs, and maintenance. What was meant to be a year of little work and lots of travel turned into a hard year of stressful work.
Don’t get us wrong. We were so grateful to have jobs and be in a country relatively untouched by the pandemic. But 2020 really took its toll and our mental health declined, Tiffs especially. We were struggling to see a way out. A way to make our dream of a working holiday come true and by the end of it a way to just make living our daily lives more enjoyable. The news of the New Zealand trans-Tasman travel bubble was the light at the end of what seemed like a never-ending tunnel.
We broke our lease…
… sold all our things, apart from some sentimental belongings and, of course, the entire contents of Tiff’s three bookcases. We were ready to hop across the pond to the land of the long white cloud. Can you sense the but coming up? Because it’s definitely there! The day before our lease was due to end, Perth went into lockdown.
If I can give you one piece of advice, it’s don’t move out of your apartment and become essentially nomads in the middle of a lockdown. It might sound like a great idea, (who am I kidding? It definitely doesn’t) but my goodness was it stressful! Props to Nathan for holding us both together when I lost it moving the bed out of the apartment during lockdown, when I lost it moving the outdoor setting out of the apartment during lockdown, when I lost it… Well, you get the idea. I was a bundle of stress, a black ball of squiggly anxiety, literally every tiny little thing set me on edge. But we did it!
We moved the rest of our house out by ourselves in the middle of lockdown. We managed to have the house empty so the carpets could be cleaned with no contact. Got the keys back to the real estate agency by 5 pm sharp (only to find they weren’t at the office and we could have gotten away with leaving them in the drop box much later… yeah that would have made cleaning much less stressful) and moved into our friend’s house without, to Tiff’s great relief, having to explain to the cops why we were more than 5km from our address which was technically no longer ours.
So we managed it. We made it. Why then are we not on a plane to New Zealand at this very minute?
The plan was simple: quit our jobs, move out of the apartment, fly to New Zealand, easy, right? Well, there was a little asterisk next to the fly to New Zealand check box. We had to be able to make it back to Perth for Tiff’s baby brother’s wedding in mid-December.
When we started this road to NZ, we figured it’d all be fine. COVID wouldn’t be so bad any more right? It surely couldn’t still be an issue in December, we wouldn’t be taking much risk at all. Yup, we were definitely wrong on that front.
The sudden closure of the travel bubble to all of Australia, before WA had any cases, really threw us off course. What if that happened again right before we needed to get back? We simply couldn’t risk it.
Here we are jobless, house-less, and loving life
We realised that what we needed was a change of lifestyle, not necessarily a change of country. The change of country is definitely coming, but in the meantime, we are so excited about living a more nomadic lifestyle in our own state! We’ll work a little, travel around a lot, and really see what WA has to offer. This entire experience has really been teaching us (mostly Tiff…) how to let go. To realise we have zero control of the future and it seems super cheesy, but we are so excited to just see where the road takes us.
We are definitely not taking the beaten, well-traveled track. We tried that with our full-time jobs and city life, but that road is not for us. So we’re saying F*** you to society’s expectations, to working till we burn out and then just carrying on. That lifestyle is ridiculous. Who actually manages to work full time, eat healthy, work out and have a clean and tidy house and then has time for hobbies and social life AND sleep!?
That stress is over for us. We are throwing ourselves into a life of freedom and love for each other and for ourselves as individuals. We are chasing adventure, making memories and are so excited to bring you along with us on our journey along the Road Less Written.
